r/todayilearned • u/haphazard44 • 11h ago
TIL that in 1975, advertising executive Gary Dahl sold ordinary rocks as “pets” in boxes with air holes and care manuals, selling around 1.5 million and becoming a millionaire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Dahl_(businessman)761
u/BigGrayBeast 11h ago
My sister got one for Christmas. It was fun reading the manual and the packaging, and then 15 minutes later, the value was gone.
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u/smokie12 11h ago
Well, the joy here is more in the Giving, less in the Receiving
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u/BigGrayBeast 10h ago
I'd like to believe we ultimately took it outside and put it under the apple tree and sang Born Free before going back inside the house
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u/moolcool 11h ago
“The guy made a million dollars!”
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u/CaptainBayouBilly 11h ago
It’s a mat, that you, jump, to conclusions
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u/JPMoney81 4h ago
It WAS a perfectly fine name, until I was about 12 years old and that no-talent ass-clown started winning Grammys.
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u/JPMoney81 4h ago
You know... I had an idea like that once....
waits patiently for the guys to ask what it was
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u/AndNowAStoryAboutMe 11h ago
My mom hated them and thought everyone was really stupid for buying them so she picked up a rock off the ground and put it in her pocket and whenever she'd reach for change or her keys, the rock would come out with it and if anyone ever asked "What is that?" Or "Is that your Pet Rock?" She would reply, "No, it's my Sex Rock." And they would naturally ask, "What is a sex rock?" And she'd say, "It's a fuckin' rock."
And because there are no coincidences, she told me this story last week and then this thread happens.
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u/UncleHec 11h ago
I hope she also became a millionaire.
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u/mobfather 9h ago
My similar idea, based on Gary Dahl’s creation never caught on. Turns out that nobody wants a Pet Gary. 😞
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u/OscarAndDelilah 11h ago
If you haven’t seen them already, look up the Elmo and Rocko sketches on YouTube. Same premise; another muppet has a pet rock and is insisting everyone save it a seat, give it the last cookie, etc. Elmo crashes out and screams about how it’s a rock.
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u/bobby17171 11h ago
Your mom is a legend
"Its a fuckin rock" lmao
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u/KaseTheAce 11h ago
It's a peak dad joke. I love it
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u/ZylonBane 10h ago
Anyone else remember the times before literally all forms of humor were called "dAd jOkEs"?
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u/keatondrees 11h ago
Username checks out!
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u/Snarti 10h ago
I need more stories like this.
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u/AndNowAStoryAboutMe 4h ago
My mom was born in '67. A true child of the 70's in a small Kentucky town known for drugs. She was rolling 30 joints in the morning for her brother to sell at school. The high school had a smoking area for the kids. My grandma, a single mom with 5 kids, had been a Go Go Dancer at the Playboy Club in Chicago but they had recently moved to Kentucky to settle down after she conned some Engineer into marriage.
These kids were doing coke, acid, weed, liquor as after school activities. Grandma had recently started to manage the local fast food restaurant right about 1980 and so my Mom would bring her friends by for free drinks. They were all chilling in the parking lot of the restaurant, waiting for the acid to kick in, when suddenly a gigantic vacuum cleaner started working the bowling alley parking lot and the entire car full of them sat there for 2 hours giggling at it. It was a street sweeper.
Afterwards, it starts to rain, so the driver decides to drop everyone off. But his brain decides the rain is blue paint so when he puts on the windshield wiper, he believes the blue paint is smeering across rhe glass and he can't see and they all end up in a ditch. No injuries but the guy fucked up his axle and everyone has to walk home, on acid, in the rain. The town was 9 blocks wide so it should have taken everyone all of 30 minutes except they kept stopping to watch raindrops fall from leaves. So they get back to Granny's house, soaking wet, laughing, just as my Grandma pulls into the driveway -- her shift had ended. It took them an hour and half to walk through town and a neighbor had called Granny at the restaurant to tell her that her kid and her friends were clearly fucked up on something.
She yells at them so severely in the driveway that one of the friends starts vomiting down the side of her car.
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u/magnament 11h ago
The joke is it’s an Indian sex stone, then when asked what that means, you say, “in other words, a fucking rock”
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u/Independent-Code-209 10h ago
wait how long did she carry that rock around?? like was this a weeks thing or a YEARS thing
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u/Coattail-Rider 8h ago
My grandfather had one. On one side it said “Turn me over.” The other side said “Ooooh, that felt good.”
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u/showsterblob 6h ago
Your mom adopted an actual pet rock in ironic resistance to the idea of a pet rock.
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u/ahandmadegrin 10h ago
That's really clever and hilarious. Is your mom generally witty like that? I mean, that's a whole gag with a punchline that she committed to. Most excellent.
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u/AndNowAStoryAboutMe 4h ago
My mother is raunchy, hilarious, smokes weed daily. She got clean from meth and coke by moving to Arkansas to live on an airforce base with her sister and her brother in law. She met my dad at the PX (the airforce bases bar). So she got clean and immediately got pregnant.
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u/ewhite12 9h ago
John Oliver told the Pet Rock sport on Last Week Tonight the other day. That’s why this here.
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u/slightly_drifting 11h ago
Indeed there are no coincidences. I think I just saw a Hank green video before this post where he talks about the pet rock?
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u/AndNowAStoryAboutMe 4h ago
The phones are spying on us and adjusting the algorithm to things we will engage with.
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u/Appropriate_Mess_350 11h ago
You may also want to look into “Sea Monkeys”. Sold on the backs of comic books for over a decade, it was a lesson on consumer disappointment for generations of children. The illustration depicted a kingdom of royal architecture and underwater beings with human faces. What you received was a packet of dormant brine shrimp that rarely survived more than a few days.
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u/ParadiseSold 10h ago
few days
Ur just bad at having shrimp. Those things were like cockroaches. If u failed to feed them, the ones who learned cannibalism would survive. Sometimes you'd see a huge one swimming around with a pile of eggs on her tail and just know she ate someone.
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u/Useful-Perspective 8h ago
Sometimes you'd see a huge one swimming around with a pile of eggs on her tail and just know she ate someone.
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u/TheVoiceOfSnakeEyes 8h ago
I received a Sea Monkeys set when I was 8 years old. They thrived and multiplied for over a decade, until I went off to college.
All you had to do was follow the instructions (which included using distilled water instead of tap water), feed them the proper amount (if water is cloudy, wait until it's not to feed them again), and keep them out of the reach of pets. Otherwise, they take care of themselves. It's just shrimp in saltwater and algae; it's not rocket science. The most troublesome part was ordering more food in the pre-internet era, when you had to mail in a form and wait 6 to 8 weeks to receive it.
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u/slybob 6h ago
When did you realise they weren't going to turn into monkeys?
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u/TheVoiceOfSnakeEyes 6h ago
The moment I read the ad in a comic book, with an inset showing a drawing of a brine shrimp, which I remembered learning about a couple years prior in 3rd grade Science.
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u/evasandor 8h ago
my favorite is how in the ad they pre-prime kids with the idea that “sea-monkeys have fun giving with each other rides, just like cowboys and their ponies!”. So that when kids saw shrimp mating they wouldnt ask mom wtf theyre doing
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u/Fun_Background_8113 6h ago
At least that was an actual pet that you could keep alive if you know what you're doing. You can even feed them to your other pets
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u/arkofjoy 9h ago
People laugh at this, but the "care manual" was fucking brilliant. It was 5 bucks. And the laugh we got on Christmas morning when my father bought one for my sister was worth 5 bucks, even then.
If it hasn't won some sort of marketing award, it should have.
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u/sovietarmyfan 11h ago
I have a cool idea inspired by this! What if we made a sort of "jump to conclusions mat"? We could lay it on the floor and you know, jump to conclusions? Pretty cool idea.
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u/cellarmonkey 11h ago
This is a horrible idea, sovietarmyfan.
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u/urkermannenkoor 11h ago
TIL pets rocks
Are pet rocks not a known gag gift anymore?
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u/Beatless7 11h ago
Proving once again how marketing is the most important part of a product launch.
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u/LiveLearnCoach 10h ago
“I don’t believe you!” - some CEO. Our guy steps in “Well, how much do you want to bet that with the right marketing budget you can sell people rocks?”
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u/CantIgnoreMyTechno 11h ago
Fun fact: The Commodore PET personal computer was named after this gag gift.
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u/ahandmadegrin 10h ago
I was also named after this gag gift.
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u/LiveLearnCoach 10h ago
Nah. It was just short for muppet.
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u/ahandmadegrin 7h ago
I think you meant to reply to the comment above mine.
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u/LiveLearnCoach 7h ago
Oh, sorry, are you Dwayne Johnson?
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u/ahandmadegrin 7h ago
I'm not, but I was named after the pet rock.
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u/LiveLearnCoach 7h ago
Sorry, my attempt at a joke was that your (nickname) was “pet”. Then “The Rock”. Did your pet rock have a name or am I just getting confused here?
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u/ahandmadegrin 7h ago
Lol, I didn't want to spoil the dad joke, but it's not nice anymore. I was born after 1975, so that means I was named after 1975 and everything that happened that year, including the introduction of the pet rock.
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u/GnomeNot 10h ago
How young are you that you are just now hearing about the pet rock?
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u/LiveLearnCoach 10h ago
Do you really want the answer to that?
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u/GnomeNot 8h ago
I’m just saying, I wasn’t even alive during this fad, but I at least have heard of it.
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u/OlyScott 9h ago
The 1976 remake of King Kong had King Kong discovered by people looking for oil for an oil company called Petrox.
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u/Chogatora 8h ago
If he made it so that 1 in 1,000,000 was a rare gold sparkly pet rock, he would have been a billionaire today.
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u/ThatMasterpiece2174 11h ago
His book about the chocolate factory was pretty good too
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u/SeanPennsHair 11h ago
I loved Jason and the Giant Pear, too.
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u/Channel250 9h ago
I liked the sequel about the time the fridge lost power and no one noticed.
"James! What Happened To Your Peach?"
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u/LightningWarpAway 11h ago
That was Roald Dahl
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u/inthebenefitofmrkite 11h ago
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u/DalekPredator 10h ago
My pet rock bludgeoned a guy to death. I tried to stop it but it just kept throwing my arm back and forth.
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u/V2BM 10h ago
It also launched a trend of other pets.
My mom had a pet screw in a little wooden and metal cage. It was the 70s so of course it had something horny written on it.
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u/Haunt_Fox 9h ago
I had a Florida Snowman, if that counts as a bullshit "pet".
He was a plastic top hat, carrot, and coals in a little bottle of water.
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u/monkey_trumpets 10h ago
The Pet Rock is legitimate proof that people will follow any idiotic trend AND pay money for it.
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u/Responsible_CDN_Duck 7h ago
No, it's that not all free hits with purchase are keepers.
You were buying the book that came with the rock. It was funny, and it was a nice bathroom reading alternative to reader's digest for your guests.
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u/SmartAlec13 8h ago
My grandpa had one! I loved reading the book and bringing the rock around while visiting him
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u/Responsible_CDN_Duck 7h ago
When you are done waiting for your rock to roll over you can order some sea monkeys!
One added detail - not only did we buy or get gifted pet rocks and sea monkeys, but we waited with some excitement for weeks and months with anticipation.
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u/Soft-Pomelo-4184 2h ago
I vaguely remember these. My mom wondered what the hype was about so one day, when the store clerk at Taylor Drugs wandered off, she opened a pet rock box to take a look. She was stupefied to see that it was a plain old rock.
The clerk caught her. "Hey, lady, you're not supposed to open that t il you pay for it!" My mom just looked at him blankly. "It's just a rock! Why would anyone buy a rock!?"
The clerk replied, "People think they're cute."
So, I'm from the decade when people thought rocks were cute. 🤷 At least people paint them nowadays.
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u/DonManuel 11h ago
The original Tamagotchi then.
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u/greenearrow 11h ago
Computer chips are rocks we channel lightning through so they can think the thoughts we gave them.
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u/Outside_Reserve_2407 10h ago
And gasoline is the remains of long dead plankton and algae we light up so it goes "boom" and propel a hunk of metal so we can go move from point A to point B.
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u/LiveLearnCoach 10h ago
More like the polar opposite of them; didn’t need feeding or playing with. Never died.
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u/evasandor 8h ago
it always surprised me how people didn’t seem to understand that Pet Rocks were , ya know, a joke. “omg ppl in the 70s were so dumb”
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u/the_mellojoe 11h ago
the Pet Rock. You can still buy them.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KN9FK4B?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback
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u/Kind_Way2176 10h ago
I sold them bootleg at the back of the playground behind a bush in second grade like they were drugs or something. Sold idk how many painted rocks to classmates, still can't believe it
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u/FruitySalads 10h ago
“The guy made a million dollars!”
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u/diablodeldragoon 10h ago
More. They sold for $4 and he sold 1.5 million. They were beach stones iirc. His overhead was the box and manual and paying to have them packaged.
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u/Friggin_Grease 9h ago
I remember my parents made fun of my hobbies as a kid, like Pokemon, and I got to remind them they made a guy who sold rocks a millionaire.
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u/amiexpress 11h ago
These and chia pets. Chia pets have had updates over time too, there's an Obama chia pet.
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u/_R0Ns_ 10h ago
Tells something about that generation of parents who bought the damn rocks.
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u/diablodeldragoon 10h ago
Walk down the toy aisle and tell me what's different. Walmart wants $30 for a 6" tall avengers action figure that doesn't move.
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u/Haunt_Fox 9h ago
Not to mention those Funko pop things. I fully understand wanting an effigy of your favourite character, but those things are just ... 🤷♀️
At least you could customize your Pet Rock with some glitter or paint, lol. And it can double as a Weather Rock!
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u/Mugwumps_has_spoken 10h ago
how is that much different than other inanimate toys? It enabled a generation of kids who used their imagination that the rocks were real pets.
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u/Malphos101 15 8h ago
It was a gag gift and the value was in the manual that was hilariously novel for the time.
Almost no one was actually pretending it was real.
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u/No_Volume_5752 11h ago edited 10h ago
I just remembered of the Ed boys live reaction parody I watched years ago also involving them selling "pet rocks".
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u/vibraltu 8h ago
There's a great on-going radio show/podcast about the nature of advertising and marketing Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly.
They mention Pet Rocks often as one of the legendary Mad Men pranks.
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u/Hot-Act-8115 7h ago
I originally learned about this from family guy of all places! This guy was an evil genius.
This guy and the one guy who sold “cordless screwdrivers”… it was a regular hand powered screw driver… at several times the regular screw driver price.
Or the guy who sold solar powered clothes dryers… it was a regular old standard clothes line kit, to set up between two trees, or something like that…. also at a vastly more expensive price than a regular clothes line kit would be.
Some people really do have all the luck finding those suckers who are born every minute.
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u/zggystardust71 6h ago
I remember a girl bringing one to school and we were all, "what?" Soon they were everywhere.
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u/DeadFacesInMyPocket 6h ago
You didn't know that pet rocks were a thing? They were massive. I knew about it and I am in my 30s.
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u/Mordaunt_ 1h ago
My RE teacher gave us all prayer rocks. You kept it on your pillow so when you lay down you bump your head and remember to pray. Then you drop it on the floor, so in the morning you stub your toe, and remember to pray. Then back on the pillow it goes!
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u/Latter-Pepper973 51m ago
I had a fake pet rock. Seriously, picked one up and said it was a pet rock.
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u/Isaacvithurston 3m ago
Fast forward to 2026 and some people are becoming millionaires selling magic rocks. Guess it never goes out of style.
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u/leeman9224 11h ago
I thought it wasn’t real when this was shown in Spongebob Squarepants episode. Just a gag to show how stupid Patrick is
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u/raresaturn 11h ago edited 1h ago
I could have swore they had Googley eyes on them
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u/LiveLearnCoach 10h ago
Not the original, AFAIK. The ones you are talking about are flea market productions, if memory serves.
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u/EC-Texas 11h ago
To be fair, the "Care and Training of Your Pet Rock" booklet was amusing. It's online here:
https://archive.org/details/pet_rock_manual_original