The Thing? Mystery of the desert

*DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN THIS CONTENT. If you are the owner and would like it removed, please contact me. The content herein is an archived reproduction of entries from Raymond Chen's "Old New Thing" Blog (most recent link is here). It may have slight formatting modifications for consistency and to improve readability.

WHY DID I DUPLICATE THIS CONTENT HERE? Let me first say this site has never had anything to sell and has never shown ads of any kind. I have nothing monetarily to gain by duplicating content here. Because I had made my own local copy of this content throughout the years, for ease of using tools like grep, I decided to put it online after I discovered some of the original content previously and publicly available, had disappeared approximately early to mid 2019. At the same time, I present the content in an easily accessible theme-agnostic way.

The information provided by Raymond's blog is, for all practical purposes, more authoritative on Windows Development than Microsoft's own MSDN documentation and should be considered supplemental reading to that documentation. The wealth of missing details provided by this blog that Microsoft could not or did not document about Windows over the years is vital enough, many would agree an online "backup" of these details is a necessary endeavor. Specifics include:

A "redesign" after 2019 erased thousands of user's comments from previous years. As many have stated, the comments are nearly as important as the postings themselves. The archived copies of the postings contained here retain the original comments.
The blog has changed domains many times and the urls have otherwise been under constant change since 2003. Even when proper redirection has been set up for those links, redirection only works for a limited period of time. For example, all of the internal blog links that were valid in early 2019, were broken by 2020 without proper redirection.
The blog has been under constant re-design and re-theming since its inception. It is downright irritating to deal with a bogged-down site experience as the result of the latest visual themes designed for cell-phone browsers. As of this writing, it is cumbersome to navigate titles with only 10 entries per page. While it is nice that the official site has a search feature, searching using this index (with all titles on a single page) is much quicker (CTRL-F in most browsers).

A_Me! says:

June 14, 2007 at 10:32 am

I had heard of the place before by spotting one of their billboards out on the interstate, possibly at the end of their advertising network, merely a yellow defaced [THE THING?] on my way towards Vegas.

I visited this roadside store and museum just last year, it was pretty interesting in the way most of the ‘odd desert roadside’ attractions are. Pay two dollars to see The Thing?…who could pass up that deal? (I might have been able to save a buck if I’d closed one eye.)

Norman Diamond says:

June 14, 2007 at 9:35 pm

The real mystery: How do we even know if the thing is real or not?

If the thing ever did explode at someone, it should have been detected by seismographs world wide.

There even used to be a photo of me somewhere on the web. But is there a photo of the thing? Nooooo. I’m suspicious.

JimKueneman says:

June 14, 2007 at 10:14 pm

Raymond how could you! I live within 30 minutes of "The Thing" and for the last 25 years have driving by that exit at least 100 times. I have never stopped to see what it was and never asked anyone what it was. I would just let my imagination go wild. Now I know what it is! Oh well I guess I will now have imagine where in the rocky crevices of the Dragoons Cochise’s was laid to rest a few miles west of The Thing.

http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Canopy/8494/cochise.html

Jim

Al says:

June 15, 2007 at 8:48 am

Is it an old or new thing, though?

Date:	June 14, 2007 / year-entry #215
Tags:	non-computer
Orig Link:	https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070614-01/?p=26413
Comments:	4
Summary:	NPR reported on The Thing?, a surreal yet kitchy roadside attraction on Interstate 10 in Arizona which has cryptic (and therefore intriguing) advertising signs for hundreds of miles. Listen as Rene Gutel of member station KJZZ in Phoenix gets to the bottom of the enduring mystery: What is The Thing?