Now that I've gotten the simple and direct answers out of the way...
...I can go back and explain the oddball ones I would try to rescue.

Grandpa's cuckoo clock.

Time for a bit of family history...

My great-grandfather was born in the Black Forest in Germany. I believe his mother died, leaving his father unable to care for him, so he arranged to have great-grandpa adopted by a family he knew who had gone to a distant place called Pennsylvania. Great-grandpa's last name was duly changed, and he grew up as one of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch.

Grandpa knew of this from an early age, it seems, so when he came of age he legally changed his last name to great-grandpa's original last name- a very odd and hard-to-pronounce German name of which he was inordinately proud. Certainly as I knew him as a child, Grandpa was intensely proud of his German heritage.

When Grandpa was a child, he was fascinated with the cuckoo clock his father had. Every morning great-grandpa would pull the chains on it to raise the weights, and on the hour and on the half-hour it would poke out and hoot. That's enough to fascinate any child, of course, and Grandpa coveted that clock all his life- here, after all, was a genuine Black Forest cuckoo clock, complete with elaborate carved birds and leaves all around it. He was so envious of it that when he had the chance to go to Germany himself, he had to buy himself a cuckoo clock which hung in his kitchen, and which I remember him ceremoniously pulling the chains on every morning.

When great-grandpa died, Grandpa and Mom were cleaning out the house when Grandpa reverently lifted the clock down from the wall, telling Mom how iconic this clock had been to him as a child, this marvel of German engineering and craftsmanship, and held it in his hands as he spoke. Then he saw the back of the clock, where a paper label said "American Clock Company, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania."

He was so utterly disillusioned that he immediately gave it to Mom.

I now own it, and it hangs in the front room of my house. I generally don't run it as it ticks very loudly and the cuckoo is rather loud, but every time I pass it I grin.

And yes, I would brave the flames to rescue that.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 8 May 2008, 13:26, 1 reply)

Oh, I like that
the delicious irony ...
(TheWeeWitch hasn't been here much recently .., Thu 8 May 2008, 14:06, closed)