Bob Ross and the circular rabbit hole

I think it was 2022. 2021? My family doesn't celebrate Christmas in December because it's too difficult to get people together in December. In January, we're all recovering. So we usually end up doing something in February, usually. Whatever year.

A white elephant exchange is common. In that year, I ended up taking home the Running Press Bob Ross bobblehead. "Deluxe Mega Kit!" the shiny silver banner proclaimed. "With Sound!" "Spreading Branches of Wisdom!" "$12.95 in U.S.A., $16.50 in Canada!" "Not intended for children!"

Anyway, it was dead. So the "with sound" wasn't happening.

I unscrewed the little battery door and found, as you do, three tiny little button batteries. I thought they looked kinda LR44-ish but actually, you know, LR44 batteries are thicker, really—these were quite thin. Hmm.

It ended up in a box and I forgot about it for a few years, right up until about a week ago when I ended up going through that box looking for something, maybe reMarkable marker tips? I don't remember, exactly, but I went all the way through that box, going "oh, yeah, there's that Bob Ross thing", plunking it on my desk.

There it sat again for a few more days until my partner noticed it, so I told them the story. And then I was like, ok, let's take Bob out. Maybe today's the day we make Bob talk. I opened the battery door again, popped out the batteries, fired up Magnifier, and started staring at these worn little things trying to identify the batteries.

Amazon loves to tell you it has things it doesn't, oh my God. It was bad enough that I really couldn't read the numbers on these batteries well at all, but then every battery number I tried came up with a hit that was not these batteries. Search engines, too, kept lying about having battery cross reference charts that matched these (eventually I figured out they said "LR932", by the way.)

The only person not lying about these batteries I could find was batteryBob. Bless you, batteryBob. I'm sorry I didn't end up buying from you in the end. This story, though, was far from over.

Surely batteryBob wasn't the only person who knew about these batteries, I told myself. Surely! And lo, it was so—I finally stumbled across a really interesting find.

Apparently there's this rather common 12-volt battery called the A23 that is actually eight LR932 batteries in a trenchcoat wrapper. And the wrapper is incredibly easy to remove. I just got Bob talking again this evening for the low price of $3.49, and will be able to change his batteries four more times with the remaining LR932s. (Tragically, I can't understand a fuckin' word he says. The playback quality is awful.)

Wild, right? But you know, I'm not the only one peeling apart A23s. While doing some more reading, I found a post about using the batteries and shims in an Airsoft laser sight. That post linked to the most 90s of websites I've seen in a long time, complete with a still-active comment section.

GearHack's Eight LR932 Button Cells Inside One A23 Battery thread looks like it's started by the writer of the Airsoft sight post, but look who makes an appearance six short years later.

I just bought a Bob Ross bobble head figure and found that it "talks" but the three LR932 batteries were dead. Thanks for the hack
— hitchhiker160, Sun, 07 Jul 2019 09:07:22 -0700

Laughing at the coincidence, I kept reading.

I had the same problem with the Bob Ross bobble head, the batteries were dead and I had a hard time finding replacements, so I took apart the A23 and low and behold, 8 little batteries that I needed, thanks for the advice !
— Jon Worthington, Wed, 18 Sep 2019 18:26:46 -0700

My laughter slowed as my jaw dropped. I kept scrolling, and someone else's photo of their Bob Ross slid into view. Another, inexplicably (ok, actually, honestly, probably bad EXIF code) rotated 90º, a short while later. Gratitude for the revival of dead Bob bobbleheads saturated the page.

This little thread on this obscure little corner of the Internet is apparently the nexus of silent Bob Ross bobbleheads, where the universe led all of us who were desperate to bask in the presence of Bob's muffled wisdom.

Eight Bobs I count explicitly revived, maybe more. And who knows how long the gravitational pull will continue? How many Bobs are still in warehouses, unable to speak?

I thought this would be a shallow rabbit hole of "identify battery, buy battery, hear Bob". But instead, it came right back up to the bobblehead I took home that February… I think… twenty-twenty-something.

Bob's pull is just that strong.