How did you find Tiki Central?

Every day there are new members and I wonder how they found us. I found the site through a business card left at Tiki Mecca - Oceanic Arts.

I happened to do a club search on Yahoo and came across Tiki Central - within 2 days I stopped looking at all other clubs and used Yahoo exclusively for Tiki Central!

Johntiki
:drink:

All I know is I was in this bar near Juarez. Someone paid me $75 to drive a van across the border, give it to a guy named Warren. Everything went well so I treated myself to some fried clams from a street vendor there in El Paso.

Must have been something wrong with them clams, 'cause before I knew it I was being rushed to the nearest ER by a group of German tourists. The rest of that day is haze of invasive tubes, gagging, and several hallucinogenic substances. Then I was looked at in the hospital!

I awoke from several days of induced coma...and went home. I logged on my PC and did a search for "Tiki". Found the old Yahoo group. The rest, as they say, is...what do they say?

midnite

Midnite,
You rule!
I've been reading you's (tiki centralites)for many moons. I recently decided to jump in due to the pre-Oasis posts. Had a feelin' that Oasis was going to be fun and the rest is history. Now I'm hooked on this site! Damn it!

Upon my release from a Cuban jail, I wriggled into a truck inner tube and floated through the warm waters of the Gulf of Florida. Surviving an unrelenting sun and sharks nibbling at my feet, I washed ashore on Ft. Lauderdale beach. The N.Y. Yankees must have been in town for Spring Training because El Duque greeted me at the beach and uttered the words "Tiki Central" in broken english. He joined me later for Mai Tai's at the Mai Kai.

Fate brought us together

[ Edited by: DaneTiki 2009-08-30 19:33 ]

There was a message scratched on the wall of the third stall in the men's room next to the TGIFriday's in the American terminal at DFW Airport. It was a phone number and when I dialed it, Sister Cleo told me to look inside a magazine that would by lying on a table in the waiting room of a prominent plastic surgeon in San Deigo. Inside the magazine there was a subscription card with a cryptic string of twelve numbers with four periods scattered within the string. When I keyed these into my internet browser it took me to an article in the Wichita Daily Reporter that contained the line:

"...and all the buildings are ricky-tiki. Central to the problem..."

Well, you guessed it! The words "tiki" and "Central" were hyperlinked to the old Yahoo club ghosttown, where I registered and then discovered the link to this site.

Isn't that how everybody found the site?

After the mothership dropped me off on your lowly planet, for a second time, I decided I needed to find some of the true culture of the planet. So I found a place called "Jimmy's Buffet" and sat down to eat my ice cream sundae with chocolate, cookie bits, and chocolate sprinkles aka jimmies. I read an article in some publication, called the Tiki News,which talked about the work I did here on my first trip to the planet. I did a little sculpture work on a little island for some friends. For some reason they wanted me to make big heads out of stone and place them facing the water, so I did it. My friends called them Moai, whatever that means. So I searched the information unit I found in a "library" I looked up "Moai" and found a strange listing for this communication board. So now I am studying the Tiki culture, which once was near extinction, but is making some great strides to once again become a viable community. So that is how I had found Tiki Central, my family on Earth.

Nanu-Nanu

You peeps are ca-ra-zz-ay!!!

Seriously, from what I remember I was sitting at the local tiki bar with a fellow Shriner, when this monkey (donning a similar fez!?!) walks up to me and serves me a bottle off the tray he was carrying, and inside the bottle was a message which read: Visit The Tiki Central, chances are it's open. Signed, Mr. X

The rest is... How you say??... History! :wink:

I'm a big New York Giants fan & can't get enough information about my fave player Tiki Barber. Another NFL fan gave me this website URL and now I get all the stats & news I could possibly need about this legendary player. Thanks Tiki Central!

Trader Woody

All clever stories... but it would be cool to hear how everyone really did find Tiki Central. It will give us all a better clue as to how the word about this club is spreading...

~Hanford

In the dim & distant past I got an e-mail from Tiki News which mentioned the Yahoo Club Tiki Central. I joined that, enjoyed it
while it lasted, then endured the horrible few weeks when it became a Yahoo Group. I was then immensely relieved when Hanford started up the Tiki Central we have today.

Trader Woody

Plain and simple -- I did a google search on the word "tiki", and there y'all were. My interest in things tiki came via music -- the usual downward spiral from techno/trance to chillout, down through the vanilla pleasure of commercial lounge and easy listening to the unexpected beauty and vividness of exotica. And once I had fallen victim to the hypnotic rhythms of Marty, Artie and Les, there was only one way to go: Tiki!

By the way, I DO play the abovementioned and others of that ilk in my car; and everywhere else. A source of deep dissatisfaction to certain of my friends...

I was sniffing around the Internet looking for retro style graphics to inspire my own website.

[ Edited by: MrsCarnaby on 2002-07-05 01:40 ]

I can't remember what got me interested in tiki mugs, but I figured there would be a Yahoo group. Saw the message posted there directing folks to this place.

Mark Cotton

I buy old poker chips from casinos and private gambling clubs anywhere.  

:drink:
Thank God the Tiki Bar is Open!

[ Edited by: jukeboy56 on 2002-07-05 13:54 ]

No funny story, sorry! :( I was admiring Rain's paintings on ebay (ebay name rain_s), and he told me I could find more examples of his art in a folder at the old Yahoo Club. I signed up just to look at his art, but got ensnared by the fun hijinks! I mostly lurk, though. :)

I was sitting in my igloo, cooking up a little whale blubber and drinking a Molson Canadian, while listening to Celine Dion (the french stuff, before she sold out) on my 8-Track. Yet, with all this splendor around me, I was strangely unsatisfied. I thought, surely there must be more to life than this. After peeing on my hands to thaw them out, I...

Aw heck, I can't even remember how I found Tiki Central, actually.

I think a gorilla told me...

How I got turned on to tiki itself is a little foggy too. It just came to me one day that there used to be these fun places back in the 70s with umbrella drinks and rivers runing through them, adn I thought it would be really cool if one still existed. so I went looking for them. I didn't even know what they were called. I described what I was looking for to my producer and she said 'Oh! You mean a KON-TIKI bar!'

I think maybe seeing the Bahooka in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas may have triggered this nostalgia for something I didn't know anything about... but of course, now am consumed with!

I'm afraid I have no stories to tell. Yahoo search, then konakai.com. That simple. Have been collecting tiki mugs and my beloved has been doing african masks. Benihana's too, for my part.

Wanted to find where I could find mugs off e-bay. Not too much luck except for the new ones. Anyone have any suggestions?

My wife and I had been frequenting flea markets in Orlando with our kids, when I started noticing some Coco Joe items and other odd bits of vintage Hawaiiana. I remember finding a metal tiki bottle opener and telling her it might be cool to collect some of this stuff because I had grown up in Hawaii. The next thing I knew I was stumbling onto all manner of these tiki and exotica internet sites, including the orginal Tiki Central. Tiki Central and the tiki Bar review pages were the most helpful.

Just surfed on in.

I sent Tikifishlady an e-mail asking her for information as to whether she could tell me where the closest Tiki bar would be in proximity to Minneapolis. She was very courteous and graciously directed me to this site. The Slovak

[ Edited by: SlovakTiki on 2002-09-06 22:40 ]

my tiki told me :P

The Dalai Lama said I should check you guys out....

My buddy Chris was telling me about a trip to Taco bell where he saw a guy putting mustard on a taco. Someone else came up to him and stabbed him in the neck with a spork. Chris was trying to figure out if they knew each other previously or if the attack on the Taco Bell patron was purely due to his putting mustard on a taco. I mean don't get me wrong, I agree that putting mustard on a taco is madness and deserves some sort of reprisal but is it honestly deservant of having your throat peirced with a plastic utensil that is both a fork and a spoon at the same time? I went to work the next day still pondering this and found an email from Daisymay saying that she saw Tikis in my interest on my Yahoo profile and that I should check out this Yahoo club called Tiki Central. That story was not so much interseting as it was long and pointless.

[ Edited by: suicide_sam on 2002-09-02 13:59 ]

I found it a little overdone but the sauce was good

In the early days Daisymay was very resourceful in building up the membership of Tiki Central. She emailed a lot of people out of the blue and asked them to join. The club's early success was all due to her. These days she's busy and no longer posts but from time to time we see her around...

~Hanford.

I wondered what happened to Daisymay...

I found this place through Konakai.com

Big Mahaloz to TikiBong an da wife for da intro to TC! Mahalo Plenny guys!

I was drunk and I cant remember how it ended up in my favorites column.

How did I find Tiki Central you ask? I found it very nice, very nice indeed!

I was working in the lab, late one night...nope that's not it.

I was walking in the park one day, in the merry merry month of May...that ain't right either.

Oh yeah, it's more mundane than that. I searched on Google for Tiki and found this, as well as an interpreter program for crop circles. Seems they are the result of a burgeoning interstellar ad agency using Earth as a billboard.

Please be gentle on me, I'm a tiki-newbie.

On 2002-09-05 15:33, KokomoTikiBar&Grill wrote:
I was drunk and I cant remember how it ended up in my favorites column.

My friend,
The quality of your honesty is truly inspiring to your fellow leisurely booze-hounds.

bump* so for my savage renewal I went digging in the archives and found this thread.

I found TC while trying to do search on the net to find out what a carving was that we had inherited from my wifes grandma. Keigs posted that I had a Witco, I had no idea what Witco even was. So the search for more knowledge began and eventually I tried my hand at carving and the rest is history....

how about you ? Whats your story?

The third post is from someguy named BambooBen, This must be from before he became ordained as the Rev.

I used to have a handle on life, but it broke.

[ Edited by: rodeotiki 2006-05-04 19:32 ]

aiight, I'll chime in.
There I was one lonely cold dark night.................okay I found the link on Bosko's website. The rest is bilge.

I typed TIKI and hit go!

I was ship wrecked on an umarked reef off a small tropical island. In the moonlight I could see a thin whisp of smoke rising towards the skies, and the fires on the island glowed in the darkness. As I paddled on a piece of flotsam towards the island, the sound of bongo drums was carried by the salt laden wind.

As I neared the beach, the drumming stopped. As I reached the beach, I was too fatigued to notice the figures before me, or the crate that had washed up alongside. The last thing I remember is a tribal warrior advancing towards, spear at the ready...

I awoke the next morning in a hut surrounded by curvacious young island girls in grass skirts and coconut bikinis. They were fanning me with palm leaves, and proceeded to feed me a platter of tropical fruits. They spoke no English, and I was unaware of their simple dialect. We communicated via simple hand singles and laughed nervously with each other.

It turned out that the object that washed up in the surf with me was a crate of the finest Rum. The chief was pleased with my offering to the tribe. I learnt later that other explorers had not been so lucky, and had been sacrificed to the tiki god who chilled out in the local volcano.

Then English missionaries came in and brought the word of god to the local heathens. The young nubiles locals covered up, and the rum was gone. Paradise ws lost.

I left the islands in sorrow. I have reverted back to a civilised lifestyle. But I still like to revert to my savage past and roast up some long pig, served with rum. Tc is my connection with the past.

Seriously - I have no idea how i got here (I'm not even sure how I got into tiki in the first place!). Probably just googled "tiki" to find TC I think.

I was already a Polynesian art collector and was looking for ideas for enhancing the genesis of The Lagoon Lounge and started here by lurking before posting.

I remember looking with astonishment at the works of Danny and Gecko and Basement Kahuna.

Heck, that's back when there was only one message board and not one hundred and twelve.

:wink:

I've really enjoyed the last 3-4 years as a part of this community and have met many of you on many shores and have made true friends through the introductions on this site.

Except for Flounder, who still really scares me.

Bob Van Oosting from Oceanic Arts told me about it.

I have been into Tiki since I was a teenager... but I found this site through my soon to be brother in law 'TikiHula'.

...now my second bedroom has become a tiki bar refuge... go figure.

I think I originally found it as a link from Konakai, but what got me posting was when my friend Dino jammed at Pablus' Lagoon Lounge. This place let me know there were other people in the world like me!

There was a link to tiki central on the "girls gone wild" homepage.
I thought I was clicking the buy button, but accidentally got directed
here. I've been searching this site for 4 years and still haven't found
where the pictures of naked college girls are. Some help please...

Don't know how I found out about on-line Tiki News and Otto (through my friend Freddy Fortune maybe?), but he and I made our way to the closing of the Kahiki because of it/him. The only people I knew there beforehand were Freddy and John Bloom, aka Joe Bob Briggs, there to write a history of the mai tai for like "Golf Monthly."

There I met this GREAT group of people: Mr. Smiley, ikitnrev, Otto and Baby Doe, Sven, Patrick the Silver Fox, Jim & Elise ChiselSlinger (thanks to their luau the next day) - who am I leaving out? I now realize I've stayed in or at least visited almost every one of their homes, and many of them mine, since then!! But I still hadn't gotten with it TC-wise. Then came Otto's Birthday party at the Madonna Inn. Or next, the first Tease-o-Rama? Well, then came Tiki Oasis II and Room 135. Everybody was talking about this "Tiki Central" thing. It was inevitable. (But why did it take me so freakin' long to join?!?)

Finding Tiki Central is one thing, finding tiki is totally different.

How and when did you discover tiki?

For me it was a slow progression. As a young girl I took hula dancing lessons & won the roller skating Hawaiian Costume Contest every year. My Grammie was big into Hawaii & Tahiti, and she had a wonderful(though not tiki) basement bar. She owned the hula wiggler I use as my signature. When she passed away in 2003 I had just begun my decent into tiki, and asked for it from her estate.

I got into drink mixing & tropical gardening at a young adult. When my husband and I bought our home he asked me to think of a theme for our future bar - I knew I wanted tropical plants, and I knew I wanted vintage. I became hooked with the idea of dark, mysterious exotic hideaways full of nautical oddities, carved tikis & lots of bamboo. I searched around online and found TC, widening my knowledge of the whole Polynesian Pop past & present.

i google searched for "KokomoTikiBar&Grill"

I was doing a search for more info on a Don the Beachcomber "Bust" mug that I found. When I found the forum, I posted a thread asking it's value. Yup... f'n newb. Fortunately, everyone was very cool with me and didn't throw me to the lions.

When I was a young pup working the late shift at the Defense Lab me and some of the other guys had weekly poker games in one of the unused labs. Well, being young and all, I got in a bit deep with this guy. He worked in one of the labs deep in the basement, the ones that people take the elevator down to but never come back up.... And even if they do, they come back somehow different. Creepy is the best way I can describe this guy. Anyway, he decided that it was time for me to pay up some of my losses. I told him that I was just a lab guy and I wouldn't be able to pay him what he wanted as fast as he wanted.

"We can work something out" he said in that creepy voice of his.

I was very nervous, not because of the tone of his voice, but because I feared he would want me to ride down the elevator with him. People don't come back from those kinds of trips.

He said that I could 'work' for him by taking pictures of the lab. It took a minute to realize that he didn't want pictures of me in the lab, but pictures of 'the' lab, pictures of the projects I was cleaning up after.

Well, while doing my best secret agent impersonation, I came across some notes on the lead scientist's desk that were circled with arrows pointing to them. I figured this was the answer to some important project and could be the piece I was looking for to get out of debt with 'him.'

Well, it was.... I am out of debt now. I also lost my job, I lost my security clearance and my best girl. But I still remember what that bit of paper said. It was a web link and it read simply http://www.tikicentral.com/drinks/drinkcontest.htm

And then! The wahine spilled Mai-Tai on me because she was laughing so hard it was coming out of her nose.... She found Tiki Central and then told me, and then we told two friends, and they told two........