Cardboard standees are pretty cool. They're often made to promote movies, and sometimes, if a movie becomes very popular, standees of various characters might be released for sale to the general public (for example, several characters from The Lord of the Rings made it into flat, stand-up format). Those seem to retail for around $60 or so. But if you want to have a standee made, with your own photo of someone who isn't famous, you'll be out at least a hundred dollars more.
That is, unless you check out FreakCitySF's cool cardboard standup tutorial on Instructables. You can have the picture you want to use blown up and printed by a professional, or you can just use a site that helps you print posters in a modular format (IE, each segment of the photo is printed on a different sheet, and you must assemble them to get the big picture).
Possible uses? Well, for fun. The photographic comedy possibilities are practically endless. There's also the strange thing that a former neighbor of mine did with a cardboard standee of a superhero: they put it in their front window and backlit it, so there was always a silhouette in the window. I could never figure out whether they meant it as decoration or a crime deterrent.
On a more serious note, this might make a great, romantic present for someone in a long-distance relationship -- assuming the standee actually depicts the person who can't be there.
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