Good Media Hunting, Saturday, April 26, 2025: Yard and Estate Sales

The church at the end of our farm road was having its annual(?) sale, and since I scored a couple records up there two years ago, I wanted to go. So I shanghaied my youngest, who became excited at the thought of maybe finding some collectible coins or trading cards cheap, and thought we would hit that sale and an estate sale whose sign I’d seen on Friday.

As it turns out, he was eager to stop at other sales, and a subdivision close to the estate sale was having its annual(?) subdivision sale which promised a number of sales in close proximity, and so we hit a number.

I mostly got videos.

I picked up two books at the church sale and one at the estate sale:

• You Can Teach Yourself Country Guitar since I’m collecting these books but am not using them to learn the guitar I bought seven years ago.
• Feasting: A Celebration of Food In Art, an art monograph centered on still lives with food.
• Business French: An Intermediate Course for my beautiful wife who has been taking Duolingo lessons for, what, two years now?

I also picked up three CDs. Well, four, as one is a two disc set:

• Christmas Party by She and Him wherein “She” is Zoey Deschanel. I’ll raise a glass to Charles Hill when I listen to it which will be before Christmas.
• Jazz for the Quiet Times, a two disc (as I mentioned) compilation of lesser-known (or unknown) jazz artists.
• The Great American Soundbook II: As TIme Goes By by Rod Stewart. And the time has indeed gone by since this CD was new.

And, oh, the videos. The estate sale, which was really a downsizing sale (so I heard), had enough of a set spread across three different rooms that I wondered if the homeowner had not owned a video store. I got a number of titles that I’ve been looking for elsewhere, such as Vintage Stock in February.

• A couple of older Jackie Chan titles: Shaolin Wooden Men and Who Am I?
• The second, third, and fourth Rambo titles.
• Major League, which I sought specifically in February.
• The Cowboy Way with Woody Harrelson and Kiefer Sutherland; I might have seen part of this at some point as I might remember the end of it, but I don’t think I’ve seen the whole thing.
• VisionQuest whose name I remembered anyway.
• The Crow, which I’ve seen a time or two but did not have on physical media–it’s one that my beautiful wife has said “We don’t have that?” Now we do.
• Tropic Thunder which we saw in the theaters but have not seen since.
• A couple of old monster movies, Godzilla versus Mothra and Rodan. To go with the one already on the top of the cabinet which I’ve avoided since I bought it a couple years ago.
• The Expendables 2 since I just watched the first one two years ago.
• Kung Pow: The Legend of the Fist which we watched a long time ago. I am pretty sure I have seen it since that 2016 post–hopefully, I rented it and did not get a second copy.

At the rate I’m going, that’s movie watching for a decade to come.

But the whole stack set me back about twenty-five dollars.

Which makes me wonder if I could make a go of hoovering up old DVDs, videos, and CDs for a dollar or less per and getting a booth at an antique mall and listing them for a couple of dollars each. I might have mentioned that some of the booths devoted to DVDs are charging five dollars and up for DVDs. So if I got them for a dollar each + cleaned the libraries out on bag day….

Well, I will perhaps leave that to my son. Who was eager to go to garage sales, but did not find anything for himself. We stopped at a Walmart Neightborhood Market, and he bought a $40 Pokemon box, and he was ready to be done for the day. But he has not ruled out doing them in the future, so maybe I am back to being a peddler like I was 25 years ago.

UPDATE: Originally, I said I’d bought the first three Rambo movies because I thought maybe they’d retitled First Blood into Rambo to retcon the numbering (First Blood is the first, First Blood II: Rambo is the second, and Rambo III being the third). However, I’d forgotten that the much later fourth was simply Rambo which is the one I picked up here. So I’ll have to think about picking up First Blood if I want to binge them in order.