Category: Life

Tam K. on collecting the old-fashioned way:

(I’m not going the internet auction site route, because it always feels to me like the gun collecting equivalent of hunting over a baited field. It’d be like having a computerized database of exactly what old sports cars are in which barns across the country, or having clear wrapping paper on your Christmas presents.)

In all the various things I collect and/or accummulate, I generally limit myself to things I find in the wild at garage sales, estate sales, flea markets, and the occasional antique mall. I could hit eBay and fill out my collections easily and, sadly, start new collections too easily. But that’s so… cold. I get a lot of satisfaction in digging around and finding something on my own and holding it in my hands.

So much of collecting is hunting for things, of almost getting them but not quite. The thrill of finding a stash of Herb Alpert albums in an estate sale, the brief hope that it will include You Smile – The Song Begins but finding it only includes the best sellers from the 1960s. That little disappointment will sweeten the triumph if I ever do find it.

Collecting comes with stories about collecting. Stories about estate sales you’ve seen, different homes you’ve visited and explored while looking, different things you’ve bought. Ask me about my Robert B. Parker collection, and I won’t tell you about the advanced reading copies, television scripts, and limited edition numbered copies I bought on eBay. I’ll tell you about the hour and a half I spent in the 18-and-older back room of a downtown Milwaukee bookstore scouring through shelves of men’s magazines (blushing the whole time, I’m sure) to find a copy of the Gallery magazine from May 1984 featuring Parker’s short story “The Surrogate”. Thankfully, I found one and included it among a stack of other lesser books picked up because I hoped, foolishly, to camouflage the men’s magazine amongst them. But the clerk knew what I was doing. Of course he would.

Finding that sort of thing on the Internet ain’t collecting. It’s buying.

Also, let’s be honest, you don’t find bargains on Internet auction sites. Most of the power sellers know the maximum price the market will bear, and many of the inexperienced sellers price their articles above what the market will bear. What I want, I want cheap. Generally.

Hey, don’t you work for a company that helps collectors more effectively leverage the Internet to add to their collections? Yeah, I know. But my preferred style is still in-person. And the service will let me hunt for other people, which can be almost as fun as hunting for myself.

P.S. I was going to ding Ms. K for adding to her collection by going to gun shows, quipping that gun shows or any other collectible shows are the low-tech equivalent of Internet marketplaces, but I can’t take a collectior-than-thou stance here given my affinity for book fairs. Besides, shows are opportunities for fellowship, and Internet marketplaces are not.

P.P.S. To further undercut my point, during my research for this post, I found a copy of Gallery from May 1984 listed on Amazon for ten bucks. So I bought it. BECAUSE I MUST OWN THEM ALL.

Problematic headline: How Much Is That PC in the Attic?:

You know that old computer that’s been sitting in your basement for years? The one you’ve been meaning to throw away? Well, maybe your laziness will pay off.

Old computers, it seems, are becoming hot collectibles. And so are many of the items associated with them.

I won’t leave it to you to guess: The problem is that none of the collectibles mentioned in the article is a PC.

As you know, gentle reader (because you’re an old man, old man), PCs refer pretty specifically to computers running MS-DOS or Windows. Of course, the first PC was the IBM PC and then the IBM PCjr., and then the race was on in the late 1980s and into the 1990s as a bunch of manufacturers made PC ‘clones’ running the same software.

These things are commodity boxes with little fan loyalty or brand differentiation, so they won’t be collectibles like old Apples or Commodores or more esoteric things are. Come on, who’s going to pay anything for an old Packard Bell or Gateway? Really? Well, I’d pay a buck for them, and then I’d gut their components for handicrafts and dump the rest at the computer recycling shop.

The collectible stuff is the older, differentiated things with nostalgia value and brand identity. Apple, Commodore, Atari, and so on.

But, alas, you never see these things in garage sales anymore. All the basements containing them have been cleaned out already.

Everyone has heard of the five second rule (Wikipedia link for those callously excluded and oppressed by my use of the word “everyone” to imply “everyone good, intelligent, and moral” when that does not include you, you oppressed victim of my facile, lazy turn of phrase).

However, not everyone knows the five second corollary:

When transferring laundry from the washer to the dryer, if you drop a clean but damp article of clothing to the floor, it will not pick up dirt from the floor if you pick it up within five seconds. If you do, you can just throw it in the dryer.

Science.

UPDATE: Thanks for the , Mr. Hill.

A subject line fail from Apple:

I mean, isn’t kinda the thinking around the holiday that you are the great match for your Valentine?

I can’t believe I have to replace this belt already! I just paid $10 for this belt at Walmart three years ago and wear it almost every day.

Jeez, I’ve definitely turned a corner in aging gracelessly, ainna?

And don’t get me started on these cheap black sweatpants that I bought because I could not afford a gi when taking bujitsu in 1997. Can you believe they’re wearing thin in spots already?

Spotted in a shop:

It’s a decorative throw pillow.

That says Man Cave.

I’m not sure how the manufacture of this eldritch artifact did not immediately consume the entirety of the universe in some sort of instantaneous energy inversion triggered by the paradox.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Ms. K. Hey, VftP readers, check out my IT-themed comic heist novel John Donnelly’s Gold and my (allegedly) humorous play The Courtship of Barbara Holt, both available on Kindle for .99 or in paperback.

So there’s some fad going around school. Who knows how second graders get these notions in their heads? But my son has been talking about Poconos cards. All his friends collect them and pass them around and trade them. So he said, “Daddy, can I get some Poconos cards?”

Well, my son, through the wonder of eBay, you can. To surprise him, I picked these beauties up:

He might just have the most enviable collection of Poconos cards in his class.

As you might know, gentle reader, my beautiful wife and I are pretentious enough that our cats have literary or mythological names.

Retired names include Galt, Ajax, and Dominique. Our current group of prowlers include Tristan, Aurora, Roark, Athena, and Isis.

But I hereby announce my intent that we name our next cats in the following literary fashion: H.P. Lovecraft stories.

Come on, there’s scarcely a title here that’s not suitable for naming a cat. The best:

• The Thing on the Doorstep
• The Haunter of the Dark
• The Lurking Fear
• What the Moon Brings
• The Doom that Came to Sarnath

I’ll have to stop there, or I’ll republish the whole bibliography in a different order.

I’m so inspired that I want to go to the feline recycling center right now.

We’re thinking about getting a new automobile, and to be honest, I’m a little leery of it since it’s gone from mechanical systems that can fail due to the laws of physics to software problems caused by an intern forgetting a semicolon. This GM problem doesn’t make me feel better about the prospect:

General Motors is recalling 370,000 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups from the 2014 model year to fix software that could cause the exhaust components to overheat and start a fire.

. . . .

GM said eight fires have been reported, but no injuries.

Hoping to get a better score next time, GM advises:

The company is asking customers not to leave their trucks idling unattended.

You know, the best place to be when your automaker’s software is going the full Edgar on you is inside the vehicle, where software-controlled door locks and electronic windows won’t hamper your escape at all.

There’s a little black cat with white paws that lives down in the little wooded gully at the front of our property. He comes around the house sometimes, but shies away from us if he sees us.

I’m glad to see he’s made it through the recent polar vortex.

I just wish he wouldn’t do that. It annoys our cats and prompts them to mark their side of the door from time to time.

Who else could read the first sentence of a story entitled I Embedded with a Community of Meth Users and think of home?

Well, the first sentence is:

The trailer parks of Jefferson County, Missouri, are a far cry from the international cartels of Breaking Bad, but this is the real picture of meth in America….

I lived in just such a place.

View Larger Map

Although the mobile home I lived in at this location was not quite so nice. As a matter of fact, it was the most ramshackle one in Siesta Mobil Home Park and it undoubtedly melted in the rain sometime between then and now.

The empty pad to the northwest, there, is where the Hittler trailer was. I still have the table they left behind when they moved their trailer.

The tree on the little hill in the back there? My brother tore his finger up falling out of it one day right before we moved, and my mother made him wait with a compress before taking him to the ER because she was showing the trailer to someone interested in buying it. He followed her (and my father’s) footsteps into the Marine Corps, so perhaps she was toughening him up for it.

At any rate, I left the trailer park for the house in the valley down the dirt road in 1987 or 1988, and I left that house for good before the meth problem really took off. Kinda like I left the projects before the crack epidemic hit. Why, it’s almost like people don’t take my leaving very well.

(Link via Instapundit. Colorful youth courtesy my parents.)

After the somewhat saddening striking of the Christmas decorations, we have the annual hunt for the Christmas straggler, the decoration missed when decamping them.

This year, it only took me a day and a half to find it:

I know! You’re saying, Brian J., do you decorate your empty gumball machine every year? Truth of the matter is that I do not.

That particular decoration started on the tree until the new young black cat harvested it. After that, I hung it on a nail over the stairs that had remained without adornment in the four years we’ve been in Nogglestead. I received a Green Bay Packers wall hanging for Christmas, so I swapped it for the wreath on Christmas day and put the wreath on the desk downstairs so I’d remember to pack it up when we packed the decorations, and then….

A child hung the ornament on the gumball machine. As I did not decorate the gumball machine, I did not think to look on the gumball machine for decorations. But it could not remain subtly hidden for eleven months. Oh, no, this misplaced wreath had to announce its presence the day after the Christmas decorations were safely ensconced deeply in the short closet beneath the stairs, safely defended by the in-home vacuum hose hydra and bicycle trainer. To taunt me with how much work I’d have to undo and redo in putting it into the bin with the other ornamentation.

Needless to say, I have not yet undertaken that step. Instead, I’ve blogged about it. And by the time I get around to actually putting it away, eleven months might elapse.

In the other room, the boys were playing Lego Batman on the Wii, and the seven-year-old said to the five-year-old, “Stop freelancing!”

Was he offering his younger brother career advice, advising him to take a secure position instead of working as a contractor? No, he was repeating something Kelly Chase used to say (and still might).

When listening to Kelly Chase do color on St. Louis Blues hockey broadcasts, he’d say a defenseman who moved out of position to try to join the play was “freelancing.” Usually he said this when the opposing team took the opportunity to use that newly free space to attack the St. Louis Blues goal.

And sometime in their (continuing) youths, my children’s father took to tell them, usually when they were wandering a bit far from him in a parking lot, to stop freelancing and get back into position. I also tell them they have to have their heads on a swivel, another Chasism, when they’re in a parking lot.

So what the older youngster meant is that his brother, acting as the second player in the game, should follow his on-screen Batman instead of wandering to other parts of the screen.

Which is probably better than other colorful metaphors children could learn from old hockey players.

(Yeah, the blog is going all Linkletter of late. But the kids have been home on break, and they’re saying better things than our self-appointed betters in the capitals are. Also, trivia to connect Art Linkletter to the St. Louis Blues more tidily than I deserve: Art Linkletter was born in Saskatchewan.)

The five-year-old got a checkers/chess game board for Christmas, and the older boy wanted to learn chess and got far enough to learn how to set up a chessboard.

So they’re in the parlor playing, and somehow they’re on the same side.

I believe this is the Molotov–Ribbentrop opening.

This is different from other game variants this morning, which have included Lego catapults firing checkers and Catzilla flattening the board.

I think they’re just about old enough to teach the dreaded Noggle Blitz.

Five-year-old child: “Daddy, how do they make paper?”

Daddy: “Like mashed potatoes, except with wood chips and glue instead of boiled potatoes and milk.”

The Springfield News-Leader offers a story about visiting the horse park in winter:

The wreath caught my eye, but the horses made me stop to take a picture. They looked so peaceful on a quiet morning at Valley Water Mill Equestrian Center.

. . . .

If you’re looking for a break from the holiday hustle, I suggest visiting the horses. The Christmas decorations at the facility are handmade by employees and each year they add a few more.

The equestrian center is open through the winter, weather permitting.

You know what I do when I want to see horses in the snow? I walk to my mailbox.

The new neighbors to our south have two new horses and have cleared the brush on the east side of their lot so the horses can graze. Further down the farm road, the neighbor across the street has a number of pintos. The house just south of us (and our new neighbors) had a number of horses, but they’ve been gone a season or two, so their big barn must be empty now. Beyond their house is a little hollow, but cattle often graze on the next hill. And to our west, although the Double Diamond Bar ranch has been broken up, the homeowner on one of its parcels has a couple of cattle and horses just because he can.

Funny how I’ve come to take these things for granted after living out in the country for four (!) years now. Strangely, I’m the old timer on the block all of a sudden. The new neighbors to the south and west. Only the house on the north has owners who predate us, and as they’re getting older, it won’t be long until they move on to something smaller. The next house north has just turned over, too, and I haven’t seen the new owners yet.

Also, given that Springfield is a small city of a touch over 100,000 located smack dab in the middle of not much extended suburbs–you pass through rural areas to get to the nearest bedroom towns–it’s strange to think that there are some people who live their entire daily lives within the confines of that city and rarely take an excursion outside it through the rolling hills and back country roads.

And they vote.

I don’t mean to go on about things one finds in the Forbes Life holiday gift giving guide (see also), but they’ve got $300 velvet slippers that you can get:

Today’s slippers announce you in a fashion far livelier than a flat-footed monogram. Go heraldic if you must, or sport the logo of dear alma mater, or your outlaw biker gang.

But the ones they choose to picture are crass. Continue reading “A Touch of Classlessness” →

Spotted in the Wall Street Journal, a friendly message from IBM:

Friends, if you don’t think some junior-level creative was snickering in his or her sleeve when he or she came up with this design, you have not worked with junior-level creatives.

I mean, it’s supposed to be a bar chart showing that IBM Cloud hosts 30% more of something. One could have designed an ad where the bars were of differing heights because IBM hosts 30% more than its nearest competitor (not all competitors who are tied). They could have put the IBM bar at the end. They could have made the IBM bar be, you know, 30% taller than the others (the bars extend some distance below the fold, which means the middle finger bar is not actually proportionate to the numbers claimed in the copy).

Which is why, in the olden days when I worked at an interactive agency, I had to keep my mind in the gutter.

Yesterday, my beautiful wife participated in the running portion of the Turkey Trot and ran five kilometers, which are Canadian miles, and she did this without stopping, sobbing, or being chased.

Whereas I cross-trained the five kilAH!meters with a five-year-old and a seven-year-old. How do you cross-train a 5K, you ask? Well, I:

• Walked fast a couple hundred meters.
• Ran a few hundred meters.
• Walked real slow a couple hundred meters.
• Repeated this cycle at intervals throughout.
• Swiveled my head 180 degrees Linda Blair style to keep in sight a sprinter and a dawdler.
• Carried 50 pounds for a kilometer because it was too tired to walk.
• Put down the 50 pounds when it saw the finish line and wanted to run across it.
• Helped up the 50 pounds who ran through the finish gate with its arms raised triumphantly and promptly tripped over the finish line–or at least the timing mat across the finish line.

I ask you, gentle reader, who got the better workout?