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Garage Sales June 18, 2016
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2309
Now it;s been 3 weeks since any real treasures, every weekend hitting the parades of Garage sales, finding nothing. In a day, 2 or 3 dozen sales, a couple of pairs of sunglasses, a book, 128 copies of "50 Shades of Grey", 98 copies of "50 Shades Darker", 102 copies of "50 Shades Freed", all of which should be, would be terrific conversation starters with the voluble hostesses, but I can't bring myself to address such commonplace tastes and deviance, it's the fashion now, after all...
...Until you find the riding crop, which paired with the books suggests ...
...only $2.00, can't have enough of these, begin the conversation..."Are you a horsey person? What happened to your pony? Do you have any other riding equipment...", or, the oversharing "I have a saddle...".
***
SO three weeks and I was due to hit..an early start, St. Edmunds, I'm late, they started early, but I still get a pair of shoes for a twonie and an antique drafting table...
This is a perfect project, clean the terrible paint off the base (when was that shade of brown ever fashionable?), wax the cast iron, maybe paint the wheels a fire-engine red. Swap out the pine tabletop for an old piece of oak and Voila! a fine new desk...
From here to another, rummage sale in my hood, it's bad, a few stops along the way, I pass this sign:
Hippies, of course, but the fine taste in car betrays a modest assemblage of crap, still, a rusty geology pick for a dollar and a pack of tarot cards. Ask the hippies if their moving to Nelson (the hammocks all over the back yard, are they renting the house or the yard I wonder?), they think about it, seems like a great idea, hadn't crossed their mind...
Leave them, there's other sales, find an antique key for another $2.00 (a couple hundred years old at least), can't leave that, some other trifles, then home to unload the car...
From here, the drafting table the big find, I set out again...and discover that Kensington is having it's neighborhood sale, and I missed it, a shame, it's over now, mostly just kids stuff left, still a nice walk through the neighborhood and I turn up some mouthpieces for trumpets/trombones...
There will be something to be done with these...
And that's it! Not a bad day, although after the table the treasures were walking away from Kensington while I checked the wrong sales in my hood, a bad call, but they weren't advertised and so it goes...
Gödel's incompleteness theorems
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 2548
It's in that little space where doubt creeps in and you realize that reason and math can never have all the answers...
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems
Torrington - Garage Sale
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 1838
And, across from the Museum in Torrington, a garage sale. A pretty big one, nothing I wanted, initially, piles of Scuba Gear, Tools, Tanks, Sporting goods, man stuff, it took me a few tours to spot the skis, masterpieces, a hair over 8' tall, barely fit into the jeep, no prices on anything, I offered $10, he took it, he was just clearing everything out, wanted it gone, an estate sale of sorts, and given the high quality of the rest of his stuff I should have made an offer, run ads on Kijiji to sell it off, could have made a couple of hundred bucks at least, but I keep reminding myself I'm not a dealer, I only buy what I love or I can find a home for...
Money's tight, I gotta change my thinking...
The Value of a Human Life
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 2131
And this is one take on the value of a human life:
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Uncomfortable, this measuring of one's worth with dollars and cents, but it's something that companies do all the time. Think Union Carbide in Bhopal, or The Ford Pinto, both of which saw companies cheerfully put a dollar value on Human Lives. We do it all the time as well, Xenophobia sees us raise the value of lives in our own country VS lives of those in other countries, sees us raise money for the rich (think Fort MacMurray, no lives lost (well, one, in a traffic accident fleeing the fire)), yet in Alberta more money was raised to support the victims of insured inconvenience and homelessness than was donated to victims of the Lac Megantic rail disaster in Quebec. Clearly Albertan property and industry is far more valuable than Quebec lives. Think of the welfare allocated to a single mother VS the amount of money it takes to incarcerate a sex offender - several times more money is "invested" - to questionable return - in the sex offender. Insurance companies assign your life a value based on your ability to pay them and the probability of them having to pay out. And I could continue. The video only lightly touches on some important questions that we, as a society, need to revisit...
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