A beautiful set of earrings, coins & other items were found by a lucky metal-detectorist in Northern Germany.

Link: https://www.archaeology.org/news/11266-230303-germany-jewelry-coins

Summer comes...

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Category: Found

I've appointed myself the Marketing Director at the thrift shop. While I'm generally only a volunteer, I've got some pretty great ideas as to how to promote the place and drum up donations and business.

Nobodies listening to me, but - boy - oh - boy, once the competition gets wind they're going to wish they had....

PROMOS: Bring in a completed jigsaw puzzle purchased at ... with all it's pieces and receive $5.00 off your next purchase (the joke here being that while we sell quite a few jigsaw puzzles, I'm not certain any of them are complete...)

Treasure Hunt - Pick a random Item from the floor - coffee mug, ugly, whatever, spoon - and when it's sold award the buyer with a $XX.00 gift certificate to the store. Promote the treasure hunt through rhyming couplets published as "Clues" in the Community Newspaper.

Use Megaphone for short-term blue light specials: "Attention Shoppers, may I have your attention please...this is not a drill...for a limited time...the next 20 minutes...receive 50% off housewares...cooking...china...clothing....". This will have the added bonus of luring in visitors that have hopes of arriving in time for a "blue-light" special.

Change the donations-receiving doorbell from the annoying buzzer to the opening bars of of the theme song from "Indiana Jones" - have beside the door a bullwhip and Indiana Style Hat that we can don before opening the door to receive the donations - dialogue can usually be in the vein of overvaluing the "treasures" our kindly patrons are dropping off, soiled bedsheets, wet books, etc.

Confetti & Glitter Cannons to shower the casual donators when the delivery bell is rung. "Appreciation" I'd like to call it....

****

Meanwhile, Friday, Saturday at the thrift shop were long days overstayed. Friday, switching the shop around, moving rubbish from one pile to another. Blech. Left the place a mess. Saturday, unboxing the backlog of donations and trying to find space for them all on the floor.

A sampling of the rubbish I had to look through:

...A Carved bone "tusk"? - a very highly detailed illustration from one of the pantheon of Indian Saints. Vishnu, whoever, couldn't tell you. But it was very detailed. The best find of the day.

...a box of broken coffee mugs, individually wrapped in paper. No, they were broken before they were wrapped, a broken coffee mug, no handle, wrapped in a box, beside another, and another, and another....WTF???

...100 Champagne flutes, used once,...

...A French-Canadian, thick accent, slim, good looking young guy but with crazy eyes, giving me his donations - a bunch of electronics, missing cables, but we must have extra cables, right? So we can use/sell it...and a bunch of wet paperback books, and - I'm not kidding - a whole pile of unmatched socks, because - well, we get a lot of socks, maybe we can find the matches? And he's telling me this in dead earnest, looking me straight in the eye, he's deadpanning, stolen my schtick, but - he's not kidding...

And so passes the days. I really should be the director of marketing.

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Category: Blog

I can't mention the name of it, don't want to get Chris fired, but it's an imposing estate with grounds, an impressive provenance, and Chris wanted to give me a tour while the owners are away...

And so - well. Things are not as they appear. From the outside it wouldn't be in the least out of place in Upstate NY or anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard, a wealthy mans palace. But enter it, and so ramshackle is the furniture, "art" - most of it poor reproductions that would have cost more than the originals, bad prints, carpets, light fixtures. 

It was, top to bottom - at it's best disappointing, at it's worst, well...

And I appreciate the tour, Chris, he's the groundskeeper Willy for this place - but - appearances have been most deceiving and it needs substantial renovations to restore it to it's former glory. Owned by Albertans, furnished by Albertans, to dismal effect. 

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Category: Places

Alexandra David-Neel, in the tradition of Great White Explorers, journeys to Lhasa, Tibet, forbidden to all Western Women. This, in 1923, largely on foot, with her faithful companion and adopted son Tibetan Llama Yongden.

Now, a fine adventure, and the situations and people she encounters are so rustic it's hard to believe this took place a mere 100 years ago. There are the monks, medieval intrigues, robbers, fine accounts of the superstitions, customs, politics, there are the amusing 'vignettes' or portraits of domestic Tibetan life, bliss, or otherwise, stories told in the character of Chaucer. 

There is, something I've noticed in these older lady explorer types, a certain style of narrative that they adhere to, it's as if they were telling you the stories themselves. In the first person, a very natural tone that other male authors try to distance themselves from.

Anyways that said she's as prone to telling her own romantic brand of Travelers tales as anyone, and while she professes Western Skepticism she as well buys into the Llama /Superstitious aspects of Buddhism as much as the next person- just not as much as your indoctrinated Tibetan. The occasional fantastic happening can't possibly hurt readership, can it?

And, there is something else that slightly annoyed me about it. This voyage, by necessity a deception (she impersonates a Tibetan Beggar Lady, the Holy City of Lhasa is off-limits to Western Women), yet she harps continually upon her cleverness, the near exposures, and somewhat paints the people who good-naturedly accept the deception as rubes. Perhaps they are, but - dependent as she is upon their hospitality, it would be kinder if she never mentioned it. 

A fine read but not a great book, merely another view into a culture and way of life that's largely vanished.

You can read it online here: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.40184, although it's not too hard to find in paperback - reprinted in 1986, maybe even again since.

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Category: Books
  1. Nemo Gould - "Click Bait"
  2. WIlfred Thesiger - The Marsh Arabs
  3. J. Augustus Knapp
  4. The Burn - Vasily Aksyonov