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Garage Sale Finds - Week 6
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2246
It used to be the Calgary Herald, you'd go to the classifieds and plot out your garage sale map, they had the garage sales organized by date and quadrant of the city. But they've changed it, "reorganized" it so that date and area of the city are no longer organizable fields, address is optional, clicking on the "read more..." link in the hopes of finding an address leads to a "Page not found Error". It's been like this for the whole season, entirely not working.
Now the Calgary Herald classifieds are a paid service. You pay them, they advertise your sale, product or event. But this is ridiculous, you can find nothing and certainly nothing in order on their site. So I search around and find other sites - Kijiji, Craigslist, Calgaryarea.com, all sites where you can advertise your garage sale for free. And this, apparently, is where everyone else is advertising their garage sale as well. It's more work, they're organized by date and city only, you have to make your own map to the highlights, but at least the information is there.
This weekend is the first "Big" weekend of sales. By which I mean there are more sales than I can make it to, hope to make it to, in various neighborhoods. There's the Bethany Chapel sale, there's a neighborhood sale in Scarborough, there are others....
And so I make my map and head out on Saturday morning.....
A day full of treasures. Stack of CD's, new, perhaps 30 in the stack, $2.00. $10.00 for miscellaneous Pokemon cards for my daughter (a stack about 6 inches thick). Books - Penguin guide to Shakespeare, Monologues for young actors, Calvin & Hobbes, for the boy, an old rotary phone, bright red ("Mr. President....It's the Kremlin calling.....") as well as a loose red "reset"button...("The Missiles have been launched..."). A small Fireking green jadeite bowl with blue butter dish, a hallmarked solid silver candlestick. And the highlight, a 16 mm movie camera from the 50's with telephoto lense. I need a tripod.
All in all a good day.
More on the Neighbors
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 2448
I've been sick. My daughter had it for 2 weeks, and as she shows signs of recovery I'm now coming down with it.
And so I'm sleeping in the middle of the afternoon when there's a "broom...BRRRROOM.. BRRRROOOOM" noise outside, construction, and I get up and look out the front window and the neighbors have begun to assemble a basketball hoop. It's one of the upright ones, and he has a his wife and her sister helping them, they're banging the pipes together on the sidewalk.
He doesn't know what he's doing. When he worked he was a tradesman. But he's not working now and he's brought the same expertise to bear on assembling this basketball hoop.
Plastic, cardboard, all strewn over the front lawn. Wal Mart again. The dumpster, (it was supposed to be gone, I asked him, yeah, he had no explanations) is full, he'll need another one to fit in the packaging for this.
I sit on the front steps to watch. He's pulled a picket off of the fence and is using it to cushion the pipes from the sidewalk, up on a ladder with a hammer banging on it while his sister-in-law holds the pipes together and he bangs with the hammer.
I have a bad feeling about this. There's no place around here they can play basketball. Our yard is grass and dumpster, not concrete, and I can imagine them setting this up in front of my office window, using the sidewalk to dribble and shoot, errant balls coming through the office window....
After another hour or two they give up. The hoop, unassembled, is brought to the back door, they leave it in front of it with their jumbo orange bags filled with beercans, Domino's Pizza boxes, 12 packs of Dr. Pepper. There's a recycling bin and trash area in the back, they haven't figured out how to use it. They leave the plastic wrapping drifting about the yard, the upturned fence picket with nails sticking through in the middle of the front sidewalk. I'm resolved not to clean up after them, my boy and I the weekend previous cleaned up the yard, picked up their cigarette butts, beer cans,and rubbish, I don't want to make it a habit. The fence picket is dangerous though.
I lasted 3 days. The plastic and cardboard were still blowing over the yard, the fence picket with rusty nails poking through still in the middle of the sidewalk. They step over it as they go to get groceries. Against all my better judgement I pick it up - not, I tell myself, for them, but for the other neighbors, the residents of the neighborhood, who must be looking upon all of this with the same skepticism that I am.
I want to talk to them, explain to them what's acceptable, but they wouldn't get it. Wouldn't get it at all. And so it goes.
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1670
by Umberto Eco
I like Umberto Eco. And I liked this. Good book.
The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1815
Edited and Introduced by Mark Roskill
Now this is a great book. Here, in 1 volume, are the collected letters of Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo.
That said, it's not perfect. It's a 1963 paperback with black and white plates of his work. Van Gogh is sold short in full color prints, there's no point to black and white prints at all. But it's an old book, so you can't really expect better. It's been edited, which is a bad thing, and there are notes to certain letters advising that certain of Vincent's observations to Theo are left out as being irrelevant. While I appreciate this is probably true, I'd prefer to judge that for myself. There are notes as well that reference other letters Van Gogh wrote to Gauguin on the back of his letters to Theo, but not reproduced. This is a bit of a tease. There are notes as to sketches that Van Gogh sent to Theo along with his letters, or drawings on the page, but these again are not reproduced. And it would be good to see Theo's responses to Van Gogh's letters, to form perhaps a better idea of their correspondence.
So in short, there's no criticizing Van Gogh, but the editing could be better done. Things I'd look for were I to buy this again:
- More notes as to the paintings and what became of them (He describes quite vividly what he's working on in the letters, but only some of them are footnoted. Many of his works went missing as well, and it would be curious to know what's survived and what's missing, as well as where the surviving works are currently.)
- Something that attempted to reproduce the drawings that accompanied his letters
- Letter from Theo, as well as surviving letters from Vincent to Gauguin, etc.
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