ShadowJoelXL on Twitter writes:
I’m screaming. I’m screaming and Im inconsolable. Im banned for life from salvation Army. I dont care anymore
If I ever get too old to think “crappie” is hilarious, it’s time to give up the blogging game.
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“It’s More Dinosaurs than any other dinosaur program! It’s More Dinosaurs than ever before in one place! It’s More Dinosaurs than you can imagine! That’s why we call it…More Dinosaurs!!!”
Lizo used to borrow these tapes from the library all the time; they’re sort of like if Beakman’s World was less bad and was about dinosaurs. Cool, weirdo kids’ shows, with wacky hosts using puns (so many puns) to explain why dinosaurs are the best. There’s a whole bunch of them, like “Dinosaurs Dinosaurs Dinosaurs”, “More Dinosaurs”, and “Seriously, How Many F***ing Dinosaurs Are There Anyway?”.
This one wasn’t on YouTube yet, so here you go! Continue reading
So here’s something You’ve Probably Never Heard of (unless you happen to live in Humboldt County, California, which is where I picked this up): Kinetic Sculpture Racing! From what I can tell, it’s sort of like a grown-up version of a soapbox derby, where, instead of building things that look like this:
They build things that look like THIS: Continue reading
Picked up at a thrift store in New Jersey a looooong time ago, like we’re talking high school. (For reference, it was my birthday a couple weeks ago, and I turned 400.)
My friend and I used to watch this every time we hung out—to the point where, years later, I was still carrying it around in the trunk of my car, just in case. It’s a weird, sweet little indie film about the life cycle of a couch, from store to living room to curb, back to a new living room—the people it’s touched (and the people who’ve touched it). …Which of course appeals to the yardsaler in me. Half the things I own used to belong to someone else and had their own life stories and people who loved them and used them for a million different things before I found them on the quarter table; and as long as I take good care of them they’ll probably find still more people to love them in the future.
Anyway, here’s the whole thing, because I don’t think there’s anywhere else you can watch this (you can’t even BUY the tape online anywhere, let alone find it elsewhere on YouTube). Continue reading
Submitted by frequent yard sale adventurer (and part-time sassy teenage dungeon crawler) Mike Teevee!, who writes:
“On Saturday I bought an old 3D camera solely to acquire this: a 3D camera instructional video hosted by Vincent Price. I have no regrets whatsoever.”
If you’ve ever wanted to watch a 300-year-old Vincent Price narrate people hiding in the bushes and taking photos of children (seriously), you can watch the whole thing in garbage 2D here:
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YOU GUYS, YOU GUYS! LOOK WHAT I FOUND AT THE SALES THIS WKND:
It’s Nightmare! The game hosted by a video!! I’d been trying to find a copy of this since literally like two weeks ago when Jeddy mentioned it on the GameCola podcast.
The way it works is, you pop the tape into your VCR machine and let it play in the background while you roll around the board, trying to collect keys or whatever (who cares, nobody cares). Most of the time it just plays spooky noises at you, but every once in a while THE GATEKEEPER pops in and says something like:
It’s my favorite game of all time. (I haven’t actually played it yet.)
Welcome, yard sale adventurers, to My New Favorite Thing!: finding weirdo VHS tapes at yard sales/thrift shops/dollar stores that haven’t been uploaded to YouTube yet, and making them available for the whole world to enjoy. (…Until I’m carted away by the Internet Police, anyway.)
FIRST UP:
A number of weeks ago, I teased that I visited this one estate sale that deserved its own post—not only because it encompassed two separate buildings and had as many goods for sale as a typical Wal-Mart (and, let’s be honest, about the same quality)—but because including it as an aside in a post about golden toothbrushes and laxative-themed thermometers just wouldn’t do it justice.
This estate sale was a thing of wonder. Epic poems could be written about the journey one had to take to get from one end of it to the other—winding through alleyways of cardboard boxes, up and down creaking, crusty staircases with little pieces crumbling off with each step—I swear I even got lost at one point and had to ask for directions. It was by far the biggest sale I’ve ever been to in Connecticut, encompassing both a two-story home and a three-story barn.
This past weekend I was visiting my parents’ house for Birthdayfest—that traditional time of year when all the summer babies in my family gather together, and mourn the fact that we were all born so close to each other and therefore don’t get our own special celebrations. It’s a somber, subdued event where we play games like “Pin the Tear on Your Own Cheek,” and (later) “Ow, My Cheek!” I look forward to it every year.
Now, I’m not the only one in my family who enjoys going to yardsales—as I stated in my very first post here, I’ve been going to them ever since I was a little kid with my mom, and I was cute enough to get free things with just a sad pout and a “my mommy said it’s too expensive…” Practically any weekend we’re together at the ol’ homestead, the whole family (or at least, anyone who can wake up early enough) piles into Mom’s minivan for a fun-filled morning of stimulating the American economy, one quarter at a time.
…Even if it’s pouring rain. Which, as it turns out, it was this weekend. Most of the sales this past Saturday that weren’t outright canceled looked like a post-apocalyptic version of Hoarders, with junk hastily packed shoulder-deep into garages, scattered contents spilling onto the tables outside—tables that were circled over again and again by we intrepid yardsalers, in hopes that something worthwhile would finally reveal itself, if only we stared hard enough.
After about an hour of this, that orphaned plastic lid was looking mighty tempting.
But I did discover one benefit to rainy-day yardsales that I hadn’t previously realized: There’s almost no competition for the quality goods. Most of the regular salers stay home, because they assume that all the sales will just be canceled. And true—many of them were. But many of them weren’t, and we were able to find a lot of choice (and not-so-choice) merchandise. Continue reading
Yardsaling to Adventure! 