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Yard Sales!   

Clifford at 2:09 pm, May 27th, 2006

yard sale sign
So today I got involved in an exciting weekend activity subculture for the first time. Yard/Garage sales! I had no idea about several aspects of it. I got up at 7:00am to go over to a friend’s house to help her move a ton of stuff from her garage to her front yard, and get it all set up.

yard sale wide Two of her neighbours also pitched in to help, and also sell a few of their own things that did not sell in their own sales last week. For my own contribution to the spread of loot, I took a couple of dreadful yard chairs that I’d inherited (from the previous owner of my house). She provided coffee and freshly baked scones to help the work along. This was very welcome indeed (Tip: Don’t stay up to 4:00am talking about braneworlds and extra dimensions if you’ve got to get up three hours later).

western union slippersThe amazing thing to me is the dedicated group of people who are on the streets early in the morning trying to be the early birds, to get the good stuff. While we were setting up they were already pulling up in pickup trucks and vans, trying to buy things out of your hands!

And it is really well organised. Apparently, people routinely advertise their yard sales on Craig’s List (I’ve nevermore thingbeen hearing more and more about this thing every day… I’m still behind the times though, having never even visited the Ebay website in my life) and other people scour the region looking for all the sales that are happening. Then there is lots of haggling and rummaging and more haggling.

You get everything in these sales, and some of it is just great. I helped myself to three lovely glass storage jars before the wolves came. They were supposed to be $2 each, but I got them for free for my lifting services. Whoo-hoo! But I want to know who buys the really…. unusual stuff…. such as the Western Union slippers (above right!), or the Nevermore Thing (as I call it) pictured left. I’ve no idea what it is intended to be. My friend is an actress, and gets invited to a ton of those Industry things where you are given gift baskets and other bizarre free stuff. She thinks that this piece came from one of those events, held at Halloween. Have a closer look. There is a black crow/raven on the top of the handle, and the entire basket itself -painted entirely black, of course- is lined with black feathers. I was told by one of the neighbours, who works in production, that no doubt someone who works in the Industry will buy it to use as a prop for something or other. You never know what is useful to someone else.

Once everything got going, I decided to come home and get some shuteye. (I have to go to see an invited screening of the almost-certainly-excruciatingly-dreadful “The Da Vinci Code” tonight. The only reason I am going is because it is at the Director’s Guild, which is a splendid facility I’d like to check out. Should be fun, but it won’t do to fall asleep there.) On the way back home I found that someone in my neighbourhood was having a yard sale, just a few doors away (kind of). So I pulled over, deciding to be a customer at one of these things for the first time - and actually meet a neighbour). I came away with a little round table for $8, the ricketiness of which I thought I could cure easily. I had a feeling that it might fit into a corner of the living room and support with a lovely round soapstone chess set that I’ve been looking to put out for a long time. I took a guess that the radii would match.

table bargaintable for chess

I fixed it easily and -almost unbelievably-the chess-set fit perfectly, almost as though it was made for it. Score! I think I’ll be doing this every weekend!

I just had a thought. Maybe we should have Yard Sales in science (and, more generally, in academia). We’ve all got lots of unused things in our labs, in our notebooks, and on our blackboards. You know those half-baked ideas and/or computations that never turned out to be good for anything, or that old custom made vacuum pump or regulated power supply you never use any more? Might be useful to someone else! Maybe every now and again it would be worth opening our doors and letting people come and browse through those neglected notebooks, or lab equipment. You never know what useful stuff -to someone- might be out there! “How much do you want for this cumbersome proof of this obscure theorem you’ve got scribbled here? How about I take it off your hands -along with this Standard Model commemorative coffee mug- for $7?”.

This could catch on, you know. :-)

-cvj

Miscellany, Personal
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13 Comments on “Yard Sales!”   rss feed

  1. spyder on May 27th, 2006 at 2:51 pm

    One of the weird quirks of yard sales is the people who show up first, maybe even the day before, who essentially are officianados of the hidden treasures. They spend their non-buying time studying various areas of artifactual lexicons: rare and/or first edition books, porcelain and fine china histories and pedigrees, special music boxes–the whole range and gambit of items that are out there in garage sales. Because of course, people don’t know what everything they have might mean or at least what it might be worth. These are culture vultures, carrion crows, eagle-eyed leeches preying on the less knowledgeable, the ignorant, and gleening the treasures for literally pennies. It is fascinating to watch them as a sub-culture, when i lived in a neighborhood populated by elderly and seniors who had stayed living in the homes of their parents or grandparents.

    btw: lots of people fall asleep at the Directors Guild screening, or get up and leave, and sometimes express overt disgust and boo. It is sort of for that purpose.

  2. Say Lee on May 27th, 2006 at 2:54 pm

    Yes, a yard sale of half-baked ideas may spur fresh leads in someone else’s pursuits. This kind of reminds me of what I just read this morning about the idea of Prof. Jacob Schwartz at the Courant Institute of New York University of including a few famous unsolved math problems in his final exams, in the hope that a brilliant student who was not aware that they were famous problems might in fact manage to solve one of them!. (from Meta Math! The Quest for Omega by Gregory Chaitin).

  3. Clifford on May 27th, 2006 at 2:58 pm

    spyder:- Yes, it is a great subculture. I have visions of someone now driving around Hollywood trying to find those Western Union slippers or the Nevermore Thing, to complete a collection! The other weekend one I love here is the Sunday “open-house”, where you can wander around in people’s houses that are for sale. I have not done that since I actually was interested in the market as a buyer, but I must get into doing it as entertainment.

    Thanks for the information about DG. I won’t feel so bad if I fall asleep then.

    -cvj

  4. Ted on May 27th, 2006 at 3:03 pm

    I don’t like this post, Clifford.

  5. Clifford on May 27th, 2006 at 3:05 pm

    Ted:- I’m devastated…. LOL!   :-D :-D

    -cvj

  6. stevem on May 28th, 2006 at 5:12 am

    I am with Ted here:). The giant rabbit post was class but this is rubbish :):) The next one better be good :)lol.

  7. stevem on May 28th, 2006 at 10:31 am

    Seriously, I enjoy your posts, and the others here, each time I have a coffee break.

  8. Poppycock on May 28th, 2006 at 5:11 pm

    Some of us enjoy Clifford’s (not “Cliff’s”) posts whenever they appear- not just on a coffee break. Please keep pontification cvj - you always lift my spirits!

  9. Ted on May 28th, 2006 at 5:58 pm

    Well, I must say the flowers brighten up my day.

  10. Jeff Nuttall on May 28th, 2006 at 8:29 pm

    This kind of reminds me of what I just read this morning about the idea of Prof. Jacob Schwartz at the Courant Institute of New York University of including a few famous unsolved math problems in his final exams, in the hope that a brilliant student who was not aware that they were famous problems might in fact manage to solve one of them!

    Wonder if he was inspired by the story of George Bernard Dantzig…

    As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, Dantzig arrived late to a class, hastily copied down the homework assignment, which consisted of two problems to solve, and after he turned in his solutions discovered that that hadn’t been the homework assignment at all, but examples of “unsolvable” statistics problems!

  11. Amara on May 29th, 2006 at 2:48 am

    >Maybe we should have Yard Sales in science (and, more generally, in academia).

    To sell all of those conference tote bags? If a really well-known scientist sold his collection of bags, then maybe he could earn enough money to donate one of those science programs that the government is killing off….

    (there’s a nice recycling idea here, you know!)

  12. Say Lee on May 29th, 2006 at 7:30 am

    Thanks, Jeff, for the link to Dantzig.

    My first exposure to linear programming was in the mid-80’s at Berkeley, but after Dantzig has moved to Stanford. Of course then I treated it just like an algorithm to solving a resource allocation homework problem, hardly aware of its revolutionary role in the scientific development of math programming.

  13. Cynthia on May 29th, 2006 at 7:57 am

    Amara… GREAT IDEA!!! And I naively thought that “only members of the medical set” were the unfortunate recipients to these rather tacky tote-bags!



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