Rare, Collectible, & Otherwise

Author: admin (Page 201 of 220)

You say TorNAYdo, I say TorNAHdo

First, New York City had to imitate our numerous lakes. They lined metal dumpsters with plastic and filled them with water. Splish Splash! Summer fun! Tough skiing, though.

Now, they have to have our exciting weather. 100 mile an hour winds on Thursday in the Big Apple. Tornado warnings on Staten Island, uprooted trees, power outages. Trash cans flying through the air along with a huge tree limb that raised up over an intersection and began spinning.

“This spinning limb hits one of the cans like it was a bat on a ball,” said a fearless observer. “It was launched way, way over there. It was like a poltergeist.”

WHAT?

Send that man back to storm-chaser school! Out here in Oklahoma, we know the tornado facts, and it has nothing to do with being like a poltergeist, but everything to do with being like a train.

“It sounded like a freight train,” is how the line goes. My personal favorite is the quote from the 1993 Catoosa, OK tornado, from a mechanic. “It sounded like a freight train coming. I jumped into the grease pit.”

I can only hope I have a grease pit for jumping, when our next bout with storms comes around. And around. As for the freight train angle, it’s no contest when weather and machine collide. As you might expect, “It sounds like a freight train.”

Meanwhile, herein lies some training for your next tornadic event:

On the Book Harvest

Three phone calls within the past hour. All three – “Do you buy books?”

Ah – if only they grew on trees! I could spend a few moments in the orchard every morning plucking bestsellers. But then, I suppose I’d have to spend all that extra time cleaning up trashy novels that end up dropping to the ground and rotting there.

I do buy books. I look for them all the time. Drive around looking for them. Visit garage sales and estate sales and church sales. People bring in books to sell and I buy some of them. I wish I could buy them all. Every book in the world. Then, when someone walked in asking, “Do you have that book by Norman Jacksprat?” I’d answer, “Of course I do. I have every book in the world! Now, if I only had a filing system!”

It turns out, I have a filing system (of sorts) but not every book in the world. There are some books people don’t want. Some people don’t want ANY books. I’ve had people open the door and lean in, looking around furtively, as though the books might be foaming at the spine with book-rabies ready to pounce down on any nearby head. Then, gaining confidence, the person will step inside, look at me and admit – with visible pride – “I knew someone once who liked to read.”

Now, there are the electronic books – Kindle and such. Will they make reading less scary? Will I be buying used electronic John Grisham novels?

Hard to know the future. Wait a second! I’ve got that fortune telling book in the back…

Did the Big-N know he’d be a continuing seller?

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