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@craig-rex Take care when you’re opening the battery compartment of your ‘Mother dog’. The old alkaline batteries can leak and dry up to leave some nasty dust. As I found out last week <cough>
Bought a 0.74 US pint (35 cl) bottle of Booth’s Finest Dry Gin yesterday at the junk market for 7 dollars (£5). It had a big label on the back from the Royal Institute For Health And Public Hygiene dated 1964, stating that it had been passed by the Examining Board of said Institute, which explains the yellow colour of the gin.
The Whiskey Exchange has a similar bottle, which they’ve priced at £150, so it’s a good job I bought the bottle of gin, and not the 1995 bottle of Taylor’s port that was standing next to it. I drink port…
Ebay is experimenting in other countries soon with charging you a PL fee if ANY person clicks on your listing in the last 30 days whether the actual buyer did or not.
“I was the victim of a click farm” claims bankrupt eBay seller.
Bough a claimed 90 sets of cigarette cards at the Croft car boot sale for £45, and now I’m doubting my sanity for the umpteenth time this week. The packets the cigarettes came in are attractive though. More attractive than the film stars of yesteryear!
Actually, she didn’t see the razor blades- they were inside the matchboxes.
This week’s haul from her stall included a Hebrew bible from 1914, published by the British and Foreign Bible Society and presented by them to E. Mervyn Blow, whoever he was.
The Society went into overdrive at the start of the Great War producing bibles for the troops. I don’t think Blow ever read his- it’s pretty bulky, too big to fit into a tunic pocket.
Picked up last Saturday a battered old tin with about a hundred winding keys from old alarm clocks. As an added bonus the tin also contained two matchboxes stuffed with vintage unused razor blades, some in their wrappers. A free bonus in a lot that cost me £25- the vendor looked at it and described it as “boring”.
Keys sold to a buyer in China for £10. The razor blades going to be a long-term investment 🙂
I was given a Jusfit cordless circular saw by an online-shopping addict. I asked them “Why have you got three circular saws?”
“I don’t know, I only ordered one. Would you like a saw?”
They’re about 50 dollars each, and actually quite a nice piece of kit, for the size, which is hobby. Only thing is, they don’t come with a battery, and the recommended battery is Makita -which seems to be about a hundred dollars with charger.
Must be a lot of this kind of cordless kit floating around unused. The bloke also had a cordless jet washer, which, judging by the size of the box, would make a pretty nifty dental pick. It was sold as a car washer- he doesn’t have a car.
I bid on, and got, two fruit boxes of stamp albums and first-day covers for £101 including fees. It’s the collection of Dr K Shallcross Dickinson, who (if he’s the same K S D) became a pharmacist in 1914, filmed the daily life of Romaldkirk in the Pennine hills in the 1930s and spent all his money on British stamps in the 1970s through to 1980s.
Looks like he wasted thousands of pounds. Plenty of part sheets of mint (unused) commemoratives. No Penny Blacks or any other “wow” stamp.
I’ve sorted out the first-day covers which I’m going to give to my next-door neighbour, who deals in that kind of thing. The only way to make money out of those is to be given them.
I pulled out a wooden “Heinz Tomato Ketchup” crate from a friend’s carriage house- it’s got a “H J Heinz Pittsburgh USA” address stenciled on it. May have been brought back from the Congo in the 1960s, with Snap-On tools in it.
I imagine a scene like the dinner party in “Apocalypse Now”, but with tomato sauce being slathered all over the buffalo steaks.
@retro-treasures-wv Most likely break-down of the Canada balsam (known as balsam separation) on that lens. It was used as glue between lens elements. The other curse is fungus, which shows up as filaments. That seems to etch the glass. The balsam fault is repairable, I think.
Ha! Went for £18, so as the bidding would have gone 10, 15, 18, there were two bidders.
It’s possible that’s the view from the Cabot Tower in Bristol . The two rectangles would be the towers of the cathedral, and the spire (as it says on the card) St Mary Redcliffe. The big buildings in the foreground might be tobacco warehouses.
John Cabot led an expedition to Newfoundland in 1497, which is why he’s got a big tower overlooking the city. Nanook of the North would have met him as he stepped off the boat 🙂
The German stamps are in a Kalamazoo thong binder, manufactured in Birmingham in 1969 to a patent by a US firm based in Kalamazoo. The binder weighs 21 pounds! Dickensian…
Just on my way up to collect a couple of lots from an auction house I haven’t dealt with before. My next-door neighbour asked me to leave some bids on cigarette cards. He won one lot- half of it seem to be Brooke Bond tea cards- for £30. Must be a market for cigarette cards- some lots went for over £150.
The other lot is a collection of German stamps- that’s for me. It’s got some hyper-inflation period issues which have been cancelled. A bit of a learning experience this one. It appears that these stamps are much rarer used than mint, so long as the stamps actually were used, and not cancelled to order for collectors. German philatelists insist on a certificate of genuineness for each stamp.
In another auction, on Saturday
Worthless?
@so-cal-joe Here (UK) the thrift shops sell barely-used breadmakers for £10 (13 dollars). I think they’re barely used because people try baking using the supplied recipes, which use added sugar and dried yeast, so it come out more like cake than bread.
I’ve got a Panasonic one- they’re a good make, but the non-stick coating wears off in patches, and the cost of a replacement pan is around a hundred dollars.
Only item I bought at the junk market last week was a billhook- a farmer’s tool for cutting bushes and hedge-laying. Got charged £10 (13 dollars) ‘cos “You know what they’re worth!”. Turns out they’re worth £50 on eBay, so that was okay.
I can kinda understand why someone would use ChatGPT to work out how to slap tariffs on some penguins living on an island off the coast of Antartica. I’m a bit bemused as to how these penguins managed to get their own internet domain (.hm) in the first place. They’re King Penguins, so presumably it’s some kind of royal prerogative, unless their name derives from something else. “Look at all those ‘king penguins over there” said Captain Cook.
