Sun Jun 23 2002 18:59:
I can tell when Crummy comes back up after an absence by the re-opening of the spam floodgates that drench my crummy.com and segfault.org addresses.
Sun Jun 23 2002 19:08 The Invisible Hand Buzzer:
One thing I enjoy is exploring the
neglected underbelly of mass production. Until the Internet came along I
saw only the endpoint of the process, the ninety-nine-cent store or (for
the more upscale items) dollar store which purchase wholesale the hopeful
monsters of capitalism and try to sell them to you. But now the scales
have been lifted from my eyes, and I can get a glimpse of the process by
which cast-off merchandise gets from its warehouse on the edge of town to
your local flea market. Some examples from Ioffer, a site I just discovered. The "Business and Commercial" section is the one I'm mainly interested in.
- Either this is some
ingenious scheme to dodge a tax on diamonds, or there is some merchandise
so unsellable (eg. Knickerbocker
Debbie Webbie Dolls by Richard Simmons) that only the promise of cool,
cool ice can soothe the pain of obtaining it.
- As with the 'One Ring' my mother once found for sale in a SkyMall
catalog (she hypothesized that Saruman Ring-Maker had created a bunch of
knockoffs to flood the market and prevent Sauron from finding the One),
you can now own the Keychain of the
Nazgûl! "Silver finish with Eye of Sauron".
- Former hippie? Now concerned, responsible liberal? You'll love these
combination Jerry
Garcia/Special Olympics T-shirts!
- 10,000 old
MS-DOS games. I'm speechless. I'd be less speechless if I could
comprehend the fact that there are probably only about 20 distinct games.
- Oh, to peek
inside this warehouse... It's like a grab bag... FOR LESS!
- Sometimes having a 'girl version' of a product doesn't make the 'boy version' any less effeminate.
- As with any online community, there are always those who want to
play by their own rules. Here, the evil Drew
Kaplan flogs the Archive of Completely Useless Ebooks. It looks like
he participated in a bunch of 'reports' variants of the chain letter scam
and somehow got the impression that, since he was paying money for the
reports, they must have been worth something.
- As an antidote to the cynicism this entry is no doubt engendering, an
awesome trilobite fossil
from St. Petersburg.
I'm tempted to make inquiries and obtain insider
information and wholesaler
catalogs, but since I'm not an insider I fear the 'buy something or get out' vibe, and if it's in a catalog it seems too respectable,
somehow, to be worth my time.
PS: Both Ioffer and Ebay have a section called "Dolls and Bears". What, are stuffed bears not a type of doll? Also, "Dolls and Bears" would be an interesting title for a musical.
Sun Jun 23 2002 20:48:
It's thrills and spills for the whole family when Danny O'Brien makes up Star Trek episodes corresponding to past editions of Linux in the Enterprise. Caution! It's funny.
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