There are three kinds of earthquakes:
Trepidatory
Combination of both
Monthly Archive for April, 2011
Page 5 of 7
Parlaying your money is hooking up a series of bets to make a real killing. It’s also used as a negotiating ploy by pirates.
I think something was lost when parlay was translated into my native English.
Lots of Money. Pirates getting booty. Garage Sale.
Nope something doesn’t compute. I used a Garage Sale on Friday afternoon to turn $15,000 worth of stuff into $3,000 in cash. Not exactly a successful parlay.
This was at the END of the garage sale
You know the drill. Spend hours and hours and hours lugging stuff to the garage for ten days before the sale. Run an ad in the newspaper announcing the sale. Then spend hours and hours and hours dealing with the public. Then spend hours and hours lugging a lot back into the garage/house.
Turns out, dealing with the public was the hardest part.
First, there was our back-yard neighbor, whom I speak to usually in one word conversations.
HOT! I’ll toss his way when it’s a sultry afternoon.
COLD! When the frost is chilling the pumpkins.
RAINY! When it’s mizzlin’
He responds according:
Yup.
Yup.
Yeah.
He also loves to mow his yard on Saturday about sundown. You know, when the rest of us are trying to sit outside and relax? And he has a thing for blackbirds sitting on his tree limbs. He will, from time-to-time wander around the backyard clapping his hands to scare them off.
Yeah, that works.
So he shows up with the wife and it was the longest conversation we ever had with him… all the while we are trying to deal with Sixty other people wanting prices on stuff, making change, and re-stocking.
How about the little old ladies. No, I mean OLD, like frail-old. (Note to self, start “frail-blog.” Update: It’s been done.)
They are circling around and around fingering every piece as if it was going to speak to them. Many bought crap. Their heirs will appreciate it someday when they have to pass it along to some other sucker yard sale shopper.
Of course, there are the negotiators. Two types: I’m-interested-but-I-want-a-deal and You’re-a-damned-fool-for-asking-this-price.
The deal seekers had a number in mind, gave it to me and I countered and sometimes they bought and sometimes they didn’t. We parted as pals.
The other idiots would look at an item and just rip it apart. Kayak:
- Does it leak?
- Bottom is sure scratched up!
- This has seen some rocks!
- I don’t like your decals.
- Never heard of this brand.
My response:
- Yes, you damned fool, I’m asking $200 for a leaky boat.
- So is mine, idiot
- It’s used, buttwad
- Commie
- So don’t buy it.
He didn’t and I wouldn’t have sold it to him anyway. As it turns out, as soon as he walked away, a full-price buyer came up and gave me cash. Neener!
How about the “foreigners?” (as another garage-saler called them.) Best of the bunch. Came in, looked, offered, bought or didn’t. Kids kept their grubby mitts off the stuff, no yakking, whining, begging or crying. My next sale ad is written:
Yard Sale: Todas las negociaciones se llevarán a cabo en español. Si usted no puede hablar el idioma a continuación, los precios se incrementará según el capricho y la voluntad de los residentes de la casa. Las ventas tempranas de bienvenida.
Lastly and leastly are the other neighbors who are just nosy – they know it and freely admit it. Sell your house? Where you going? When you leaving? Had a good sale? I know they mean well, but I am outside A LOT. Why today when I’m exhausted, hot, and crabby, do you decide to chat me up.
Don’t you know parlaying $15,000 worth of stuff to $3000 cash is hard work?
To find a prince you have to kiss a lot of frogs.
Living in Costa Rica requires the same kind of attitude: to enjoy the Toucans you have to suffer the Toads.
The first time I saw the house Nancy had bought us outside Guacimo, Alujuela, Costa Rica, I was standing by the pool under the rancho (yeah, I’m bragging. If you want to come visit, it’s OK. 
) and a magnificent Toucan flew to a branch not twenty feet from where I stood.
He showed me both sides of his beak to prove he didn’t have a “bad side” before flying further down the hill into more dense trees above our coffee crop (I am insufferable I know.) What fantastic bird. In my back yard.
When I related the story to our friends who have lived in Costa Rica for years, they were suitably impressed because Toucans are kinda flighty when it comes to human beans. We saw one at their house, but it stayed at least 50 meters away.
Not my Toucan. He was a show-off.
Then Frances told us about the toads. Bufo alvarius. Deadly to dogs. Fun for the human beans. Some bufo toads secrete a poison through their skin. For human beans, licking the toad is great sport. The secretion gives the toad-licker the same effect as a hit of LSD. A toad-studier calls this “bufoglossation.”
We would call it “stupid.”
Look at that sucker. Would you rub your tongue over that without a hit of LSD first?
Since dogs tend to weigh less than human bean toad-lickers, dogs can die. They get all spazzie and droolie.
To save a dog toad-licker, Frances advises to flush their mouth out with a garden hose, force milk and lemon juice down their gullet at hurry them to her or a vet for a shot of Atropin. She’s had to do it twice and saved the dogs both times.
I have yet to run into the human bean equivalent of these kinds of toads in Costa Rica. But I’m sure they are there. I’ll just try to remember the Toucans I have met, and forget the Toads.
On my first trip to Costa Rica, I met a bonafide famous Costa Rican, Jorge Arroyo. This last trip I met an infamous Costa Rican, Joseph Dion.
Seems that Sr. Dion fancies himself to be “Max” in the book by Jose Canseco “Vindicated” dealing with his steriod use.
Canseco claims “Max” was a steroids dealer he introduced to Alex Rodriguez.
I met Joe/Max while waiting in the customs line. As with most ques, we doubled back a lot and saw many of the same faces in the twenty minutes of shuffling along. A man in front of me was recognized by another line-stander and he introduced him to the young girl with him as “blah blah blah… famous, very famous… blah blah blah.”
Before I could chat up the famous guy, he started chatting up the chick in front of him. So I chatted up the other guy in line ahead of us who explained that Joe Dion was a very famous baseball trainer.
Soon Joe realized he wasn’t leaving the terminal with the young woman and restarted in customs-line shuffle. When I said his friend had busted him as a trainer we started our conversation.
I am SO not a baseball fan, so I asked if he had trained anybody that I would have heard of.
“Jose Canseco? Alex Rodriquez?”
Uh, yeah, I heard of those guys. Oh, so were you in the book? Sez me. I didn’t read it, but it was hard not to hear about it.
Dion told me I should wait and read HIS book to get the true story.
I was the guy in the book. Not by name, but I’m mentioned throughout the book. Just wait until the movie comes out to get the real story. And there will be a movie.
Dion told me he has been a baseball trainer for 30 years. He said he trained Rodriguez for four years when A-Rod was with Seattle. Dion denied Canseco’s account in “Vindicated” that “Max” was a fan of steroids.
That’s really, really funny because I am the one person that hates steroids. I’m against it 100 percent. And, A-Rod, at the time that I trained him — and this I swear to God — was 100 percent against steroids. He was one of the hardest working guys, and most natural guy, that I’ve met in my life. He hated steroids. We talked about it.
After 30 years of training hundreds, if not thousands, of baseball players, Joesph Dion felt compelled to define his personna based on cheating in baseball. I found that a little sad.
Nobody has ever made the connection between Joe Dion and “Max” officially.
Rodriguez hasn’t commented, while Canseco has refused to discuss the identity of “Max.”
Famous/Infamous. Either way, Costa Rica has some interesting people.
Funny or Die reaches out to the baby boomer crowd via Billy Crystal and Rob Reiner remake of “When Harry Met Sally.”
Helen Mirren makes her appearance as the picky eater at the old folks home where Harry ends up when Sally falls down and can’t get up and dies.
