I thought I’d mention here that I’ve started a series of video tours of Poppe’s. I hope these videos will give people an idea what sort of things we carry, in a way that’s easier and more entertaining than taking pictures and writing up descriptions for hundreds of items. I may do more of a formal online catalog eventually, but this will do for now. It should take about 8-10 of these short videos to cover the entire store, and after that I’ll do ones on new products as they come in. I hope that keeping them short makes them more watchable than if I did one hour-long tour of the entire store.
These were made with a Flip camera by a total amateur (me), so the quality isn’t that great, but I think they’re good enough for my purpose. It’s a little time-consuming, because I have to shoot the video — and then probably shoot it a couple more times, because I forgot to include something or didn’t like how the first one turned out — and then upload it to YouTube, which takes a while. Once it’s uploaded and they have it converted to their format and placed in public view, then I can go to the website and make a page for it, and post links from other places like Facebook. So I probably won’t be posting more than one per day.
This first one covers the wall crucifixes, and some of the jewelry and statues that we have in the display counter. More jewelry and statues will show up in later tours of other parts of the store.
Suggestions, or complaints that I need to speak up, are heartily welcome in the comments. (By the way, I discovered recently that my comment spam prevention plugin was broken, so if anyone tried to comment on my long ADD post and wasn’t able to, I’m sorry about that. It should be fixed now.) Also, if you are on Facebook and would like to be notified of new videos and other store news, be sure to go to the Poppe’s fan page and ‘like’ it. Thank you!
(This was supposed to be scheduled to publish on Monday, but I goofed, so here it is a couple days late. This is more personal than I usually get on here, but it’s something I’ve discovered there’s a lot of misunderstanding about, and I’ve learned a lot about it firsthand recently, so here goes. Buckle up.)
Well, it’s official: I’m a speed freak. For a couple months now, I’ve been taking amphetamines. It’s perfectly legal (although the price is so high that I’m thinking maybe I should figure out how to make the stuff in my barn from anhydrous ammonia, cold medicine, and dirty socks, or whatever the kids are doing these days), and I have a prescription. Read more »
Apropos of nothing in particular, here’s what has to be the best song I’ve ever heard with only a single line of lyrics. The funny thing is, it’s not even really a song. It’s just something that one of the show’s musicians threw together for the DVD, when they couldn’t work out a deal on publishing rights with the band that did the original music for the scene. Yet it fits perfectly, and I had a heck of a time finding it when I first saw the episode.
(By the way, if you watch the rest of the scene after the music stops, the context here is that Elliot (the woman doctor) is pretty frazzled and scared at her job, and intimidated by her boss, and they’ve got a chance to have a perfect game — zero deaths for a 24-hour period — for the first time in ages.)
A long, serious, thoughtful post about something besides old TV shows and movies is coming Monday. I promise.
One of these days, I’m going to start posting deep deconstructions on the meaning of life. But until then, here’s a pointless story about when I worked at an Internet provider. This was the early days of the net, so you had to be a pretty serious geek to be getting online from home at all. Quite a few customers would come into the office to pay their bill in person, because they were interested in the technology, and we had some cool Unix machines with large monitors and a big stack of modems with lots of flashing lights and wires running everywhere. One group that came in often dressed like they were in the middle of a role-playing game, with dark cloaks and so on. One time they were wearing these dark, thick bracelets, and someone said, “Those must be their bracers +2.” And it was hilarious.
Much like that story, this picture will separate those who played D&D-type games from those who didn’t. One group will laugh out loud, and the other group won’t have a clue. If you don’t have a clue, congratulations: you saved a lot of money on dice and books, and were probably getting dates when some of us were painstakingly drawing maps on graph paper in a basement somewhere. (However, let me make it clear: when I played D&D, we did not dress up.)
Someday I need to write a long review of Real Genius, the best movie ever made about being too smart for your own good. But right now I’ve got 10 minutes, so I’ll post a clip instead. Yes, it’s a silly 80s movie with pop music, overly elaborate pranks, and an unrealistically happy ending. But the characters are pitch perfect. And yes, to answer a question in the YouTube comments, I did have a huge crush on Jordan in 1985.
I think it might be possible to keep a blog busy just pointing out silly mistakes in the Herald-Whig. Here’s a fun one from this week’s classifieds (always a rich source of goofs):
ROUND BALES of Hay $45 a
bail, approximately 6 Bales
of hay, [phone number]
How do you spell ‘bale’ correctly once, then misspell it five words later, then get it right again just three words after that? Allow me to help: A ‘bale’ is a bunch of smaller pieces of something, often plant material or paper, that has been tightly wrapped into a bundle for shipping or storage. (In the olden days, it was also the thing with little rollers that held the paper down against the bigger roller thingy in a typewriter.) To ‘bail’ is what you do with a bucket when your boat is sinking, or when you give up on a situation and ‘bail out.’ Also the money your friend brings to get you out of jail after your big night out, or the handle on a bucket.
But even better than that: how do you have approximately 6 bales to sell? Round hay bales weigh 1000 pounds or more, measure 5-6 feet in each direction, and they aren’t very fast on their feet. It’s not exactly hard to count them. I can’t decide whether that’s a typo and it should be something like 60; or the owner was too lazy to go outside and figured, Dirty Harry style, “Were there six bales left in the barn, or only five? Ah, it’s gotta be about six.”
Ok, this is driving me nuts lately, because I don’t see it just in grammatically-challenged places like YouTube comments, but even in serious articles. So here it is:
The past tense of the verb ‘lead’ is ‘led.’ As in, “Today I will lead the horses to water. Yesterday I led them to water.” Never, “Yesterday I lead them to water.”
I guess the problem is that ‘led’ is pronounced the same as the noun ‘lead,’ as in pencil lead. So people think the sound ‘led’ but then pull out the spelling for the noun that sounds that way. It’d never be a problem in spoken English, but when I run across it in writing, it jumps out like a sore thumb. (At least I still notice it. I’ve seen its/it’s interchanged so often that I don’t always catch that one anymore.) So to make it simple: when the sound ‘lehd’ is a verb, it’s ‘led.’ When it’s a noun, the metal that used to be in everything from paint to fishing sinkers, it’s ‘lead.’
This has been your irregularly scheduled grammar rant. In the next advanced class, lay versus lie.
Oh, there have been times I felt busy. There was a time when I was working 70-80 hours a week managing a pizza delivery store. But I didn’t have anything else going on in my life — I wasn’t involved in church, I wasn’t married or taking care of any kids, and I shared an apartment I can barely remember because I spent so little time there. I ate most of my meals at work, so even if I got 8 hours of sleep a night, that still left another 30-40 hours a week of leisure time, most of which was spent watching 80′s movies and playing drinking games, as best I can remember.
For most of my life, I wasn’t even that busy. Certainly not in school. When you can finish most of your assignments while the teacher is explaining the lesson, school is a pretty relaxed place, more boring than busy. At home, we had chores and helped on the farm, but we also had enough free time to read several books a week and build rafts to go “exploring” on the Sny. Most jobs I’ve had weren’t that demanding — put in your hours, make enough to pay the bills, and have plenty of time for fishing, computer games, or whatever else sounded good. Read more »
I suppose we all tend to take for granted our own inherent talents. To me, doing algebra or writing a computer program is no big deal; it seems like a reasonably smart monkey could learn to do it. But painting or sculpting — those are gifts that I don’t really understand at all. (One of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen was the self-portrait I had to paint in high school art class. I hope it was safely destroyed long ago.)
So when I see something like this, it’s almost mesmerizing. How does he know to leave that curve on the right for the hair to fill in later, or which colors to start with that’ll end up blending later to make the right skin tones? I know some of that can be learned, but a real artist’s eye is a God-given gift that, combined with study and practice, makes for something extraordinary that I can only envy.
