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King John's Crown Jewels, Lost in the Wash
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Lost
- Hits: 2001
No, not the wash, a name given to a tidal Estuary in Eastern England.
Lost in 1213, never recovered as far as we know. And what would they be worth today...?
Further Reading: The Wash (Wikipedia), BBC.
2 Tales from the BBC
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 1715
2 Tales of treasure found from the BBC today.
#1) a hoard of Roman coins unearthed by archeologists in Colchester
#2) Hoard of gold coins hidden from Nazis found in Hackney - This, I suspect, is a common tale, but more on that in a separate post.
Garage Sales - Week 4 - 2011
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2126
Now it's a long weekend, and usually the pickings are slim, but I've checked Kijiji and found no less than 7 pages of garage sales this weekend and so I made my map.
1st Stop - Thorncliffe, I'm off at 8:00 hoping to catch the early worms.
But after a quick ride about the neighborhood I discover that I'm the only one up, and so head back downtown to grab a coffee to go.
By the time I'm back there are a few underway, and a few more setting up.
It's nothing but junk. All junk. Junk junk junk. The best find is a cat tree and house someone has left in an alley by the trash, and while I'm deliberating picking it up (it'll need recovering) I remind myself that I'm not here trash picking today, it's business, and a few more of these useless garage sales later I've abandoned all hope and start heading out to Springbank via Bowness.
Not a thing purchased in Thorncliffe.
All along the way I stop and follow signs, nothing, nothing, nothing. In Bowness there's a couple big ones on the street, again nothing and nothing, one a few pieces of cheap costume jewelry, otherwise nothing. A reuse - recycle store is going out of business, some big concrete planters in the back, open to offers, but at 200lbs apiece I'm too discouraged to dicker or try and load them into the car. The inside of the store is a mess, possibly, if I dug and rummaged, but the water and power has been turned off and the smell of an overused and underflushed toilet puts me off a more thorough search.
And on and on, eventually arriving on Old Banff Coach road, there's a sale out in Springbank that used the word "Antiques", and while usually that's a caution that the prices will be high I just need to rest my eyes, find something half-worthwhile....
I find the sale, one of those telescoping distance roads, "4 KM ahead" signs warn you, then when you've clocked your 4 KM there's another sign "2 KM ahead", and so it goes, Zeno's paradox brought to life, eventually I arrive, antique tools and hurricane lamps, mismatched china and vinegar cruets, the proprietors of the sale discussing the treasures they've already let go (better by far than what remains) ...
From here home, vary the route, more sales, by 1:00 I'm home having spent $6.00 on coffee and $12.00 on garage sale items ($5.00 of which went to a new phone, the last 2 I bought proved not to work...)
An absolutely fruitless day.
***
Sunday it's the Hillhurst flea market, the dealers, it would appear, had as rough a go of it as I did, a pair of cufflinks for a dollar, a blue Medalta beanpot, (blue being rare, otherwise I have too many beanpots as it is...).
***
All in all it's a no-star garage sale weekend. Time would have been far better spent sleeping in, reading a book, anything but garage saling....
Alligators in NY Sewers
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 1915
"Did he remember the baby alligators? Last year, or maybe the year before, kids all over Nueva York bought these alligators for pets. Macy's was selling them for fifty cents; every child, it seemed, had to have one. But soon the children grew bored with them. Some set them loose in the streets, but most flushed them down the toilets. And these had grown & reproduced, had few of rats & sewage, so that now they moved big, blind, albino, all over the sewer system. Down there, God knew how many there were. Some had turned cannibal because in their neighborhood the rats had all been eaten, or had fled in terror."
- Thomas Pynchon - V
A favorite legend of mine as a child, that there were alligators in NY sewers, and that one day when I grew up I'd go and hunt them.
Of course no one believed me, and even I don't remember how I came by the fact, only that I was ridiculed nonstop for spreading the news.
But you know, you grow up, and I didn't even think to go hunting alligators in NY sewers when I was there last year. Foolish me. But reading my urban legends guidebook I'm inspired again...
Especially by the note:
According to May, sewer inspectors first reported seeing alligators in 1935, but neither May nor anyone else believed them. "Instead, he set men to watch the sewer walkers to find out how they were obtaining whisky down in the pipes." Persistent reports, however, perhaps including the newspaper item discovered by Coleman, caused May to go down to find out for himself. He found that the reports were true. "The beam of his own flashlight had spotted alligators whose length, on the average, was about ten feet."
May started an extermination campaign, using poisoned bait followed by flooding of the side tunnels to flush the beasts out into the major arteries where hunters with .22 rifles were waiting. He announced in 1937 that the 'gators were gone. Reported sightings in 1948 and 1966 were not confirmed.
Read More: Sewer Alligator's on the Wikipedia
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