My dad used to participate in the sports card shows back in the early '90s. Somewhere around that time he bought Michael Jordan's rookie card for $105, and thought that it my have been the stupidest purchase that he had ever made. Then a few years later he sold it for $800. Baseball cards (the cheaper ones) were always a good thing to bring for show and tell in elementary school.
Came home after hanging out with my sister and her husband last night, and my roommate was shitfaced and taking shots of Rumpleminze. Of course he demands I join him. Damn you, Rumpleminze. Sometimes the drunken version of myself is no good, but I woke up to a sparkling clean kitchen today. Woohoo! Never really got into baseball cards, but back in 3rd or 4th grade I ruined a big stack of Pokemon cards when I went swimming in a creek and forgot them in my pocket. Was a huge loss at the time, but they were quickly forgotten. Pics or it didn't happen!
Okay, I have ZERO artistic ability. If you're horrified by my MS Paint job, you should be. Somebody who does this for a living, do us proud:
I google "boobs trading cards" and see someone was way ahead of you, back in glorious 1992: #58 Betsy Boobs
When I was a kid and we moved from Tennessee to Germany (Army), my parents got rid of a bunch of my toys and stuff because I was in middle school. I was pissed because two of the things they got rid of I had wanted to keep. Not necessarily because I thought I would one day make money off of them, but because they had value to me. One of them was a portfolio of Ralph McQuarrie art for ROTJ: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Return-of-the-J ... 4d2ee672ee The other was some sort of anthology of Archie comics that showed the history of the comic over the years. I was big into Archie comics at the time. They tossed all my comic books, including that anthology. I'm trying to google it to post here, and having a hard time finding it. I don't know if it would be worth anything today.
I have a collection of antique tools as well, my grandfather ran a weekend business for it in his retirement. These things ARE worth a lot of money and I have NO desire to get rid of them. I love having them. Nothing nowadays looks like the 19th century and before stuff. It all looks like weaponry-- wood, iron and hand-crafted. It looks scary-glorious on the wall.
So, I asked about sticking it to the Man, right? Turns out that she's pretty much dug her own grave. An exec flew in for a meeting with all of the managers and basically reamed her. A large portion of the meeting was discussing her bad attitude, argumentative nature with the managers from other dept, and her lack of leadership for a staff of mostly new grads. Oh, and the docs AND nursing hate how our dept is run. I think she's on tilt. I no longer have the desire to tell anyone how crappy she is; people with more power than I are already doing it. That's enough for me. I think things are going to change soon, and fortunately I'm not going to be there for the shitstorm. Yippy! Someday I might be a manager, and I'm definitely going to remember this experience of How Not To Manage People.
Best piece of leadership advice I ever got was "Don't worry about the people above you. If you take care of the people below you, the people above you will take care of themselves". It's not 100%, but it's pretty much guaranteed that if you're having problems with your people, somebody's going to notice, and it's not going to go well for you. Even if your own performance isn't perfect, if you're at least taking care of your guys, then you're not doing too bad.
Thats cool. My grandpa has tons of antique tools, and records, and furniture...all worth jack shit. He's not so much a hoarder as a child of the Depression and seems to find functional "value" in almost everything. I tried to make lemonade out of lemons when I was helping him clean his storage unit (aka basement under the office building he owned) and thought I could find some stuff to sell on EBay. Unfortunately there is no market for 30 year old cans of paint, antique tools that are chipped or broken, and boxes of records without sleeves or in packaging that is water damaged.
Poor Asia Carrera My uncle was a huge Playboy fan, was a member of the club back in the day and all, and kept his entire collection in a big safe he had in his closet. My aunt finally convinced him to get rid of them when they were moving to bumfuck Texas. I think the used book store offered him 2.50 for the entire stack. My grandparents also liked to useless stuff. They have an entire basement filled with used TV dinner trays my grandma would clean and keep for later reuse. All sorts of plastic cups and plates like this. What she was saving it for? I don't know.
One of my techs at work moved into his mother in laws house after she passed away and left it to them, she had stacks of papers and useless shit everywhere, they rented a 10 yard dumpster and after having it emptied twice they still have 2 whole bedrooms to go. Why the fuck save newspapers? Or empty coffee cans?
Spoiler Spoilered for size, surprisingly SFW To quote Patrice O'Neal: "I bet her pussy tastes like hope."
When my dad and aunt cleaned out my grandparents' house in Queens (where they had a townhouse, but still not a lot of space) in I think 2005, they found old stock from my great-grandparents candy store/soda fountain that expired in the '50s. Old people just be keeping stuff yo.
Cleaning out my grandmother's house, we filled the dumpster 5 times. She kept every magazine she had ever bought for 30 years. I found a shoe box overflowing with Charlie's Angels trading cards that were water damaged and covered in mold. My uncle found a bag of weed from the 70s in the bottom of a drawer. She also had a crawlspace in her attic filled with so many newspapers, it took us 8 hours to clean it out. Old people just save everything.
My grandma's husband (step-grandpa sounds weird) had about two dozen Playboys from the 80s stashed away in the closet. We also found KY and condoms. They got married to each other when they were both in their 80s. Gross.
I have a prized Playboy that I bought new in 2001. I was in the music business, and Belinda Carslile was in town, and we ended up at a local private "music business" party. I did the only thing that made sense... I asked her to sign the cover of her playboy spread, that I had brought with me. She did, gladly, and then gave me a lingering kiss. I was gobsmacked, and she walked away laughing. I had a hard-on for the rest of the night, and abused myself stupid when I got home.
I saw a documentary about porn starts on Netflix, I believe she was one of them. She actually had a pretty lousy stretch after porn, including losing her second husband in a car crash while she was 8 months pregnant. If I recall correctly, that's when the drinking got out of hand according to her. Nonetheless, driving around with a child in your car blitzed is really really shitty.