Fun Moments at a the Local Flea Market, hee, heee

[renomarvinm]

We had a booth at a local flea market yesterday, and I was sitting there, bored silly because the sales were down.  A young couple came by with a nine year old boy, and the boy picked up a single cowboy spur that I had for sale.  There was only one spur - it had no mate.  So the kid asked me why there was only one spur.  And I answered him:

"Son," I said, "This is a truly sad and tragic tale of the heroic old west!  The cowboy that once owned this spur was walking around one day on a ranch, when his left leg fell into a very deep gopher hole, and he was trapped there and couldn't move!  He was there for three whole days with the prairie dogs gnawing on his leg.  When they finally rescued him, they had to cut it off, and so, forever after, he only needed one spur.  It's the one you're holding.  He was all right, of course, except that whenever he rode a horse, it would always turn to the right....."

OK, I could have said that the owner had lost the other spur, but THAT was no fun!   The kid had a look of either shock or incredibe awe on his face -  I couldn't tell.  His parents were giggling.  I'm guessing that  next week, they'll take him to a shrink, and mom will say "Honestly, I don't know what's wrong with him.  We took him to the local swap meet, and now he's all twitchy.....

[al**bear]

We call Flea markets, Car boot sales, nowadays, even when indoors

[renomarvinm]

Hi al*bear!  That works for me!!   Car Boot Sale it is!!!!  And I should love to give my own car the boot as well.   When we moved to Oregon a few years ago, the local department of motor vehicles (a truly psychotic lot if ever I've seen one) gave us our new Oregon license plates, which were 998 FLU.    So great, now my automoble has the bloody flu!  And I tell you, it's been coughing ever since!!!

[cee-dee]

So where does that leave "Swap-Meet" then?

[5129frederick]

Back in 2008, I paid the princely sum of 10p for a virtually unread copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Third Archipelago.  Man, it was really heavy: impossible to read.  Anyway, I took it along to a boot sale along with a load of other things.  My wife tutted.

"You're mad, you'll never get rid of it!"  Bless him, the man chose to "Go West". three days previously, and was in the news.  By chance, up walks a communist, complete with a bushy beard, whose eyes nearly pop out of his head, leafing through it.

"Solzhenitsyn!  How much?"

Scarsely believing my luck, I suggested £4.00.  He looked disappointed

"Hold on,"  I said, lowering my voice, "normally it would be £4.00 but to you, comrade, I can let you have it for £3.00.  We then spent the next fifteen minutes having a profound conversation about the works of that great man, while my wife took over.

"You're in the wrong job!"  She laughed later.

"I don't think so.  I've just made three THOUSAND percent profit on one item!"   Long live communism!    

[al**bear]

Does anyone remember the BBC doing news stories 'laughing' at Russians selling tat & old stuff out of the boots of their cars in car parks

[renomarvinm]

Decades ago, while we lived in Las Vegas, Nevada, we were out looking at yard sales, and came across a sale with tables of USSR Soviet stuff!  It was mostly clothing, badges, insignia, and patches.  The seller told us that he worked at the Nuclear Test Site where they detonated the nukes.  Many people in Las Vegas worked there.  He had bought this stuff from the Russians.

He told us that the Soviets had brought two live weapons over to be detonated at the site, and that our government was taking two of ours to the USSR to do the same thing.  This was all highly publicized (definitely not secret) and part of the famous nuclear test ban treaty.  The idea was to calibrate their instruments by detonating a device of a known yield.  

But while they were in the USA, the Russians sold stuff!  They had literally loaded suitcases full of medals, pins, etc. in order to acquire either something of real value, or cold hard US cash.  They would have sold their underware if someone had asked.

Hi cee-dee ---  the swap meets still exist.  They're just over here.  Over there you have car boot sales.  That term troubles me.  I keep thinking I'm giving my car the boot....  But I'll get over it.

Hi 5219frederick - That's funny!   My hat is off to you!!  Solzhenitsyn - oh, my!

[bankhaunter]

I love the story of Russians some years ago that were changing Zorki and Fed cameras into fake Leicas with highly imaginitive engravings, Nazi, Luftwaffe etc. and in finishes that Leica hadn't even dreamed of in their wildest imaginations.

It must have been hard for them not to laugh everytime they sold one although they now sell for quite high sums.

[renomarvinm]

Dang it!  I should have told the kid that forever after, the cowboy could only ride Shetland Ponies because he couldn't reach a normal saddle with one leg.  

Fed Cameras - I've always wanted a Fed 1 or a Fed 2 camera.  Fed stood for Feliz Dezershensky (spelling?) who was the head of the Checkists or NKVD and a terrifying individual.  The early cameras had a copy of his signature on it!    History, I have discovered, is often very, very weird.

[cee-dee]

Marvin, what would folks on your side of the pond have to say about this?:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-26025939

[renomarvinm]

Hi Cee-dee!  The Spruce Goose?  We saw it years ago in Long Beach, and last year when we moved up here to Oregon we saw it again at the famous Evergreen Museum.  It is big - that's for sure.!  I've stood under the thing, and have stood in the cockpit (along with a lot of other people at the same time).   What would our people say about it?  Not much, unfortunately, except the airplane lovers (of which I am one) and we agree that it could fly.  

Except that, when you stand near it, there are those subtle feelings of wrongness  - it feels somehow too big, too underpowered, and too something ---, what it is exactly, I can't exactly pin down - it just doesn't seem right.  And one wonders how would it do in severe gusts, or a microburst.   What if it struck an object in the harbor while taking off?   As an interesting aside here for a moment, Howard Hughes was severely injured while flying his almost unknown XF-11 photo reconnaisance prototype, which looked like an over weight P-38 on steroids.  If you look closely at a picture of the XF-ll, the engine pods look very similar to those on the Goose, except that the Goose has a lot more of them - eight engines, I think.

All in all, and having pondered this question for a bit, I think the Spruce Goose is the American eqivalent of the Barabazon made by your people.  In short, an oversized dead end in aviation.  Both planes were bold and courageous, but they were the wrong answer to the problems they were trying to solve.

But don't get me started here......

[cee-dee]

I think the joint problems of the Spruce Goose and the Brabazon were that they were before their time and underpowered.

I wondered if the aircraft buffs (we don't say "airplane" here) would be interested in the work done with that simulator because the opinion for years has been that the Spruce Goose would never fly as intended.

Sure, severe gusts or a microburst wouldn't be any fun but microbursts have taken down better planes than either of those two. Do microbursts occur over water? We don't have large seaplanes "landing" these days so I guess there's been nothing recorded along those lines?

[renomarvinm]

Hi Cee-dee!  You Brits have built some wonderful sea planes over the years - Sanders Roe comes to mind.  As for microbursts,   I have no background information, but I'm going to guess that microbursts could occur over water.  And flying through a typhoon would be no fun either.

I think the simulator would be loads of fun!  It might answer some interesting questions!  I would love to try it!  Slow, ponderous?

The problem with those huge old aircraft was that they had big wings with relatively low wing loading.   That tended to increase drag, which burned more fuel.  Today's aircraft have rather high wing loading, and lots of lift devices, flaps, etc.  There are arguments in both directions about the merits of this.  I think Boeing's B-47 bomber went too far, but that's just an opinion.  They were hard to land.

As for me, I always thought the DeHaviland Comet was a beautiful bird, though rarely seen in our skies.  I only ever saw one in the air once.   I was attending an aviation school near Los Angeles International Airport in the 1960's at the time.  One day, we heard a horrible, terrible screaching noise coming from an aircraft flying overhead.  We ran outside just in time to see a DeHavilland Comet 4 being flown by Aeronaves de Mexico.  Nothing wrong with it, but those early engines were loud!! Shrill high pitched noise!   The Boeing 727 was just as bad!  (And that's another thing that bothers me - Look Boeing, this is silly!  The 727 had THREE engines, and the 737 had TWO engines - couldn't they have changed the model  numbers around?  I'm being silly here.

The United States Post Office absolutey forbids people shipping lithium batteries around - tiny little camera batteries.  And the Boeing 787 "Dreamliner" is loaded with them - huge lithium batteries!  Perhaps they know what they're doing, but I'm not reassured.

I love aviation!  Give me enough time and I'll grouse about the first Bleriot that flew the English Channel.   Hee, hee..

[cee-dee]

They might have been wonderful but flying boats are impractical really because of the weather causing problems at times. OK when the wind's not too bad but the waves can get hairy in an unprotected harbour area?

The Comet suffered bad press in it's day because they originally used "square" windows which provoked metal fatigue causing some high profile crashes. By the time they'd sorted it and changed to round windows, the 707 had stolen the market.

The Comet lived on until recently in the guise of the Nimrod.

Yes, modern aircraft have all sorts of devices to increase lift at T/O and landing which are retracted for cruising to reduce drag. Amazing machines these days?

The batteries are something else, they need to do far more to find out why some of them give problems. As for camera batteries, I think many thousands have flown without problem. I've never heard of any problems in the air, have you?

[renomarvinm]

 Hi cee-dee!  Camera batteries in aircraft, no, I haven't heard about anything bad happening to them.  The US Post Office is currently driving me crazy right now!  They have instigated a new rule:  When you go to the counter with a group of packages, the clerk has to ask you "Is this package liquid, fragile, perishable, and does it contain anything potentially hazardous, including lithium batteries or perfume...."   They must do this for each and every package individually, and then you have to punch "No" onto a key pad once, for each and every package.  Boy, that'll speed the lines up.....

A few years ago, I told the lady at the counter that my package was entirely legal, however, it DID contain something potentially hazardous.   In fact, as I told her, the contents of this package have already caused untold suffering, misery and physical distress to literally hundreds of thousands of people, and that it was very dangerous - very dangerous, but legal.

She had a worried look on her face.  "This package contains a World War Two US Army Cook Book," I told her. 

My only negative thoughts about the Comet were that it wasn't really all that adaptable to stretching the design for more passenger load.  And having the engines burried in the wing roots didn't help, although it was very beautiful.  You don't hear much about the VC-10, and yet they had a great career, I think.  I think the Russians copied it (sort of) with the IL-62.  

When I worked for the police in Las Vegas, some thirty years ago, the FBI came out and gave classes, as they often did, and one of their guys was an investigator for plane crashes.  He told us that they had received a memo from their management stating that they should NOT fly on board Soviet airliners - way, way too dangerous, it said.  Shortly thereafter, there was an aircraft crash in Poland, or some place, and they had to fly out to it.  Then the US State Department (Lord help us all) issued their own memo stating, that becuse of international relations, the FBI HAD TO FLY on Soviet aircraft and nothing else, if it was available.

Why, oh why, does my head hurt?

[bankhaunter]

 You don't hear much about the VC-10,

When it was going to take it's maiden flight at Weybridge everyone in the area was warned there migh be an unusual amount of noise but in the event it was nothing much.

http://www.britishpathe.com/video/super-vc-10-maiden-flight

[renomarvinm]

Pretty airplane, that one!  Very stylish, I've always thought.  Now the Russian equivalent, the IL-62 - I've heard that you literally take your life in your hands when you board that thing...