The Vintage Reader

Carol suggested a couple of weeks ago that I do a list of things I'm glad I bought as a companion to the post about things I wish I had bought. I'm working on that; I want to add pictures to that one, which takes me approximately FOREVER. In the meantime, here's something I just bought recently that I'm really, really glad I bought: the Saitek A-250.

I had read a very positive review of this thing--maybe on CNet, I don't remember, but it was some source I trust--or I probably would have vetoed its purchase. Mr. VR and I aren't impulse buyers, but we've become much more decisive shoppers now that we can't necessarily spend a lot of time in each store or come back whenever we feel like it to buy something. So when this showed up at Circuit City on last-chance clearance for $61, we couldn't resist, and I'm glad we didn't.

With this weird little bug-eyed piece of plastic, we can stream Internet radio to any room in the house. It sets up its own wireless connection and plays whatever's currently playing on iTunes or Windows Media Player (it can also use MusicMatch and some of the open source media players, I think). You can navigate iTunes with the buttons on the machine, and since I have iTunes set up with my Live365 stations all in a row, it's just like pressing the preset buttons on a radio.

It's true that it goes with NOTHING in our home, but yard sale season is upon us, and perhaps this will be the year that I find a non-functioning hi-fi with a great cabinet and retrofit it for the A-250. However, one of the things I like the most about this unit is its portability. That means I can have soft music in the nursery (although we usually just listen to NPR, except at bedtime), oldies in the sewing room, music of the early 80s (no, really! I was in the mood for music from 9th grade, and Easy Rock is in the CD changer that seems to have gone missing from my car. So I did a search on Live365 for "early 80s" and found a station that ONLY plays music from 1980-1982! Right now it's playing the theme from "Hill Street Blues.") when I'm cleaning house, and classic country whenever I feel like it, and not just when I'm visiting Tulsa. And of course, Radio Dismuke anyplace, any time.

I love, love, love Internet radio.

So today I sat down with Vintage Baby to try to calm him down and feed him. Usually for the 2:00 feeding (which is usually around 1:30; to keep everything easy when we talk to the endocrinologists, the hematologists, the feeding clinic, and the surgeons, we refer to it as the 2:00 feeding) we watch Deep Space Nine on Spike, but today SciFi was running an Incredible Hulk marathon. In a neat little coincidence, the episode that was on today starred Gul Dukat from DS9, Marc Alaimo. And there was only one shot in which I might have even guessed who he was, despite the fact that he was playing a crooked prison guard--basically the 70s-prison-camp version of Gul Dukat.

Just hearing the theme for The Incredible Hulk sent me back in time. Nearly every Friday night in 7th grade I had a ritual: Hulk, The Dukes of Hazzard, and the 9-to-11 session at Skate World with my friend Valerie (arriving fashionably late by leaving while the credits were still rolling on the Dukes). Friday nights that we didn't go skating, it was Hulk, Dukes, facial.

We were both in love with Bill Bixby. After school, I watched reruns of My Favorite Martian and sometimes The Courtship of Eddie's Father (Valerie probably didn't because she actually did things like homework and practicing the violin). We even watched his magic show.

But really, I think what I loved wasn't Bill Bixby (although I still have a certain fondness for My Favorite Martian)--it was the David Banner character. I loved the idea of this guy who wandered from place to place, never settling down, never being able to let his guard down, pursued by a relentless reporter (ooh! scary!), burdened with this terrible secret identity that he couldn't control, haunted by the memory of his late wife.

Sure, the episode I saw today was really cheesy. The prison camp looked like the prop guys had staged a raid on the Hogan's Heroes set and stolen bits and pieces of Stalag 13. Somehow David Banner doesn't get mad enough to Hulk out when Gul Dukat/Captain Holt perpetrates all kinds of offenses against not only him, but also a bunch of other wrongly accused prisoners, but when David himself provokes an unlikely-looking rattlesnake into biting him--something he should have been able to predict before, oh, I don't know, POKING IT WITH A STICK--he goes all green and tosses the poor snake--which was only doing what snakes do, after all--a mile or so into the air. But the music and the Ted Cassidy voiceover are still... well... incredible.

[For the record, my favorite Cardassian is actually Gul Damar, not Gul Dukat]

Angry Chicken has found some wonderful old printable paper dolls.

[NOTE: If you click through to the Printables web site, you'll need to disable JavaScript to do things like, oh, say, add the site to del.icio.us with the Firefox extension or blog it with Performancing--a couple of things that you'd think would be desirable actions by web site visitors--because in a rather pointless effort to keep people from saving images from the site, Printables has disabled right-click. See, it's pointless because all you have to do to get around it is turn off JavaScript in your browser while you're visiting the site. I understand not wanting other people to steal your images, but the right-click disable trick--besides being soooo 1997--just isn't effective, and it keeps people from doing useful, desirable things like easily sharing your site. And since they made it difficult for me, I'm not going to make is easy for them by linking to them here.]

But do go visit angry chicken and look at some of her neat things. Right now I'm fascinated by Tie One On, her monthly challenge and gallery of reader-submitted aprons.

I'm a big apron fan myself. There's hardly anything as useful as an apron: it keeps your clothes clean, a good one has plenty of pockets to put stuff in, and a really good one--say, a nice chiffon hostess apron with plenty of ruffles--makes you look dainty and delightful. I can't resist buying apron patterns every time JoAnn or Hancock's has 99-cent patterns, so I have a lot of apron patterns and a stash of 1930s reproduction fabric (every time I spot some on a clearance table I buy all that's left on the bolt, after the Great Classic Cottons Sellout of 2003, when I passed up these green kittens and they had sold out--in every color--at every store in town when I went back for them). Maybe I'll make one out of the blue birdies I scored for $2 a yard last week!

After all, since I'm a full-time homemaker now, I really need a new apron.

Carol from Davenport (the site, not the perennially flooded city in Iowa) wrote to let me know that she's going to post 10 things she wishes she had bought too, and you know what that means:

It's a MEME!

I'd like to invite anyone who stops by to join in and post the 10 things you wish you'd bought on your blog. If you leave a note in the comments of this post or the original one, I'll add a link to your list in a future post.

And here are two more things I wish I had bought:

1. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward's Nash Metropolitan, $12K, a few years ago. Actually, I heard from a friend who is in the Nash club that the car was for sale; I don't know if I would have actually had a shot at it, even if I had had $12000 to spend on a Met. I couldn't find a picture of it online, but it was a yellow and white convertible, which is my favorite Met combination.


2. Red rhinestone-bedecked Kit-Cat clock in original box, Tulsa Flea Market, 1996 or so, $40.

Also, it occurs to me to wonder, after looking at the list of all the houses I wish we'd bought, how it is that I live in a 1920s stone-and-clapboard American Foursquare instead of a brick cape or cottage... and perhaps I should keep that in mind next time we go househunting.

I still wish I had bought, but didn't:

1. Frankoma "cat mark" vase, antique mall in Noble, Oklahoma, 1991. Didn't buy it because it was $22 that I thought would be better spent on groceries. Would probably be worth a lot more than that now on eBay, but I'm not sure I'd sell it if I had it. The "cat mark" (a pacing puma, incised on the bottom of the vase) was used in the mid-30s and is pretty difficult to find. And very, very neat-looking.


2. Silver "Saturn" alto saxophone with a Bobby Dukoff mouthpiece, in a short-lived antique mall that might have actually been a market for fences, Norman, Oklahoma, 1993, $150. I've never seen another Saturn sax, although I think there's a "Jupiter" tenor, so maybe it's made by the same company. I don't know why I still wish I had bought this; I had about $72 in my checking account and another $180 in savings at the time, so I would say that not buying it was probably a really good idea. I haven't played ANY saxophone since college, and then I played bari. So I'm not quite sure why this one has been stuck in my brain for so long.


3. MacTV, Best Buy, 1992, about $2000. It was black. With a TV tuner and a video capture card. And here's the reason I didn't buy it: I thought CDs were too expensive as storage media to ever catch on. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Silly Vintage Reader! So instead of the RAREST MACINTOSH EVER MADE I have a fully operational, but common as dirt, Performa in the attic.


4. Brick 1930s cottage, Shepherd neighborhood, Oklahoma City, 1995, $54K. Actually, this one needed so much work that I'm not all that sorry we didn't buy it, but the living room had rounded corners. With custom light fixtures in them. And hand-painted tiles all around the fireplace. I would love to have lived there.


5. 1930s English bar with lighted back and lots of inlaid wood, Elektra Deco, Oklahoma City, circa 1995, $165. And yes, that was a good price for it even in 1995. It was in perfect condition. You opened it up and the lights came on and were reflected in the beveled mirrors that were on every surface. The perfect showplace for all of my antique barware--which I was collecting before it was cool, btw.


6. AMC Marlin, car dealership on 39th St. (AKA Route 66) in Oklahoma City, 1996, $6000. I had $6000 to spend on a car, and I went down to 39th Street, where the used dealers that sold cars with more than 10 years or 100K miles on them peddled (or in some cases, pedaled) their wares. I bought a '91 Honda Accord with 130K miles on it instead of the Marlin, which was a beautiful blue-green and still had most of its original badging. Didn't buy it because I was too afraid of asking stupid questions about the care of classic cars--although come on, how many people, let alone how many women under 30, would have recognized the Marlin from the street and pulled in to look at it? How stupid could I have possibly looked?


7. Absolutely immaculate white Rambler American, same car dealership in OKC, a few rows behind the Marlin, $5000. It even had the Flash-o-Matic pushbutton transmission!! I still can't believe I let both of these cars get away. For some reason I was convinced that a stupid ACCORD was a better buy. Note that the C-column is still straight up and down, instead of angled like in the later Ramblers; the reason I think this is cool is that the angled C-column is what made the AMC Gremlin and Pacer so instantly recognizable, and that particular design feature came all the way up from Nash and Rambler. Pretty cool, huh?


8. Singer 301 sewing machine with cabinet and attachments, black, with perfect paint and decals, garage sale, Kenmore, New York, 2000, $50. The 301 is very popular with quilters because it's portable and uses the same attachments as a Featherweight. I've got a 301 that I bought at a thrift store (the same day I found the cat mark vase, as a matter of fact) and it's a work horse, let me tell you. The 301 is possibly the finest sewing machine Singer ever made, and I didn't buy that one because I didn't think it would fit in my Volkswagen and I didn't want to spend the $50. So instead, I've spent the last six years kicking myself and searching for a slant-needle zigzag attachment (which I finally scored a few weeks ago on eBay).


9. Brick 1940s Cape Cod house, Amherst, New York, 2000, $114K. Huge 1940s kitchen. Basement rec room. In-law suite TO DIE FOR. Walking distance to work for Mr. VR and to bus line for me. Didn't buy it because the first person we asked told us, without even running the numbers, that he didn't think we'd qualify for the mortgage. Six months later, we bought a house for $10K more, without even bringing my salary into the equation.


10. Brick 1940s Cape Cod house, Kenmore, New York, 2000, $110K. No kidding: had not been TOUCHED since the 1950s, but had been kept in great condition. There was a beauty salon AND a rec room in the basement. They were open to the possibility of selling us all the 1950s furniture with the house. Yes, including the Danish twin bedroom set in the turquoise-and-green attic bedroom and the vinyl-and-Formica dinette set. We didn't buy it because it was on a fairly busy street and we feared for our outdoor cats. Which I suppose is not a bad reason.

I'm afraid I've offended one of my regular readers--possibly my ONLY regular reader--by trying too hard to be snarky and funny, when really, that's not my thing. Dorothy Parker I ain't, and it wouldn't be the first time I put my foot in it. In 1981 I lost a pen pal I got through Starlog magazine that way after only a few letters. (I just Googled him and found that he's either a soccer coach, a game designer, or the dean of a community college in the next county over from me. Or maybe none of the above. Just going by the whole "put-a-pen-pal-ad-in-Starlog-in-9th-grade" thing, though, I'd say game designer is a good bet.)

Anyway, I'm sorry if I was out of line--I didn't mean to be, really. I'm just a little socially inept, even in the virtual world.

Aha! I had wondered why my local Izod outlet, while having lovely tennis gear for the septuagenarian set, does not carry those ubiquitous knit shirts from my high school days in the 80s. Thanks to Bill Walsh, now I know.

I miss it. All of the furniture in my office came from campus surplus. You could go over there and pick out as much streamline steel as would fit in your office--tables, desks, map stands, file cabinets, you name it. Some of the desks had typewriter trays that collapsed into the front of the desk. They all had Formica tops.

Someday, they will sell all that stuff at state auction, and when they do, I will be ready. On that you can rely.