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Saturday, May 12, 2007

Timeless

It's hard to pin down a time period for this tie; the fabric is acetate, which was widely used for ties in the 40s and 50s, but the pattern is more late 60s/early 70s. It is safe to say, however, that it is not recent.

The past weekend was quite eventful: on the first day of the semiannual Friends of the Library Book Sale (with its own dedicated building, no less) I spent a couple happy hours perusing the shelves, and ended up with a stack of modern art books and a few novels, all on the cheap. Then on Sunday I finally got to try out my new cordless electric lawnmower. From studying product reviews on the web, I understand that the biggest problem with most cordless mowers is that they just aren't powerful enough to be practical. One reviewer noted that when he modded his Black and Decker mower from 24 volts to 36, it worked just fine. I took the easier route and found a 36-volt mower on eBay. It's by MPL and it cost about 40% less than the Black and Decker. It does weigh 90 pounds, and the body is made of resin rather than steel, but it's much quieter than a gas mower, it doesn't shake my arms, it cuts my grass, and it holds a charge long enough to mow the whole lawn. Hurray for eBay! I closed out the weekend by taking the kids to Cornell for the outdoor World Percussion Festival, with performances by several student percussion groups: the Percussion Ensemble, the World Drum and Dance Ensemble (with distinguished guest Bernard Woma of Ghana; and the women of the group wore skirts with amazing patterns!), the Steel Band (with their own distinguished guest Liam Teague, of Trinidad via Northern Illinois University), the Boogie Band, and the "Inline" Band (I think), a non-marching subset of the marching band. The high point was when Bernard Woma got the whole crowd up and dancing, his energy was infectious!

This tie is now off to Mississippi, to one of my former eBay customers. He just outbid me on several lots of vintage ties (which reminds me of a story, for another entry), but we worked out a swap for some of the duplicates. Thanks, Blake!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are clearly having way too much fun and must immediately return to Maryland to be miserable.

Unknown said...

Holy cow! Who knew the tie thing would stick back in 1982 when you were wearing those skinny ties with all the new wave pins?!?! :)

It's a crazy roundabout way that I found this blog, but had to say HI!

(Kathryn Poremski)

Jeff Langr said...

Hey Bill,

May 12? That's pretty bad. You can't possibly be running out of ties.

Hey Kathy Poremski,

Saw your post, how's things going?

Jeff L.

Burl Veneer said...

Hi, Kathy! (Or Kathryn.) What a surprise to hear from you! What have you been up to for the last... 15-20 years??? Drop me a line at burlveneer at gmail if you care to.

Hi Jeff; hmm, I see the last entry on your blog is dated April 7... I have one tie that I wore back in May still to put up, but that's the last one I've worn. There's just no point to it when every day is Casual Day. But I'm experimenting with a new blog on Vox.