Category: Oddities

Found this in the garage while clearing out some junk, of which we still have a great accumulation.

My first guess was a fire hydrant wrench, but it’s not big enough for the ones out front. Water valves in a house? Gas valves?

It’s obviously an antique worth zillions of Ebay bux, but is now perched on the main beam in the basement for all to admire…

Maybe somebody will make me an offer.

Update: Gadzooks! It’s still in production!

I keep track of rebates with scanned images of the forms I send in, with file names describing what’s inside. When I deposit a rebate, I move the file to the Deposited folder.

Sometimes I forget to move ’em and sometimes I can’t tell which rebate generated the check.

So a while back, I was cleaning out the cruft and found I never got a check from Circuit City for a rebate I sent many moons earlier. The online site didn’t have any record of the rebate, so I called That Nice Man. After I read him the receipt & rebate numbers from the form, he discovered that there wasn’t any record of the rebate, either. Duh.

He asked if I had a copy of the rebate info I sent in. I said “Yup, that’s what I’m reading from.” He then proceeded to create the missing rebate and told me that the check would be mailed in 7-10 days. No need to send in the copies… he didn’t even mention it.

I guess they figure if you’re the type of person to make a copy in the first place, there’s nothing to be gained by hassling you to send the info one more time.

It’s peculiar that the USPS only loses my mail when I’m sending rebate forms…

So we went on a trip to the Renaissance Faire in Tuxedo, NY this fall for reasons that aren’t germane right now.

Here’s what I found most interesting: the parking lot.

We wound up in the “free” parking lot, a goodly walk from the Main Event, as all the others were full. The lot is in a valley, that being the general terrain around those parts.

The first thing that struck me was that the lot was suspiciously level. Walking toward the path over the hill to the Faire showed that the whole thing was paved with crushed blast-furnace slag and sported many, many concrete pads and foundations that were absolutely flat and flush with the gravel. No grass, no curbs, no drains, no nothing.

Somebody spent a lot of money making a parking lot in the middle of nowhere dead flat and perfectly level? WTF?

On our way out, I spotted the reason: it’s an old antenna test range. See the dish at the far end, aimed right down the bore of the valley? No feed structure and it seems to be covered in graffiti, so it’s out of action.

The overview from above shows the straight dope. The Faire is the tangle of junk inside the bow of the road on the left, the antenna range is the long vertical stripe to the upper right.

Zoom in on the valley and examine the patterns!

I took those pictures from the left side of the valley, roughly in line with the lower X, where the paving widens.

I thought it must have something to do with Bell Labs, but apparently it’s even weirder: Tuxedo Park.

Now, there’s a guy with a basement shop it is to die for!