You all know I have a weakness for obsolete technology, for the dinosaurs of the pre-digital age, and it often takes all the self-discipline I can muster to resist buying stuff that tends not to work and serves no purpose (unless dust magnet counts as a purpose). The cute Smith-Corona Coronet, above, was fairly easy to pass up given the $75 price tag (hello? what?). And I've been pretty good about limiting myself to just one vintage typewriter, my super-rad Smith Corona Super G, unless you count that powder blue Smith-Corona Galaxie 12 in my garage (anyone want it? They are a bitch to ship).
I did not buy this Atari 400 "home computer" because it was part of a box lot that was going for a few hundred dollars, and I wasn't really sure what the market value would be. I also knew the value didn't matter, that it would end up in the garage because Lindsay, who became visibly emotional when I showed him this pic, would never let me resell it.
Ah, the Kodak Carousel. As I've observed in the past, there really does seem to be one tucked away in the closet of every midcentury tract house in town. I can't even begin to fathom what kind of camera I would need to produce slides, and if it's possible to still make slides, or would I just have to buy someone's old vacation slides and view those? I do love a good slide show. Maybe I will break down and buy one next time...
I didn't buy any of these cameras. I see so many cameras and we have so many cameras, I can't see adding to our collection (the two Polaroid Land cameras, the two Lomos, the Lumix, the Nikon, the Olympus, the various underwater cameras belonging to the children, the two videocameras...I'm sure I'm leaving some out) when all I ever use is my iPhone.
I didn't buy this portable Zenith Solid-State turntable and radio—oh, wait a minute, yes, I did! I cannot resist a $5 turntable, no matter how filthy it is, and the radio works like a dream! Radio may be a fogey medium, but it's not obsolete (yet).
Summer means not being able to go to estate sales with the clockwork regularity I'm accustomed to during the school year, but it also means catching up on some crucial sorting/organizing/downsizing projects, particularly with regard to my piles of books. I just rediscovered this 1976 gem, Better Homes and Gardens Treasures from Throwaways, and I'm so sorry for you all that I've only got just the one copy because look at this typewriter! You know you want the book that provides the instructions for a "Typewriter Note Holder":
The secretarial pool is no place for a standout like [this] typewriter. Instead, this old machine has joined the executive ranks and now functions as the most unique message center a family ever had. If you think painting a typewriter is a lot of work for just a message center, think of it as creating a piece of pop art—and sign it!
Well, now that is waaay too much work for me, but then I never actually craft any crafts (unless they involve walnuts or pinecones and googly eyes)—I just like to gawk at books like these. I do think this typewriter message center is magnificent, just perfect for one of those pared-down "landing strips" you see touted in the shelter mags and on design blogs. Really, I love everything about that photo, including the prop styling (who is Liz? Who is Bill? Who is Chester? Why does that mug have a "5" on it?").
But as an erstwhile fancy magazine editor, I find this craft project more poignant than loopy. Who even reads magazines now let alone wallpapers their bathroom with clippings from Vogue? This actually reminds me of what my bedroom walls looked like back in the 80s, and, come to think of it, the cork walls I've had in various former offices. Though the book instructs crafters to "preserve your 'cover' job with a clear protective finish," which would make sense in a bathroom (think what the moisture would do to this collage), they also say you can "leave the magazine pages as they are for quick patch-ups—adding new pages to fit your fancy and to maintain the fanciful wallscape." Madness.
Paging through the book now, I'm not sure why I chose to feature this TV Tube Chess Set instead of various other crazy crafts (I might have to continue this post in the near future with more pics). I guess it was just the idea of someone actually having access to TV tubes, let alone transforming them into a chess set. But according to the editors, it was no big thang: "A check at any TV and radio repair shop will net you all the old tubes you want." If you say so!
And finally, we have The Victrola Teen Bar, because who doesn't recognize the genius of gutting your heirloom Victrola? You won't be able to spin Granddad's 78s anymore, but you can use it to serve popcorn and Cokes to the wholesome teens in your life:
An old Victrola will never replace stereo or TV as entertainment, but as a teen-age party center it's still "the cat's pajamas." Or, in latter day linguistics, it's really cool!
I have not abandoned this blog as I have abandoned certain others; I've merely been sucked into the whirling eddy that is summer vacation. I'm not sure who planned out this summer, but whoever did certainly didn't give much careful consideration to my needs—for instance, my need to go to estate sales every Friday, to buy things to keep, to buy things to sell, to buy things for seemingly inexplicable reasons to be examined here, on this neglected blog. To research the value of things bought, to photograph them endlessly, to list them on etsy. Or to clean and then carefully arrange them in my teeny antiques mall stall, where they can be ignored by the kind of foot traffic that doesn't know from MCM to midcentury-atomic-eames-era-retro-danish mod-60s-70s-kitsch-whatever. Right now this summer is panning out to be just like the school year except that the kids aren't in school. I entertain them all day and then shuttle them to various one-hour-long extracurriculars, idle in parking lots and waiting rooms with other idling parents. What nonsense! Who's in charge here?
But today I can thank Carl Hiassen for deciding to write compelling novels for the young; right now, having played tennis, gone swimming and consumed tubs of Orange Leaf, my girls are working their way through his audiobooks, some of which are at least eight CDs long. Hurray! So I have been uploading a ton of photos for the blog as well as listing like a mofo at my etsy shoppe. Expect a flurry of postings and listings this week. As for the next two, I'm off to the homeland, where the flag flies forever half-mast for James Gandolfini, so it remains to be seen if I'll be able to keep it up (if nothing else my right thumb should be very busy instagramming).
In the meantime, today I have Mad Men on the mind, having actually watched the season finale last night with the rest of the devotees of Sunday-nite prestige programming (previously it was shunted to Monday viewing in favor of Game of Thrones... now True Blood has been relegated to Monday nites).
I found the episode quite satisfactory, and look forward to the final season (isn't it supposed to be final—it should be), mostly so I can continue to enjoy the great work the production and costume designers are doing, as that midcentury style evolves deeper into the ’70s. Do we think Banana Republic is going to embrace the Raggedy Ann polyester plaid pantsuit look and come out with another Mad Men line of chic office-friendly attire for youngish ladies? Har.
Coincidentally, I was seeing a lot of these Kodak slide Carousels on the estate-sale circuit these past few months. It's impossible to look at one without thinking of that tour-de-force Don Draper pitch scene that closed the first season, right?
Still, that's not quite enough to get me to buy one, as much as I love obsolete technology, just... no. I've got limits, though sometimes I forget what they are.
I took typing in high school. My teacher was a mincing version of Walter White crossed with Ned Flanders from The Simpsons. Maybe it was the glasses and the mustache. And this might be wishful thinking on my part, but I'm reasonably certain he wore plaid pants, and a yellow button-down with a green pullover sweater vest every single day. That's probably not true, but that's how I remember him. I also remember the way he would march up and down the classroom shouting out the home keys—"F! F! F! G! G! G!"—we were to strike without looking down at our hands. The sound of 20 typewriters typing at once; it was kind of awesome, like thunder. The faint tap-tap of touch-typing on a computer could never be so operatic.
I peaked at 70 words per minute, which is pretty damn good but when you consider that I was in a typing class every day, five days a week, for my entire junior year, maybe I should've been even better. Still, it was good enough to get me all kinds of offers at the major book-publishing houses after I graduated college. My fancy and very expensive college degree was what got my foot in the door at Human Resources, but it was my typing, a skill acquired at my small NJ public high school, that they were really interested in. I don't know what the interview process is like now, but back then, entry-level editorial assistant positions started at $14K and they made you take a typing test and sometimes a spelling test and that's all they needed to know about you because the truth was the job was secretarial though I guess you could move up after doing your time in the glorified typing pool. I imagine it being very much like the great Rona Jaffe novel The Best of Everything, and the even greater movie version starring Joan Crawford (see trailer below, though sadly the focus is on sex, not typing). Except when I was taking typing tests at Random House and HarperCollins, it was the 1990s, not the 1950s. So maybe it wasn't like that at all.
I never found out because I was lucky enough to answer a classified ad for a job that paid $17K and required no typing whatsoever, as an actual editorial assistant at a nursing magazine. I got my own office and shared a secretary with my bosses and she typed all the business letters on a typewriter while I clackety-clacked on an early word processor that wouldn't have looked out of place on the bridge of the Enterprise.
Anyway, I was reminded of the glamorous secretaries/junior editors in The Best of Everything when I found this supercute Smith-Corona Ten-Day Touch-Typing Course, which comes with a book and a set of 45s. I love the blissed-out expression on the model's face. She loves to learn about typing! As much as I venerate typewriters, I try to resist buying them—they are bulky dust-catchers and when it comes down to it, our hands have become soft and lazy over years of typing on neat little wireless keyboards so they're just not that fun to use. And yes, there's a great market for reselling typewriters to the hipster luddites of faraway Brooklyn, but the shipping is prohibitive. So I've limited myself to my precious Super G (which I wrote about here) and maybe there are one or two vintage typewriters languishing in the garage, waiting to be tidied up for resale.
The question is, do I save the typing course for my kids, or sell it? Do they still teach typing in public schools? I mean, it is still a pretty handy skill to have. They can't go through life two-finger texting everything. Can they?
I didn't buy these adorable Valiant Walkie-Talkies because I assumed they wouldn't work. Walkie-Talkies never work, no matter how much we wish they would.
I didn't buy this turntable because I have more turntables than I know what to do with.
I didn't buy this stack of laserdiscs because—thankfully—that was one clunky, short-lived media format we never got on board with.
I see a lot of tiny TVs and I always have to suppress the urge to buy them. For one thing, I've got at least one tiny TV tucked away in the guest-room closet right now, possibly more. For another, they never work (see walkie-talkies). But I do romanticize them; as a kid, I had a tiny grey Panasonic in my bedroom. I remember rising before dawn to watch the sham wedding of Charles and Diana on it (even on a screen smaller than your hand that dress was larger than life). I also took my tiny TV to college freshman year, and with the aid of the rabbit ears, was able to tune into Letterman every night. But nostalgia is no justification for purchasing a tiny, probably nonfunctioning TV, is it? No, it's not.
This Animal House poster is super-rad and I have no idea why I didn't buy it. Even if it'd ended up hanging in the garage, it would've been a worthy investment at $15. Poo.
I did not buy any of these 8-tracks; in fact, I never buy 8-tracks. Much as I love me some obsolete technology, certain media-delivery systems are too clunky and cumbersome and ugly to be revived (don't get all cocky, VHS and CDs, cuz I'm looking at you, too).
Do you ever wonder what will happen to all your precious refrigerator magnets when you die? Assuming your kids don't want them—and I'm going to assume that—they will be organized into Zip-locs and offered for cheap at your estate sale. No one will buy them and they will end up in a landfill. Consider this next time you're tempted to buy a souvenir magnet at some truck stop on your next road trip (says the person who recently discovered a Zip-loc full of grimy refrigerator magnets from her refrigerator in Brooklyn, which she hasn't seen in eight years).
Despite his being totally on the money with the Hister/Hitler prediction, I did not buy this copy of The Prophecies of Nostradamus... Wait a minute, I totally did! The eyes of Nostradamus compelled me to do so!
I did not buy this amateur painting, despite my soft spot for amateur art, because it's obviously too creepy, even for me. Also, this is just a detail of the work—the canvas covered an entire wall. That's a big commitment.
At this sale, an entire room was given over to Coke collectibles. I was there on day 2 so most of the bottles containing the original formula of Coke (not Coke Classic) and the short-lived New Coke were sold out, not that I would've bought any since my Coke-drinking is confined to the occasional Diet Coke on an airplane when the sad airplane coffee has left me with caffeine-withdrawal symptoms. Coke collectibles always depress me—it seems like the sort of collecting that's forced on someone rather than voluntarily pursued. Take, for example, that family member (i.e., your dad) who is impossible to buy gifts for. One day someone's like, Hey, Dad drinks Coke! Let's get him a deluxe limited edition Coca-Cola Uno set and a nine-foot-tall stuffed Coca-Cola-quaffing Polar bear and then there's no turning back. How many collections start out this way, I wonder.
I did not buy this rad Magnavox turntable/radio/record cabinet because Lindsay bought a similar Telefunken stereo cabinet eight years ago—a Telefunken that doesn't actually work but makes a fine surface area for displaying tchotchkes.
I did not buy this vintage Sperti Sunlamp because it seemed silly and a waste of money but definitely worth a quick snap of the iPhone. Maybe I should've bought this vintage Sperti Sunlamp because it turns out there's a market for old sunlamps, especially when they come with the original goggles, like this one did. Here in San Antonio, there's a Tanfastic (or similarly, awesomely named) tanning salon in every strip mall, so it's hard for me to imagine what one does with an old-school face-fryer.
I did not buy this Northern Untangler Comb, despite the ecstatic expression of the Carol Alt-meets-Rita Hayworth model on the box, because my hair isn't long enough to tangle, and my tangly-tressed daughter swears by the Remington Tangle Tamer.
I did not buy this 1960s Oster Scientific Junior Massage Instrument because I need at least a Senior Massage Instrument to achieve "that feeling of well being."
This week's (or maybe this month's—not sure how often I'll do this) random collection of links for fellow thrifters, bookworms and all-round clutter magnets:
I've definitely got a weakness for vintage holiday ornaments and I've been known to buy them at the height of summer without feeling like I have a problem. But these balls were like $5 apiece! I mean, seriously—they didn't even have the original Shiny-Brite boxes.
I used to shop at Kinney shoes, but I don't remember MudKats. Couldn't help but glom onto the cute box, though. Sadly, these were a size too small, which is probably a good thing since there's little call for duck boots in South Texas.
I didn't buy these Christmas ties because I don't know anyone in the history of the universe who needs Christmas ties.
I'm a little fuzzy on the purpose of a Lafayette four-track solid-state stereo 820, but it looked like something Lindsay might buy and then put in the garage till the end of time so I decided not to text him and ask if he wanted it. Do you think he wanted it?
I did not buy this Igor painting because I'm not going to start collecting campy sex kitten art of the 1960s. This was one of a pair, however, and it seemed reasonably priced on the first day of this estate sale ($30), so I went back on the second day when it had dropped by 30% but I still didn't buy it because it was very grimy (its mate was water-damanged). Was it original? I spent a lot of time standing in front of it, conspicuously googling Igor Pantuhoff on my iPhone, but couldn't make up my mind. I resolved to return the next day, when the prices would be cut in half, and buy it if it was still there. I never went back. Probably for the best.
Despite my affection for obsolete technology and especially old-fangled writing machines, I didn't buy either of these typewriters. I didn't even consider it for a moment. I just thought they looked so picturesque, relics strewn about in the grass, like a kind of typewriter graveyard—the sort of image that's just begging to be instagrammed. What about replacing garden gnomes with old typewriters? In the hands of the right design blogger, I'm sure this is an idea that could be sold in certain hipster enclaves in Brooklyn.
I am not a car person, by any stretch of the imagination. I got my license when I was 20 (three and a half years after I was old enough) and that was only because my plans to be a cocktail waitress in Atlantic City had imploded and I was forced to spend the summer at home. What else could I do in that one-horse-town, but work at a record store and learn how to drive?
When summer ended, I went back to NYC and pretty much never drove again—until I moved to Texas and had no choice but to reacquire the suburban life skill and get me some wheels. Lindsay picked the car—a very safe, economical and not-terribly-attractive Subaru Outback—because I didn't really care, as long as there was enough room in the back to carry my junk around. Besides, the only car I'd ever truly admired was quite out of reach: the Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. Come on, you know it—a design icon of the 60s and 70s? Maxwell Smart drove a powder-blue one? Well, someone used to park a red Karmann Ghia outside my local library, which I'd gawk at as I toted my Anne Mcaffrey books home. That's the kind of car I'm going to drive, I thought, and when I drive it, I will wear a leather pilot hat like Amelia Earhart and a long white silk scarf like Isadora Duncan. Never worked out.
So I may not be much of a car person but I am a typewriter person. And this here typewriter is the eye-poppingly lovely result of a 1970 collaboration between Carrozzeria Ghia, the designer of the Karmann Ghia, and Smith Corona. They called it the Super G. I bought it ten years ago at a flea market in Brooklyn for $20. At the time, I felt like a fool—it didn't even have ribbon and who knew if they still made them?—but I couldn't pass it up, this merging of one of my favorite things with the old dream car.
I know a lot of luddite hipsters fetishize typewriters nowadays—see this entertaining article about the "Analog Underground" in New York magazine—which is why my Super G is worth a lot more than I paid for it. But I don't believe I fall into that category. Those youngsters are nostalgic for something they never had. (Isn't there a word for that?) Whereas I had no choice but to use a typewriter.
As a kid, I had an old grey Royal, upon which I authored some truly terrible poetry for the high school literary mag Calliope. When I headed to college, my parents bought me my first electric typewriter—a very bare-bones Brother. I wrote all my papers in longhand on yellow legal pads and then typed them up on the Brother. The summer after freshman year I went to Harvard summer school and took my first creative-writing class, Autobiography (yes, still navel-gazing after all these years!), with the remarkable Bill Corbett. This was 1987. I remember him asking the class how we wrote, if we wrote longhand or on typewriters or on a "word processor." So quaint! Though it seemed pretty state-of-the-art to me at the time since all I had was my trusty typewriter. I seem to recall that he was reluctantly making the transition to word processing and that he was well aware of how it made writing such a different enterprise.
Word processing was just too fast, allowing you to write unreflectively, ten different ways and then obliterate it all in a moment. You know, the way we write now. If you write longhand (especially with a quill!) or even on a typewriter, you're more careful, considered in your choices. You think more about what you write before you write it. Ah well. Too late to turn back the clock. And so word processing begat...blogging, and all the platforms for verbiage that followed. (One might argue that twitter, with its 140-character restriction, signals a return to concise, pointed language, but that argument doesn't really take into account the sheer volume of tweets tweeters tweet.)
I didn't process words until I met Lindsay at the end of my junior year. Lindsay had a Mac SE. Bye-bye, Brother. I wrote all my senior papers on his Mac, and I'm sure they were all twice as long as they needed to be.
Sometimes I think I should try writing on my typewriter again. I have a whole drawer full of ribbons; as is the case with most fetishes, there are ample resources available on the internets. But then I try and it's just...too...hard. My fingers don't work that way anymore. Nor does my brain. So I gave it—excuse me, loaned it—to my kids, who one-finger type on it till the novelty wears off, and it does wear off rather quickly. I'm afraid it's too late for them as well.
I have a real hate-hate relationship with my land line these days, no doubt because I'm the stay-at-home hausfrau who's the target of all the survey calls, political robocalls, credit card bullshit calls, stupid magazine subscription calls and—I'm sorry but I have to say it—annoying calls from charitable organizations (I'm looking at you, Nature Conservancy!). When I hear the phone ring, my hackles go up immediately and I'm sure my friendly greeting reflects that (I channel J. Jonah Jameson from the 1960s Spiderman cartoons, which we're currently rewatching on Netflix—sadly the robocallers are not intimidated). Many before me with far greater understanding of technology have noted that the phone is practically obsolete; only old people have land lines now, and medium-old people like us. Lindsay has some cockamamie reason for maintaining ours—something about the sound quality being better on the land line but since he almost never talks on the phone at home, and when he does it's on his cell, and really he just texts, I don't know why he cares.
Despite how much I hate the phone, I have a deep affection for the quaint accessories that go along with obsolete technologies. Do you remember your first answering machine? Did it not blow your mind? This commercial for a cassette with pre-recorded answering machine messages might just be my favorite commercial of all time. Wow, did we used to think it was funny—the dude was rapping—though we never actually did buy the product. I'm also a sucker for little wooden message-holding tchotchkes like this one, which sits on the kitchen counter next to my ugly cordless phone, collecting dust rather than messages. Who takes messages anymore? Who leaves them? Who has the patience to even listen to a voicemail? What hath God wrought?
Who buys Super-8 reels (is that even the right term?) when they don't have a Super-8? We do! Or more precisely, Lindsay does. He just couldn't do the sensible thing and back away slowly from the laundry basket filled with Super-8s for just 25¢ apiece at our recent "city-wide garage sale." Instead, he reasoned, the kids could watch Heckle and Jeckle unspool through a microscope until we eventually purchase a Super-8 cuz how have we managed so long without one? Come to think of it, why don't we have an 8-track player and what happened to that reel-to-reel we bought at the Best Rummage Sale in NJ so many years ago?
Well, the kids did watch Heckle and Jeckle under a microscope and it was good times for a good ten minutes, at least.
And I was sorry to learn after the fact that Ms. Vintage Kids Books My Kid Loves has a Super-8 and I could have totally squared her son's birthday so much more cheaply than on amazon had I only known!
I bought this proto boom box, a 1970s Panasonic cassette player, several summers ago at a garage sale around the corner from the house I grew up in, because my brother had the exact same one as a kid. (I've often wondered if I was possibly buying back our own tape player—it wouldn't be the first time.) Apart from my AM photo-block radio and our record players (mine: the denim-style Fisher Price; his: some vintage console barely a step up from a Victrola), this was our primary source for tunes. And this is what we listened to on it:
1. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I think maybe my parents gave him this Beatles cassette along with the player for his birthday? I dunno but we played that thing till it broke. Favorite song then: "When I'm 64." Favorite song now: "When I'm 64."
2. A handmade tape that we found in someone's trash. One side had Hank Thompson's Greatest Hits; the other side was a Johnny Cash mix. At the time, I had heard of neither artist; we just thought every song was knee-slapping funny—"Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart"? "The Blackboard of Your Heart"? "Squaws Along the Yukon"? Are you freaking kidding me? We knew nothing from country music and assumed these were parody albums, like Weird Al Yankovic, but not Weird Al because this was in the time before Al. Not sure what the appropriate comparison would be—the Chipmunks? This tape was as funny as the Chipmunks. How hilarious my 7-year-old self would have found it that a great motivating factor in my relocation to Texas was my deep love and appreciation for the towering figures of country music, Mr. Cash and Mr. Thompson foremost among them.
3. Television's Greatest Hits. No, not the series of K-tel-like albums you may be old enough to remember, but a tape we made ourselves by placing this cassette player next to the TV whenever our favorite shows came on and pressing the "play" and "record" buttons simultaneously. There was a solid 90 minutes of music on that tape but I only remember the themes from: Captain Scarlett, Aqua Boy, Ultra Man, George of the Jungle, S*W*A*T and Hawaii 5-0, which was hands-down the best because we taped it at our grandma's house and you could hear her whisper-shouting for us to turn that music down because of the neighbors! the neighbors!
If we listened to any other tapes during those years, they've been washed down the sink of my conscience, as Johnny would put it. I have a ton of cassettes in my garage but unfortunately this player is barely functioning anymore, and to be honest, the sound was never that great. So I'm on the hunt for a good cassette player (not a tape deck, something portable). It's always good to be on the hunt for something.
A few weeks ago I mentioned my purchase of San Antonio's Most Famous Flamenco Dancer's vintage telephone and I know you were dying to see it, so here it is. Tres ’80s chic, no? At least I assume it's ’80s. I can't find another Soundesign phone like it on the internets so it must be very rare and very valuable, not that I have any plans to sell it when it looks so perky sitting atop a pile tech fossils in my garage.
I've thought about using it but have you ever tried to use a restored/refurbished vintage telephone? They are, at best, unreliable and super-inconvenient. I have a beauteous orange Ericofon (midcentury Swedish telephone) on my nightside table, which works, intermittently, but is so damn inconvenient that when the phone rings I find myself sprinting to another room to pick up one of the ugly cordless phones we have scattered throughout the house. I'm not a big phone talker to begin with, so the idea of being tethered to my vintage phone, stranded in one small corner of my bedroom instead of being able to free-range from refrigerator to water cooler to computer to laundry room to patio and back again while on the phone sounds like hell. The only scenario in which I can envision myself contentedly yakking on the phone in bed is when I'm propped up on my pillows, wearing a satin bed jacket and popping bonbons—but that so rarely happens, you know?
So the questions of the day are: Do aesthetically pleasing cordless phones exist? And why do I have a land line anyway?
Lindsay "scored" this Roberts Rally IV proto-Atari game console at a crazy ’70s sale—my friend Burgin, who hit it on the first day, breathlessly, rightly described it as "It's like your ’70s childhood exploded in this one house—you've got to go!" How could we not go?
Lindsay gets a little glazed when surrounded by the totems of his childhood, so he was in heaven, despite the children whining and pulling on his clothes and asking for things. (Where was I? In the room with all the books of course.) Unfortunately, he made a classic estate-sale error: He saw something he liked: a working Atari, with games. He picked it up, examined it, then put it back down, undecided. Never put anything down! If you see something and kinda like it, hold it close till you've made up your mind. Officious estate sale workers might try to pry it from your hands—they'll offer to relieve you of your burden, to write up your ticket—but you just wave them away till you're sure. When Lindsay finally decided to get the Atari, he went back to the room and saw another guy with it tucked under his arm. ARGH.
It's a terrible, empty feeling. Naturally he had to fill that void by buying something else, and the something else—the Roberts Rally IV pong game thingie—is still covered with dust and sitting in the garage. Apparently there's a small problem with the battery pack (there isn't one) but he's confident that he can make it work by crossing some wires, you know, when he gets around to it. And when he gets around to it, the kids will lay down their wii microphones long enough to play the four games built in to the system: hockey, tennis, squash and squash practice. Woo-hoo, squash practice!
