Trawling Through The Thrift Stores With Joseph Finn

Hello, Thursday!  Little later than usual but hey, techie problems.  But you don't care, you just want to see what thrift finds I want to highlight this week.  So let's soldier on!

I'm an an atheist, pretty solid on it...but damn do I like a Christmas or Hanukkah decoration.  (Have I found any gelt this year to eat?  No, and I'm annoyed.)  But do I love this Christmas mug for my coffee?  Absolutely.  It's German-made, has a great heft to it and holds a few espressos.  What more could I ask?

____________________

I am of the age where I encountered Elmore Leonard through his neo-noir work like with Get Shorty, so it was much later that I realized how many westerns he had written.  Seriously, if you have never seen the original 3:10 To Yuma, get on this.  What an amazing movie that even in 1957 was deconstructing the Western genre.  Then there is The Tall T, one of the best of the Randolph Scott westerns.  So finding this was a major joy, so now I can read the Leonard westerns.  


 

Seriously, how great is that theme song by Frankie Laine?  

Last year, I watched all of the Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher movies, and The Tall T was a huge standout, a fantastic western of death and revenge.  Also, watching them explained a joke from Blazing Saddles.

____________________

So this one is a bit of "we got those two years ago!"  To hell with it, I love these plates and haven't shown them off.   So many naughty elves.

____________________

I'm a sucker for an excellent pint glass and I'm also a sucker for a bike.  Here in the Chicago area, bik season is essentially over for a few months unless you're one of the hardcore winter bikers, but this pint glass reminds me that it's coming again.  I look at it and I immediately think of the late, great Douglas Rain.

____________________

Finally this week, a weird 1986 edition that I found that reminds me of how the people who wrote the US Constitution weren't gods, or even the average American, but a bunch of white dudes doing the best they could with their own prejudices.  In some cases, they were brilliant.  In some, they failed (the 2nd Amendment is a grammatical and political MESS, and even more so how they excluded like 75% of Americans).  But this is so far a really interesting look at how hard they were trying.  (The arguments over property qualifications for voting, which end up not being a thing at all for federal elections, are kind of fascinating.)  I think we sometimes forget, those of us who are US citizens, how mutable or system is, for better or for worse, and the arguments in this are a great example.