The Gems of Sharpless: August 20, 2014

Gems returns after a one-week hiatus. (I was in Des Moines last Wednesday with Sweets, enjoying beer and baseball.) This week’s edition is a day late because I have been working on a 2014 Iowa football preview. It ended up being 2,809 words — probably more than the editors ever dreamed of wanting. Needless to say, it will need to be gutted.

On to the gems!

-Ugly, but oh so comfortable.

-I’ll take “Crap” for five hundred, Pat.

-This was an interesting little game. Wind up little Homer and set him loose on the baseball field. I tried it a couple times but Homer did not want to walk past home plate.

-A Welcome Back, Kotter lunchbox and thermos set. Damn.

-Sports Afield magazine. Apparently there were high hopes for the future of fishing back in the day. According to Wikipedia, Sports Afield is “the oldest continuously published outdoor magazine in North America.”

-Oh, the trusty Zip drive. The workhorse of high-capacity floppy disk storage in the nineties. I still have a bunch of them in my desk drawer.

-Tiny Pabst and Squirt salt and pepper shaker bottles. Cute.

-A mug featuring the old ZIP Code mascot.

-A gas powered shaver. I’m not sure how it worked and am not sure I want to know.

-A nice mirror.

-A Star Wars VHS in a rental case.

-A dart version of Asshole? This board brings back a lot of bad memories. Needless to say, I am not a fan of drinking games.

-BMX trophies.

-Get a load of these beauties. They were in the yard along with a number of old Mustangs. The car on the left actually is a Mustang, and the car on the right is a Chevy of some kind (I think it may be the same model as the one featured on the cover of N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton: N.W.A 10th Anniversary Tribute album). Both were rusted hunks of metal that will probably never see the road again. Check out the interior of the Chevy:

Oh, yeah. I’m pretty sure they were sitting somewhere in an abandoned barn or farm yard.