Showing posts with label The Castle5000 Free Box. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Castle5000 Free Box. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

The Wednesday Post


Ask not for whom the Wednesday Post comes, again!
It comes for thee, right?

Another Wednesday Post Giveaway!

So, like I said last week, Mrs.5000 and myself reaped a rich harvest of fine-arts jigsaw puzzles this holiday season.  We have enjoyed putting the first few together, but eventually one wants the dining table back for a while.

This time it's a Monet landscape, with 1000 highly squiggly pieces..



If you like the idea of having a classy artsy puzzle sent to you in the post -- perhaps the Wednesday post! -- but were too polite to say so last time after Morgan indicated his interest, just say so in the comments.  If you are Morgan, and want this one too, just say "I want this one, too."  If you like the idea of getting something free in the mail, but feel that it would be unseemly to say so in a public forum, loosen up and live a little.  If multiple people want it, the winner will be chosen by some sort of random deal.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

The Wednesday Post


Ask not for whom the Wednesday Post comes!
It comes for thee.

A Wednesday Post Giveaway!

Due to a serendipitous confusion in the matter of wish lists, Mrs.5000 and myself emerged from Christmas with no fewer than six fine-arts jigsaw puzzles.  They are pretty cool.  Solving them, you can combine a detailed study of an artist's brush technique with such time-honored tactics such as "sorting out all the green ones" or "looking for one with the doohicky at kind of a funny angle."

 We completed Breugel's Tower of Babel in the first half of January.


A few days later, we took it back apart to make room for a Monet.

Perhaps you would like to be the next person to put it together!  It is 1000 pieces, of which 999 are good as new and one nearly so, having been skillfully relaminated (if I do say so myself) after having been found floating in the cat's water bowl.  We were careful when we took it apart, and 99% sure that all pieces are there.

If you would like to have this puzzle sent to you in the post -- perhaps the Wednesday post! -- just say so in the comments.  If multiple people want it, the winner will be chosen by some sort of random deal.

Monday, July 2, 2012

The Mix Tape Offer


Was once a time, and younger readers will just have to trust me on this, when it made sense to keep a stock of blank cassette tapes on hand.  They were a sort of file-sharing system without the files.  One would use them to... well... you know... make backup copies of copyrighted musical products that one had purchased in another medium.  That sort of thing.

During the five years from 1997 to 2002, however, the use of cassette tapes plunged as they ceased being the legacy format being supplanted by CDs, and CDs became the legacy format being supplanted by aether.  The end of  this period found me with quite a number of blank tapes on hand -- and they have sat there on the shelf ever since, patiently wondering whether they will ever be called up to fulfill their function.

Up to 15 mix tapes, just waiting to happen!
Now, many members will recall the phenomenon of the "Mix Tape."  Aptly named, a Mix Tape was a "tape" on which a "mix" of music had been compiled.  Sometimes these were assembled by an individual  for his or her own benefit, marshaling a selection of music that would suit a certain mood or situation, in the same way that a modern music lover will create a playlist or curate a Pandora station, for instance.  At least as often, though, a Mix Tape would be a carefully considered, laboriously conceived gift from one person to another, an earnest, heartfelt, and generous offering of music that the giver really enjoyed a lot.  The recipient would not generally like the songs nearly so much as the giver, of course, and would be blind to the careful subtleties of their sequencing.  But, they would feel obliged to pretend that the tape was an intensely meaningful artifact, and this traditional form of exchange was well established in the range of passive-aggressive rituals in which most friendships are firmly rooted.

I Think You See Where This Is Going 

Gentle Reader, I have the capacity and the will to make you a Mix Tape.  Naturally, such a tape would be a mere temporary sampler which you would use in deciding whether or not to make purchases -- anything else would be cold-blooded intellectual property theft!  But, attending always with remorseless vigor to that proviso, the sky is more or less the limit.

You could request, for instance:

  • Classical music of a particular era, date, form, instrumentation, nationality, key, or freakin' conductor for that matter -- my classical collection is fairly vast.
  • In particular, I've long thought it would be fun to make a compilation of classical songs, properly speaking -- as in, music in the song form, composed by a recognized composer dude, sung with an orchestra or piano accompaniment.
  • I am, as you may know, gradually exploring the world of jazz.  Making you a jazz Mix Tape could only help me in this endeavor.
  • Naturally I have idiosyncratic but excellent taste in rock and popular music.
  • You could always appeal to my well-developed vanity by pretending to want a compilation of my own musical recordings.
  • You could challenge me to provide you with the most esoteric possible collection of music, stipulating whether or not listenability was an issue.
  • You could suggest a general mood or theme.
  • You could pose me some sort of arbitrary puzzle (eg. "music related to maps", "music in 3/4 time," "music by people named John," etc.)
  • Or whatever.

If you are interested, I encourage you to send me your address through the post at InfiniteArtTournament, gmail.  This protects your privacy, and protects me from embarrassment if no one bites: there may be no comments on this post, but I encourage you to assume that requests are just pouring in via email.

Please allow 6-8 weeks for compilation and delivery, unless a lot of people throw down, in which case 2-6 months, and please don't be silly about the trivial cost of postage for a cassette tape.

Note: Cassette Tapes require a specialized Cassette Tape Player (not included) in order to produce audible music.  To fully benefit from this offer, please check to make sure you still have one lying around somewhere.

What If I Don't Want a Mix Tape?


Then here's a picture that I took yesterday morning of a pale young apple bedewed by late spring rains.  I thought it was pretty.



Monday, August 9, 2010

Acquisition & Divestiture -- with FREE BOX!!!


Acquisition:

I was at an estate sale this weekend and found some medium-good boring postcards. They weren't marked -- estate sale faux pas, in my humble opinion -- but when I ran down the owner he carefully counted them up before announcing they were $2.00 apiece. $2.00 apiece! You know what Michael5000 does when you try to sell him old postcards for $2.00 apiece? HE LAUGHS IN YOUR FACE, that's what! Albeit civilly.

Oddly, the guy let go of this 1941 map, which you could probably squeeze ten or twenty bucks from in the right situation, for a measly dollar!


It's not quite like anything else in my vintage map collection! It's not a road map so much as a page from the old Rand McNally Commercial atlases, folded up inside a booklet along with an exhaustive gazetteer. Just the thing for the travelling businessman who visits a lot of obscure rural communities, in 1941.


For my money ($1.00, that is), the best part is this little blurb for the company's world atlases:


Hey, Pop! "Where are the Azores?" the ad text asks. "Where are Pieping, Suez, Istanbul?" I mean, really? When you think about it? This is heady existential stuff.


Meanwhile, in a nearby Free Box, I found this perfectly unremarkable 2002 map of Seattle, which will be a modest improvement on the 1999 map of Seattle that has been in my truck's glove compartment.


Divestiture

Speaking of Free Boxes, today we're taking this cherished City of Roses tradition online with the first edition of:

The CASTLE5000 FREE BOX

Here are some items that we, the 5000s, are finished with and ready to divest of. Want 'em? As a member of the L&TM5K community, you get first dibs! First come first serve! Postage paid by us where reasonable!
  • An old-school military-style duffel bag, olive drab.
  • The two quilting hoops that no one wanted when I mentioned them here.
  • CD: Lalo, Symphonie espagnole. Anne-Sophie Mutter, soloist. EMI Classics.
  • CD: Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Come On Come On.
  • CD: Camera Obscura, Underachievers Please Try Harder, not exactly a store-bought copy.
  • CD: John Mayer, Room for Squares
  • CD: Russian Folk Songs. The Patriarchal Choir of Moscow. Naxos.
  • CD: U2, All That You Can't Leave Behind.
  • CD: Professor Longhair, Crawfish Fiesta. Caveat Emptor: his hair is actually not especially long.
  • CD: Britten, A Ceremony of Carols, Friday Afternoons, others. New London Children's Choir. Naxos.
  • CD: Elgar, Violin Concerto. Nigel Kennedy, soloist. EMI Classics.
  • Old-style "UO" logo enamel University of Oregon keychain.
  • One of those little compasses you stick on your dashboard, with two ineffectual suction cups.
  • One computer keyboard, still in box.
  • Three (3) irons, all three of which leak water but which work just fine as non-steam irons.
  • Nice poster-sized National Geographic map of the world, folded.
  • The 1999 map of Seattle that has been in my glove compartment hitherto.
  • Book: Peter Hoeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow. Hardback First Edition, excellent condition, not worth much. Caveat Emptor: this is one seriously disappointing book.
  • Book: Octavia Butler, Kindred. Trade Paperback.
  • Last but not least: Great Expectations (by Charles Dickens, duh), unabridged, on 13 cassettes. Awesome reading of an awesome book, and I bet you still have a tape player somewhere around the house, don't ya.
That's all for this time. Don't be shy! Everything must go!