Ready? Let’s get started. Grab a tote bag. You will need: Black light Magnet Tape measure Curious? Then you should take a look at this piece about thrifting tips before you head out to any yard sales this weekend. Why the owners of Twin Thrift Vintage bring a magnet and black light to every yard sale , Megan Knight, WMAR-2 News What I learned from reading this piece is that I am not looking for the same things at yard sales as the owners of Twin Thrift Vintage. No surprise there. Ali and Jordan Virden are professionals. As dealers, they are looking for high quality items to resell. I mostly go to yard sales for fun these days - - without any particular goal in mind. If I spend more than five dollars it’s a big day. When I was teaching I was primarily looking for children’s books and items that could be used in learning activities and dramatic play. Too bad a black light won’t automatically tell you if things like that have been stored in moldy conditions or spent years in rooms f...
For reasons unknown to me, June 8th is Name Your Poison Day. While making the rounds of the usual “did you know about this holiday?” websites I discovered that no one seems to know the actual origin of the day. That’s odd. How do we know it’s really a holiday if no one can document its origins? Perhaps it’s even a hoax. How would we know? The poison du jour is AI, which is making it harder and harder to do online research or to tell truth from fiction. Examples: Facebook is now flooding my feed with accounts and posts from “Howard County” and “Columbia” but from other states entirely. When I search YouTube for current local stories these days, I routinely get substantial amounts of unrelated junk - - even if I put my search term in quotes. My realtor’s newsletter just recommended this house to me. See the problem? What AI has meant in my daily life is less accuracy, more difficulty finding what I’m looking for, and an overall degradation in the quality of information. (See ...