Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (61 page)

“Television is the bland leading the bland.”

—
Murray Schumach

“Television is the literature of the illiterate, the culture of the lowbrow, the wealth of the poor, the privilege of the underprivileged, the exclusive club of the excluded masses.”

—
Lee Loevinger

“One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”

—
Kurt Vonnegut

BRI member Viola Rose is our resident yard sale expert. She has them once a year or so, and she always makes a ton of money. So we asked her to share her secrets with us. (And then she bargained on the price.)

A
WORD TO THE WISE
Putting on your own yard sale is fun and easy, and the money that rolls in adds up surprisingly—and delightfully—fast. It’s amazing how much dough you can rake in for your unwanted doo-dads, what-nots, and junk. Making your sale sail smoothly is all in the prep work. Here’s the lowdown:

1. The Round-up.
First, gather up everything you want to sell. Scour your house, yard, and garage, and then ask your friends or anyone else who might willing to donate their junk to your cause. Have everything ready a day ahead of time; it’s best to have it all displayed at the beginning of the sale instead of adding stuff later in the day or weekend.

2. Location.
Weather permitting, an outside sale that’s visible from the road will
always
attract more shoppers, but a backyard or indoor sale can do just fine if you mark it with big, outrageous signs.

3. Setup.
Give yourself at least two hours to get your sale ready before starting time. Prepare the night before if possible because people always (repeat:
always
) come early. Even if you write “no early birds” in your newspaper ad, they will still come. So it’s much less frustrating (and more exciting) if you’re ready to go early and can just sit back and rake in the cash. Keep in mind that in the first three hours of the sale, you’ll get 75 percent of your customers.

To display your items, tables are better than tarps or blankets on the ground. But use whatever you’ve got. If you don’t have enough tables, then make sure your stuff is well spread out on the ground and arranged nicely. Don’t put items in boxes; most people don’t like to dig through boxes or piles and will just pass it by thinking it’s junk. Also, a “big spread” with objects in view will make your yard sale look large and enticing from the road.

Now, here’s the ultimate yard sale question: To Price or Not to Price? Answer: It’s a waste of time to go around putting teensy little price stickers on every single thing. Price items over $5.00 and then have different priced tables or areas that say $2.00, 50 cents, etc. You can also make up a price in the moment when someone asks how much something is—it’s fun to do, and you can keep making up a new price until someone buys it.

4. Advertising.
There are two crucial parts to advertising your sale. If you’re going to put all this effort into actually having a yard sale, you want it to be worth your time, so always use both.

• Place an ad in the local paper. It is definitely worth the cost. Your ad should run the day before your sale. Obsessive, gung-ho yard salers (like Uncle John) get the paper and actually plan out a route to make sure they hit all the sales. Be sure to include the address, date, time, and a few enticing items, but leave out your phone number. Don’t use the words “huge,” “mega” or “gigantic” unless it actually
is
, as this makes people feel swindled when they see it isn’t. Here’s another tip: Try to coerce your neighbors or friends to have a sale at the same time. Then you can advertise “multi-family sale” and share the ad cost. The friendly newspaper classifieds telephone operator will help you make sure your ad looks good and includes all the key ingredients. You might also want to put up a sign at your neighborhood supermarket or advertise on a free online posting site, but you don’t need to spend money on any advertising other than in your local newspaper—that’s the key.

• The other part of advertising is
signage
. If they can’t find you, they will not come…or they’ll give up if the signs leading to your sale are unclear or confusing. You can get in trouble for posting signs on telephone poles and street signs—it’s actually against the law in most places. One sure-fire method: Make signs out of big cardboard boxes. Put heavy rocks inside the boxes and then tape them closed. Stand the boxes up and write your yard sale info on both sides of them. Then place them at pertinent street corners leading to your sale. Also put one that says SALE HERE on top of a parked car right outside of your sale. Your signs should state the date, time, street address of your sale, and of course, the ever-important arrow pointing the way. Do not busy up the signs with extra info—it makes it hard for drivers to read them. Use simple big, bold, readable letters; this is not the place to be artsy. If you
really want to embellish, get some helium balloons and attach them to the signs. That’ll get people’s attention—no one can resist balloons.

Other options: Ask a neighbor at the corner if you can put a sign in their yard. Or recruit your (or someone else’s) 10-year-old to dress in a banana costume and stand at the corner, waving a big yard sale sign. This is also effective for drawing in crowds.

5. Be Prepared.

•
Get change. This is essential. Go to a bank and get $30 in five-dollar bills and $20 in ones.

• Have a good supply of paper or plastic bags, and newspaper for wrapping glass items.

• Find an apron, hip sack, or over-the-shoulder purse with several pockets you can use for making change and keeping the fast-flying funds organized.

• Make food in advance—there may not be time to make anything to eat once your sale starts.

6. Sale Day.
Depending on how much prep you did, you may just need to get up on time and then go put up the street signs that are already in your car. Or maybe you’ll be up at 5:30 a.m., scurrying around in the dark. Either way, now it’s time to have some fun.

• Bring out a CD player (be sure to put “Not for Sale” on it) and crank up the tunes. (For some reason, disco is always a big hit.)

• Invite the kids next door to put up a lemonade stand, or sell veggies from their garden. And any money they make they’ll probably spend at your sale.

• Invite anyone and everyone to your sale. Once the neighbors realize you’re having a sale, they might ask if they can bring over a few things and join in. The more, the merrier; that way you can cover each other for bathroom breaks and kitchen runs. Plus, you’ll all buy each other’s stuff.

• Make it a potluck, or throw in a bake sale.

• Give something away to every tenth customer as a booby prize. If folks are having fun, they will stay and find more treasures they can’t live without and your day will fly by.

At the end of the day, count up your cash and BE AMAZED!

The next time you find yourself rolling a pair of dice, know that you’re tapping into something primordial—keeping alive an ancient tradition that began long before recorded history
.

D
EM BONES
Archaeologists can’t pinpoint the first humans who threw dice, but they do know this: Unlike many customs that started in one place and then spread, dice-throwing appeared independently all across the populated world. The oldest known dice—dating back at least 8,000 years—consisted of found objects such as fruit pits, pebbles, and seashells. But the direct precursors of modern dice were bones: the ankle bones of hoofed animals, such as sheep and oxen. These bones—later called
astragali
by the Greeks—were chosen because they’re roughly cube-shaped, with two rounded sides that couldn’t be landed on, and four flat ones that could. Which side would be facing up after a toss, or a series of tosses, was as much of a gamble to our ancestors as it is to us today.

The first dice throwers weren’t gamers, though—they were religious shamans who used astragali (as well as sticks, rocks, and even animal entrails) for
divination
, the practice of telling the future by interpreting signs from the gods. How did these early dice make their way from the shaman to the layman? According to David Schwartz in
Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling
:

The line between divination and gambling is blurred. One hunter, for example, might say to another, “If the bones land short side up, we will search for game to the south; if not, we look north,” thus using the astragali to plumb the future. But after the hunt, the hunters might cast bones to determine who would go home with the most desirable cuts.

And with that, gambling—and dice gaming—was born, leading to the next big step in dice evolution. Around 7,000 years ago, ancient Mesopotamians carved down the rounded sides of the astragali to make them even more cube-like. Now they could land
on one of
six
sides, allowing the outcome to become more complex. As their technology advanced, materials such as ivory, wood, and whalebone were used to make dice. It is believed that the shamans were the first ones to put marks on the sides of the dice, but it didn’t take long for them to roll into the rest of society. Dice first appeared in board games in Ur, a city in southern Mesopotamia. Now referred to as the “Royal Game of Ur,” this early version of backgammon (circa 3000 B.C.) used four-sided, pyramidal dice.

However, the most common dice, then and now, are six-sided cubic
hexahedrons
with little dots, or
pips
, to denote their values. The pip pattern still in use today—one opposite six, two opposite five, and four opposite three—first appeared in Mesopotamia circa 1300 B.C., centuries
before
the introduction of Arabic numerals.

In the first millennium B.C., civilizations thrived in Greece, India, and China—and they all threw dice. In Rome, it was common for gamblers to call out the goddess Fortuna’s name while rolling a 20-sided die during a game of chance. But they had to do it quietly—dice games were illegal in Rome (except during the winter-solstice festival of Saturnalia). Not that that stopped anybody from playing it: One surviving fresco depicts two quarreling dicers being thrown out of a public house by the proprietor.

• When General Julius Caesar led his army across the Rubicon River to attack Rome in 49 B.C.—which set in motion his rise to power—he knew that there was no turning back, proclaiming, “
Alea iacta est
.” Translation: “The die is cast.”

• Later Roman leaders were also dice aficionados, including Mark Antony, Caligula (he was notorious for cheating), Claudius, Nero, and Commodus, who built special dicing rooms in his palace.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, many of civilization’s advancements and inventions fell out of use. Not dice, though—their use continued through the Middle Ages, being one of the few leisure activities affordable to peasants. In the rest of the world, dice played an important role among the tribes and indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas, for both recreation and divination.
And in 12th-century China, a variation of a dice game led to the introduction of dominoes, which are basically flattened-out dice.

But it was in Medieval Europe that the popularity of dice games soared, starting in the 1100s with a game called Hazard that was played by both aristocrats and commoners. “They dance and play at dice both day and night,” wrote Chaucer in
The Canterbury Tales
. These games were so popular that over the ensuing centuries dice guilds and schools formed all over western Europe. That didn’t stop the Catholic Church from attempting to ban all gambling games, though. Over the next few hundred years, dozens of popes, bishops, and priests instituted bans against dicing games. And just like in Ancient Rome, the bans didn’t stop people from playing them.

It was inevitable, then, that dice travelled aboard the ships emigrating to the New World (the religious Pilgrims on the
Mayflower
were none too fond of the crewmen’s gambling games). In colonial America, the game of Hazard was introduced by the French in New Orleans, who called it
crapaud
, meaning “toad.” The game became popular with slaves, who shortened the name to craps, which is still the most popular gambling dice game in the United States. And in the early 20th century, board games like Monopoly became popular, guaranteeing that nearly every American home would have at least one set of dice.

Where there is gaming, there is cheating. While ancient civilizations may have believed the gods were responsible for the outcome of the roll, many unscrupulous players felt the need to give the gods a little help. Loaded dice—as well as dice with the corners shaved off—were found in the ruins of Pompeii. When wooden dice were common, enterprising gamblers would grow small trees around pebbles; then they’d carve the dice with the weight inside, leaving no visible marks.