Tag: spejunking

Photos

Junk Shop Finds

A New Batch of Junk Shop Photos

April 26, 2009 | Sunday

Just an update to let everyone know I've been digging through more boxes of discarded old snapshots and have uploaded a whole new batch of oddball images over at Junk Shop Photos.

New ones are published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so be sure to keep checking back or sign up for the RSS feed. Enjoy!

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A Valentine's in Austin

March 10, 2009 | Tuesday
See video

Sure, it may be March already, but why should the spirit of Valentine's Day be over? After all, we eat Thanksgiving turkey well into December, leave our Halloween jack-o-lanterns out till they look like potatoes and leave our Christmas lights up all year round, so why not enjoy V-Day just a little bit longer?

OK, so I'm just making excuses for taking so long to post my Valentine's road-trip video. But, hey, it was tough work compressing so much weekend into just seven minutes and 47 seconds: my valentine Bethany and I spent the holiday exploring such oddities as the Cathedral of Junk, Smut Putt Heaven, Greater Austin Garbage Arts, a memorial to Stevie Ray Vaughan and an abandoned airport control tower.

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Junk Shop Photos

January 26, 2009 | Monday

Whenever I discover a good junk shop, my final act, after exploring every other dusty crevice for oddball antiques and rare tiki finds, is to locate the inevitable box full of other people's old photographs. I'll then spend an hour or two rustling through fragile, curled bits of paper, picking out the most unusual and enigmatic shots from the lives of people I've never met.

Until now, I've simply added all my photographic finds to a collection accumulating in my closet. Starting today, however, that collection will reside at Junk Shop Photos, a new photographic blog featuring all the unusual snapshots I've liberated from dust-covered obscurity.

Check them out, rate them and, by all means, add you own captions!

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Found Gadgets: Clicky Button Fun

August 18, 2008 | Monday

God, I love buttons. Buttons, switches, knobs and flashy lights. They don't even have to do anything. Just depress, click, turn and flash. I'm actually a bit of a philistine when it comes to all these new touch-screens and LCD displays. Well OK, I love those too, but there is something intrinsically satisfying about flicking a nice, aluminum toggle and hearing a metallic snap that tapping a bit of plastic can never bring.

As such, I've recently decided to start looking out for examples of such technology — gadgets from an era when clicking and flicking were just the way things got done. I don't care much what purpose said gadgets originally served, as long as they have manual interfaces and look cool.

My quest officially commenced two weekends ago. On a trip out to Graham, Texas, to visit a couple of friends who manage a wonderful, old-fashioned drive-in movie theater, I spotted a gigantic snowman looking very much like the one voiced by Burl Ives in those old claymation films. He was standing amid a bunch of dusty old junk in front of a quiet shop with a sign that read, "THIS IS NOT A MUSEUM. Everything in here is for sale!" ... Continued