oinkkxolfv: Nov 6, 2007

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Appraisal, Valuation and Inspired Guesswork or the Rise of TV Antique Shows and the Collecting Bug

The Price is Right.

Once upon a time you knew precisely where you stood. You were, metaphorically speaking, peering over the shoulder of the venerable Arthur Negus, denizen of that epitome of middle class culture, The Antiques Roadshow. Now, however, youre turning this way and that, amidst a plethora of antiques discovery programmes, as you seek to satisfy your voyeuristic craving and perhaps learn a little something as you go.

Life used to be very simple in the antique firmament on TV. Its first airing was Going for a Song in 1965, so ancient a time that England had yet to win the World Cup and I was still in short trousers, in a programme memorably described as a

Pooterish pottery riddleathon, chaired in its glory days by Max Robertson with Arthur Negus stapled to one side for a bit of gossip. Max would then proffer a vaguely familiar looking antique loom at teams of experts and a clueless public, demanding both date and asking price. Points were awarded for the closest bid.

That wont ring too many bells with todays protagonists, by all accounts. This was an age in which most educated people were expected to have a routine general knowledge of art, antiques and collecting because it suggested some hint of engagement and appreciation of the world around them. Of course, the clueless public were a convenient prop to the cardsharps around them but the scenario hasnt deviated too far over the last forty years. Having said that, presenters could always be relied upon in yesteryear to wear a jacket and tie and a sensible haircut this was the BBC after all so one wasnt confronted, as is our current misfortune, by a bunch of D listers swathed in Hawaiian tee shirts and an all over tan.

Yet the extraordinary thing is that these programmes and, believe me, there are plenty of them have such enduring appeal. The antiques themselves obviously play their part but the real key is the human dimension and, without exception, it is a feature of all the latter day productions that the viewing public are encouraged to make contact and tell their stories. However, whereas The Antiques Roadshow was deliberately more formal in its approach, more recent entrants are positively gushing. The three best examples of this new genre are Flog It, Bargain Hunt and Cash in the Attic, each of which, like The Antiques Roadshow, have spawned some very ugly American hatchlings. More of that anon.

Back here, we have David Dickinson, full of grandiloquent gestures and gravelly tones, hosting Bargain Hunt. Dickinson, notwithstanding that he loves the sound of his own voice, has certainly done the rounds and knows his stuff unlike the motley crew from Cash in the Attic who look like cast offs from a lifestyle channel. Bargain Hunt is not designed to be too successful but just give a taste of what could be achieved with a good eye and a judicious approach though, as ever, it is most watchable when confronted by the unexpected. One contestant so successfully bought and sold a copper log box that Dickinson, momentarily speechless, had to dispatch a crew member to an ATM to cough up enough cash when he ran short. Priceless!

2006 Ford Focus: Never Better!

Back in 2000, the year that the Ford Focus was introduced, Ford Motor Company was hoping that the model would be well received and exceed the sales totals of its previous small car, the Escort. Unfortunately, the new Focus was plagued by various minor quality problems and the car soon became the joke of the industry. Step forward to 2006, and the current Focus is vastly improved on earlier models. Lets explore what is helping the Focus become a proven challenger in the crowded small vehicle sector:

1. Aggressive Price. Yes, the number of cars available under US$15,000 continues to drop each year. However, the Focus takes it one step further as it retails just below $14,000. Comparably equipped Chevys, Kias and Hyundais sell for nearly the same amount, so the consumer has a good choice when buying the Ford Focus.

2. Sufficient Power. The 2.0L I4 engine paired to a five speed manual transmission gives the car enough power to get it moving and keep it moving at a nice clip on the freeway. Competing models offer smaller engines as small as 1.6L as found in the Kia Rio.

3. Spacious Interior. Up to five people can be carried in the Focus and the interior room is large for a car in its segment. Most small cars are intolerable for big rear seating passengers, but not so for the Focus. Compare the Focus seating to the Cobalt and the Focus is the clear winner.

4. An Assortment of Body Styles. Most cars built today come in only one or two body styles, however the Focus features four: a three-door ZX3 hatchback, a five-door ZX5 hatchback, a ZX4 sedan and the ZXW wagon. It is the ZX3 that retails for as low as US$13,990.

5. Respectable Fuel Economy. With EPA figures of 26 city / 34 highway, the Focus achieves a fuel mileage level that few small cars can boast of.

Competition in the small car group remains tight with the Toyota Corolla, Chevrolet Cobalt, Hyundai Elantra, and Saturn ION all competitively priced. The Corolla remains the favorite amongst industry specialists, but the Focus has certainly shed its low quality status with the current model. Check out special financing deals through Ford Credit to save even more money on your Focus.

In conclusion, the Focus has improved with age, but it is in need of updating now that it is in its seventh model year. With Ford fortunes sagging, the company cannot afford additional dips in sales.

Fantasy Baseball and that Sweet Electronic Candy

The 1992 Summer Olympics were the first to feature NBA players, and the squad from that year was known as the Dream Team. Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird are just three of the legends that played on that historic and unbeatable team. Although Fantasy Baseball, Football, or even Basketball did not begin in 1992, these thrilling and interactive pastimes do carry on the tradition of that squad. By trying to assemble the best line-up of players from the game in any given year, and seeing how they would match up, fans can rearrange the leagues as they see fit and pretend to be owner, coach, and player all at once. Now, this may sound like a recipe for insanity, but its actually a lot of fun - and it gives you some control over the game, even if only in your head. Fantasy Baseball is one of the more popular games for people to play, and there are even draft kits to help players navigate through the draft and auction process.

A draft kit? Is assembly required?

Ouch! Now, back in the olden days, before the Internet became the venue of choice for fantasy baseball enthusiasts, you had to keep track of your teams and players with a newspaper. Plus, you had to keep in contact with the other members of your league to keep tabs on who was winning the pool. Now, the Web keeps players from around the world connected, and brings a level of intensity to Fantasy Baseball and other such leagues that was not there before. To navigate through the maze of statistics and player data, the serious fantasy fanatic needs a Fantasy Baseball starter kit to best position himself for the upcoming season.

So..I get a Fantasy Baseball Draft Kit to use on the Internet? Do I actually get anything?

This is the Information Age, my friend, and that is precisely what you are getting with your Fantasy Baseball Draft Kit. Every kit is filled with electronic candy to fuel your dreams and propel your team to success. Analysts who live the dream of getting paid to study, breathe, and live baseball devote hours of hard work and energy to bring you:

- strategy to use during the draft and auction

- a list of potential sleepers who are just waiting to take their game to a new level in the next season

- predictions about who is going to falter and fade in the coming year

- the best rookies to bring to your team

- cheat sheets filled with the must-know facts to be successful on draft

day.

Some Fantasy Baseball draft kit options include a mock draft for newbies to the game, and a host of other useful tips, to position you to bring home a championship - and hopefully some of that play money that everyone poured into a pool at the beginning of the season!

Hey look, if you like baseball, you are going to love Fantasy Baseball. Players and coaches change teams more often than lovers on some silly soap opera, so it is hard to be loyal to traditional teams. But, with Fantasy Baseball, you can build your own Dream Team, and bring an exciting new element to a classic game. If you are new to the process, or just want an edge for the next season, a Fantasy Baseball draft kit is just what you need.

Archiving Our Families

We do not remember days. We remember moments. Casare Pavese

A couple of weeks ago, a dear reader emailed me for help on documenting her familys life and history. For several generations, we knew this as stuffing pictures in shoe boxes. If we were super-organized, we used photo albums. Today, we call this scrapbooking.

The fastest growing hobby in our countrywith more than 25 million Americans, or 1 in every four households, participatingit didnt even exist as an industry eighteen years ago, when I first contemplated how I would document and organize our own family photosor memories as they are now called. Less than ten years old as an industry, scrapbooking holds more than 52, 000 sites on the Internet; over 4,000 retail stores support this multi-billion dollar industry and even traditional stores such as office supply giants, pharmacies, groceries, and gift shops all carry a sampling of scrapbooking products. The maze isto me anywaycompletely overwhelming. To even partially navigate its many avenues both exhausts and bewilders me.

When you calculate the time and expense required to not only take quality photos (a high quality 35 mm camera, digital camera, and video camera are all practically required paraphernalia), it boggles ones mind to add in the additional cost of documenting your pix once developed. The average scrapper spends $50 per month on her hobby, or roughly $600 a year in supplies. Scrapbook papers generally cost anywhere from 10 cents a piece to upwards of 50 cents a piece (while browsing online sites I came across some fabulous specialty papers for my military enthusiast son, so I purchased papers with a military theme; they cost 45 cents a pop plus shipping) Add to that the cost of stickers, brads, and trinketsall totally adorable in their own riteand your personal scrapbooking arsenal just escalated another couple hundred degrees.

And what about ink pads and rubber stamps? Gotta have those, too. At anywhere from a couple dollars to ten to twelve dollars for a decent stampas well as several dollars per each ink pad (gotta have all those wonderful colors, you know!)youre by now in this stuff too deep to escape fiscally unscathed.

And we havent even gotten to embossing yet.

Oh, geez.

So whats a rocket mom to do? Practically speaking, at what point do you jump onto the scrapbooking craze while maintaining all of the other parenting strategies deemed so important in raising brilliant kids? I mean: can you really instill a musical heritage into your kids, immerse them into sports and exercise, and shape their character and help them to become more spiritually matureand scrapbook all at the same time? Are there really enough hours in the day to get in a good workout at the gym, get dinner on the tableand scrapbook? Can you add community service to your calendar as well as add colorful borders to your family photos? And is it really possible to hammer in that decorative brad (which seriously requires a good whack on the kitchen cutting board) and keep the baby down for a nap all at the same time?!?

OK. Enough already. Heres my advice on getting your arms around the whole scrapbooking/creative memories/documenting-your-family-history thing:

Find an organizational scheme that you think you can stick with over the next dozen years or so. Trust me: motherhood, while certainly easier in some ways over the years, does not get any less demanding. You just shift areas in which you spend your time. Time, money, and energy are your three most valuable resources todayand they will continue to be until the day you go up. So find a system to which you believe you can reasonably commit. If the whole idea of scrapbooking each and every page of your baby journals wears you out (as it would me), then switch to a system that is less creatively taxing. My personal choice: photo albums from Exposures. (www.exposures.com) Theyve been in business long enough that I trust theyll be there as long as we all still need their stuff. The last thing you need to worry about while selecting a system is the possibility of changing it mid-stream. I researched their product line until I was nauseous. I wound up using over-sized, attractive three-ring binders (offered in three different colors) that work perfectly for our family. I buy a few at a time so I know Ill never run out. I also buy their archival scrapbook paper, and use old-fashioned photo corners for every picture. You might want to look for albums that are offered in a variety of colors, in case youd like to color-code your family. (see http://www.selfhelpcenters.com/family.asp#1 for my recent article Color-Coding Your World)

Decide if you want to be a documenter or a scrapper. Theres a world of difference here. Documenters organize their pictures once retrieved from the store (pharmacy, Costco, etc.) and then put them into albums. Sureyou can add titles, captions, dates, and quick journal entries. You can even use color! But you dont spend an inordinate amount of time on each page. Scrappers, on the other hand, make each page of photos a veritable work of art. They use artsy background papers; crop each photo; add beautiful borders; make great use of sticker art, brads, and trinkets; and punch designs to coordinate with the page theme. You should decide which path youre likely to travel down as soon as possible. Like it or not, you need to get your systema system, any systemdown before you take the plunge, as each system requires a hefty financial commitment. (The only inexpensive alternative is to buy cheap albums from a discount store (with those old-fashioned non-archival magnetic pages) and throw in your photos. You wouldnt do that, Im sure)

Start collecting art and craft supplies. Regardless of which system you use, your childrens happy childhoods require that you spend time doing art. Make regular art days part of your familys weekly schedule. Those rubber stamps and ink pads that youre picking up on sale now will become a wonderful collection down the road. Lets face it: you need colored markers, pencils, pens, paints and papers anyway. They all add to your childrens artistic development. So perhaps documenting or scrapping your familys memories will be part of your regular art day for the next few years. OKso youre not going to take up sculpting for awhileor oil painting, rug hooking, or knitting. Thats alright. Just stay on track, keep picking up supplies, continue to browse art supply stores, and purchase fun stuff as you see fit. If you find yourself drawn to fancy papers and expensive stickersgo ahead and splurge. Youre going to need some of this stuff anyway, so try to make thoughtful and purposeful buying decisions rather than compulsive ones!

Try to stay on top of things. But dont beat yourself up if you fall behind. I always tried to use holidays and summers to catch up with my albums, but with major moves in four of the past six summers, those plans went to pieces. So I am terribly behind in organizing and documenting my familys life. OK. So life goes on. I just commit that when I have time Ill renew my photo journey. Its a process. Itll never be finishedso I dont let myself get all whacky over it. If possible, though, you should come up with some system: perhaps you are on the ball enough that each and every time you pick up pix from the developer, you immediately put them into albums. Youd get an extra cherry in your sundae at my house. Perhaps after you pick up your pix you throw them all into a large drawer, with the hopes of organizing them one day. (Thats been me these last few years.) OK. So thats a system, too. Just be sure that one day isnt too far into the future, promise?!?

Figure out where this all fits into your familys direction. You may be committed to too many thingsprofessionally and personally. This may simply have too small a role in your familys purpose. The commitment of energy alone to the whole scrapping thing might wear you out, leaving you feeling totally unglued and unable to do the other things in which you are truly passionate about! Thats OK!!!!! Maybe this just isnt your time!!! Stop beating yourself up. You may prefer to use your fingers teaching your child to finger-paint, your lap rocking your newborn, and your energy driving your kids to music lessons. You might rather use your discretionary funds supporting a missionary rather than spending it on pretty background papers for family photos. I cant tell you whats right for you. I can only help do the heavy lifting. So Ive done the research, evaluated some of the options, and am presenting them to you for your ultimate decision. I can help to equip youand encourage youto propel you to excellence. But in the end, this is your archiving. Above all, dont stress about this. Spend time your kids first and foremostand these decisions will fall easily into place in due time.

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oinkkxolfv

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Appraisal, Valuation and Inspired Guesswork or the Rise of TV Antique Shows and the Collecting Bug

2006 Ford Focus: Never Better!

Fantasy Baseball and that Sweet Electronic Candy

Archiving Our Families

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