James Lileks’ blog The Bleat mentions Candy Corn flavor Oreos.
The mind reels.
I have not noticed Candy Corn Oreos in Hawaii, perhaps it is a Minnesota thing. But I did note “Fun Football-shape Oreos.”
As my father used to say, it doesn’t take much to amuse some people.
And speaking of curiosities,
More fun than a round Oreo?
what’s with backing into parking spaces? I’d say close to a third of local drivers do this. But why?
For example, a 1963 silver dime that was irradiated at Oak Ridge.
And why, you ask, would anyone irradiate a dime? Is it still radioactive?
According to Oak Ridge Associated Universities, the dimes were a public relations stunt designed to show visitors how neutron activation created valuable radioisotopes that are used in medicine.
Silver was chosen because, in those days, people had silver coins in their pockets, and neutron-irradiated silve-109 changed to radioactive silver-110.
Silver-110 has the convenient property of a short half-life — 22 seconds.
Visitors had their dimes put under a Geiger counter to show that they had, indeed, become radioactive. But by the time the tour was over, the radioactivity had declined to almost undetectable levels.
Amazingly, the silver-110 had also transmuted into another element, cadmium-110.
The lab encased the radiodimes in plastic. They are not particularly rare; about 250,000 were irradiated.
These coins are purely collectors’ items. They are no longer radioactive and have no practical use.
Our dime is priced at $9.99. Since it is 90% silver, its metal content is, at today’s price, worth around $5. The other $5 or so is curiosity value.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320980036292&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT
An irradiated dime
In a previous post, we talked about a Kamaaina Loan customer who needed — and got — cash just overnight.
The only way to do this is to deal with a local pawnbroker.
There are Internet pawnbrokers, but it takes a little while to get a loan with them. If you need cash within hours (or on the weekend), then local is your only option. (We are talking here about people who don’t have money to get out of ATMs and suchlike.)
There is a question whether Internet pawnbroking is legal.
Pawnbroking has always been regulated, and in the early days of the United States, regulation was done by cities. The firs
t pawn regulations were passed in New York City about 200 years ago.
As the country grew, and pawnshops grew along with them, in both extent and numbers, the states took over regulation (although cities can impose additional regulation on top of state rules).
Although pawnshops are subject to some national laws (like anti-moneylaundering laws), the Congress has never specifically passed pawn regulations. Unlike banks, which have a choice of seeking a federal or a state charter, pawnshops are all state-controlled.
Or were, until the rise of Internet pawnbroking. There does not appear to be any way an Internet pawnbroker can be in compliance with state regulations. For example, most states prevent taking a pawn pledge out of their jurisdictions during the mandatory hold period. But the essence of an Internet pawn is that you send your gold to an address somewhere else.
It might be that the pawn does not begin until the item arrives at the Internet pawn office, wherever that is, but this theory has not yet been tested in courts.
Something to think about next time you are planning to place your valuable property temporarily in the hands of a pawnbroker.
Bob McCullough of Pawn Stories says he got enough good footage in 2 days to fill 3 30-minute shows (with 22 or 23 minutes of program per show).
Our customers came through like champions.
Pick of the litter were 2 Father Damien postcards that were authenticated by out expert and valued at several hundred dollars.
So check the back of your desk drawer for old postcards, yeagh?
Dog of the days was probably the old home-remedy case containing about 20 vials of medicines that go back to the days of ancient Greece and beyond, like nux vomica (an emetic) and aconite (a nasty poison).
Most of the vials were empty, but the one marked “opium” still had 7 tablets in it. Our customer hadn’t noticed that.
The tablets may have been about 100 years old, and no doubt the opium has lost its potency by now. But we had to tell him, “We cannot buy opium.”
Stay tuned for even more news about reality pawn television.
Father Damien
Kandi of Kamaaina Loan and Bob McCullough of Pawn Stories, both veteran jewelry salesmen, trade tips at our store Thursday. Bob is showing the size of an ivory tusk he bought one time.
First day of shooting for Pawn Stories is in the can. Nobody showed up with a knickknack from tutu’s attic that was really a rare artifact worth $50,000, but we had fun anyway.
Filming continues today (but not Saturday), and you do NOT have to bring an item to take part. One customer brought her voice and sang an aria from “La Boheme.” Very loud.
Bob McCullough, owner of the Pawn Stories production company, says that was not unique. He has had one other singer show up for his reality show. Not La Boheme, though.
We are no threat to “American Idol.”
Tonight is First Friday on Market Street, so we will be here and be busy all day. Stop by and join the fun.
Pawn Stories camera crew Amber Smith and Carl Johnson ready to work
As of 8 this morning, the Pawn Stories crew was at work, filming behind-the-scenes at the pawnshop.
When Kamaaina Loan opened its doors at 9, there was not a line of people carrying stuffed monkeys, but there was a short line of regular customers coming in to make and pay off loans. We’re hoping the cinematic element grows as the day wears on.
Pawn Stories cameraman Carl Johnson and his sidekick and second camerawoman Amber Smith were impessed by the Iao Valley rainforest, which they hope to hike before they leave the island.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Carl.
Carl and Amber have been filming pawn operations for Pawn Stories for years now, and they’ve never seen anything like Kamaaina Loan. But, as Carl noted, every pawn business is different.
A ribbon issued to welcome US Navy sailors to Honolulu during the war with Spain.
The excitement is building, but a little nervousness, too, as we prep Kamaaina Loan for filming the Pawn Stories reality TV show Thursday. As we said earlier, this is real reality, no script.
Now that we’re about to go on camera, the idea of a script begins to show its advantages.
With a script, you not only know for sure you’ll be getting something, but you know what it will be. You can cheat a little and do some research beforehand. Come Thursday, we’ll be working the flying trapeze without a net: If you bring in a whatzis that we’ve never seen before, we might be stumped. Or not. There are a lot of reference books upstairs, and with a combined cenjury or so of experience, there are not that many things that have never come over the counter before.
It doesn’t have to be bizarre, though.
Hawaiiana item
Hawaiiana items are sure to be a hit with the Mainlanders. Come on by, starting at 9 a.m. Thursday, 9 a.m. again Friday and 10 a.m. Saturday.
(What’s the weirdest thing anyone ever brought in? Hard to say, but the Egyptian sarcophagus has to be a contender. It took a while, but we found a buyer for it.)
IN HOCK: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression, by Wendy A. Woloson. 233 pages, illustrated. Chicago
Like a lot of people, social hisrorian Wendy Woloson had never been in a pawnshop, but she’d heard bad things about them. After a lot of research, mostly in obscure 19th century archives, she came to a different conclusion.
In “In Hock” she concludes that American industrial capitalism (the “second industrial revolution”) could not have occurred without pawnbrokers.
Industrialists depended on low-wage workers who were periodically no-wage workers as plants laid off workers, especially in the financial panics that swept the nation every decade or so before the New Deal tried to control banks. There were almost no provisions for out-of-work workers, and large classes (women, African-Americans, Irish, children) were paid subsistence or less-than-subsistence wages when they were working.
Only the pawnbroker stood between them and starvation.
No thanks did he get for it. Pawnbrokers, like their customers, were on the fringe, and the economic powers did what they could to destroy, or at least limit pawnbroking. Only a very few men – usually those with personal experience of the successful municipal pawnshops of Europe – understood the benefits of pawn lending.
“Respectable” businessmen and bankers, much later, had to be forced to treat customers without prejudice by regulation. There were plenty of regulations of pawnbrokers, but there has never been a law requiring pawnbrokers to treat all people the same.
At a time when bankers would not deal with women, blacks, Jews or people with shabby clothes, pawnbrokers stood ready to lend cash to all comers. The only thing that mattered was that the pawner had something valuable to pledge.
For the truly destitute, even the pawnbroker was no help.
In her lively, but sometimes repetitive book, Woloson ferrets out the pawnbroker in popular novels and advertisements, in rapidly growing cities, in small towns.
According to respectable opinion, pawnbrokers served only to provide money for drunkards to drink. A long statement by Woloson is worth quoting because it exposes the falsehood behind the capitalist program:
“Industrial capitalism begat wealth and poverty, winners and losers. It remained in the winners’ collective self-interest to create consensus among the larger public that capitalism was good for all of society, that wholesale and retail exchange were the ‘normal’ and ‘mainstream’ ways of doing business, and that this particular economic system was the only one befitting a modern, civilized nation. By its continued existence, however, pawnbroking demonstrated quite clearly that the promise of capitalism was broken for countless Americans. The true character of emergent industrial capitalism can be found beyond the shiny surfaces of retail show windows and the smooth pages of ledgers, revealing life at it was actually lived by most Americans, not simply the privileged few.
“Tellingly, pawning remained a popular coping strategy throughout the nineteenth century, from the very dawn of capitalism through the second industrial revolution. The endurance of pawnbroking through radical economic shifts and perennial boom and bust cycles was an indication both of its ability to adapt to changing times and more important, of Americans’ enduring need for such an institution. Regardless of the rhetoric championing capitalism as a democratizing force, it created inequities that led pawners to their local pawnshops. Pawnbroking could not have survived without the continued expansion of capitalism. Yet at every turn pawners, pawnbrokers, and the institution of pawnbroking were denigrated and demonized. Why was this so? Counting the great number who put things in hock makes it evident that there were many more losers than winners. What did it say about capitalism that it generated so many pawners? The symbiosis of pawning and capitalism warrants further examination if we are to fully understand the living and working lives of those who came before us and comprehend the economic exigencies of the people who continue to struggle today.”
Woloson ends her history in the Great Depression. The New Deal and the postwar liberal economic system were nearly fatal to pawnshops. For a while, it was predicted that they would fade out.
The rise of brutal finance capitalism has created wonderful business for pawnshops, which are doing better today than ever.
Secrets of reality TV
Most reality TV shows are staged. You knew that, right? I mean, all those coincidences in “The Amazing Race” didn’t just happen.
There’s an exception, though, and it’s right here. Only we need you to make it happen, fo’ real.
On Thursday and Friday (and maybe Saturday, too), Pawn Stories will be filming at Kamaaina Loan. No script, no fakery.
What we are trying to do, however, is to compress the interesting things that really do happen in the pawnshop over a month, or six months into two days – in the interest of efficiency with the production crews.
Thus, we want you to bring your most curious item in and let us give you a reading. Did tutu tell you the diamond in her wedding ring was “perfect”? You always wondered if it really was. Find out.
In reality, Kamaaina Loan does get a lot of curious stuff. Not every day. Jimi likes to talk about atmospheric clocks, “the closest thing to perpetual energy.”
We really do get atmospheric clocks in. We have one on pawn right now, and we purchased another about three years ago.
They’re real but rare.
So what we’d like you to do for us is help us concentrate all that reality into two days. Should be fun.
We’re open 9 a.m.-6 p.m., and the early bird will get the worms.
Call 242-5555 if you have questions.
And, yes, if you have regular business and don’t want to be filmed, we’re setting up a no-camera area.
Two of Maui’s coastal areas have been in the news during the last couple of weeks, but just as interesting is a third one that has not been, but was supposed to be.
The ones in the news are Launiupoko, where Honoapiilani Highway is falling into the ocean, and the Kahului sewage treatment plant, where an 1,100-foot seawall is proposed to keep buildings from being washed out.
Not in the news is the long stretch of beach along North Kihei Road. Old-timers may recall that some 18 to 20 years ago, it was predicted that erosion would reach the road within five years. It didn’t.
What happened? Cars struck two hawksbill turtles that were crawling across the highway looking for a place to nest. In alarm about wildlife, snow fences were put up to halt the turtles before they got to the road.
This apparently also had the effect of changing the dune geometry enough to retard the alongshore erosion. Unfortunately, something as cheap and benign as a snow fence is probably not going to do the job that seawalls do.
And benign is relative. The fences have prevented any more endangered turtles from being run over and killed, but although motorists killed a large fraction of the hawksbill that like that stretch of beach for nesting, they didn’t get them all.
Since the fences went up, several nests have been discovered, but, for lack of access to a place they’d like, in the high dune close to the waves. Not one of these nests has resulted in developed eggs.
Turtle watchers suspect that the locations are too dry and salty. Mother knows best. Farther inland is better.
I don’t know what could be done about this. Maybe dig up nests and relocate them, and then help the hatchlings to the water.
Maybe water the nests in place.
Launiupoko is an example of the rule that if you defer maintenance long enough, a minor problem will become a crisis.
That the shoreline is retreating there has been obvious for a long time. During Hurricane Iniki, waves were hurling softball-size rocks across the road like cannonballs.
As long as Pioneer Mill was farming that area, it was unlikely anything would be done to move the road inland. When Pioneer left, a golden chance to pick up the land cheap and begin realigning the road was missed.
Since then, slow progress has been made. Not fast enough to prevent the state DOT from armoring the shoreline.
At one point – I believe it was during Linda Lingle’s mayoralty – the planning department decided it would no longer support any further armoring of Maui’s shores. It always causes trouble somewhere down the line.
That was good policy. But it’s been forgotten.
Now the county itself is proposing to further harden the shoreline near the airport.
The alternatives were all expensive.
Moving the sewage treatment plant inland was expected to cost nearly half a billion dollars. Naturally, the council preferred to waterproof the plant.
Even that cost many tens of millions. The idea is that when a tsunami or hurricane threatens to swamp the plant, it will be shut down and buttoned up. The waves will wash over the plant, doing (it is hoped) little permanent damage to Kanaha Pond wildlife refuge as the partially treated sewage in open tanks is spread around.
If the electrical systems are waterproofed, the plant can be restarted within a day or so after the overflow. (The Japanese should have been so prudent at Fukushima, although to work this plan requires adequate warning, which the Japanese tsunami did not give.)
Not mentioned, that I can recall, during the discussions about waterproofing the plant was the coming need to armor the shoreline. 1,100 feet is a lot of seawall, bound to cause trouble downcurrent – which at that location is in either direction, because the current changes direction with the seasons.
Monday – Friday 9 am – 6 pm
Saturday – Sunday 10 am – 4 pm