Today I am going to address an issue which is no doubt on many people’s minds.  That is, what is the difference between an old fart, a gaffer, a crank, a curmudgeon, a codger and a geezer.  For some reason, I have always felt older than I really am.  Maybe this has something to dowith having been promoted from kid to quasi-parent at age 12, when my first sister was born–at the time, Mom was working nights at a truck stop, and Dad was busy drinking himself into the state hospital.  Also, premature grey runs in my family, and I  started going grey in high school. Anyway. . . . .

I sorta jokingly refer to myself as an old fart.  The expression is a pejorative in my book.  It refers to someone who is inconsequential, ephemeral, slightly unpleasant, and sometimes unintentionally amusing.  Around our house, a fart joke is always good for a laugh.

A gaffer, in Hollywood slang, is a lighting technician.  Similarly, a gaffer here is enlightened, someone who is full of years and as full of homespun wisdom as an egg is of meat. I will never be a gaffer.  Crank, yes; gaffer, no.

Cranks don’t have to be old, but the best ones are.  It takes time to develop the eccentric mannerisms and extreme and unpopular opinions that are the hallmarks of crankhood.  In our neighborhood, the woods are pretty much full of cranks.  I encountered a genuine crank at my stand once, a retired commercial pilot who was convinced that the Trade Center went down because of explosive charges planted by One-Worlders.  A salient characteristic of cranks is that they often start out making a certain amount of sense, then just sort of veer off into the ozone.

That brings me to curmudgeons.  They have a long and honorable history.  The dudue who wrote the Book of Jeremiah was certainly a curmudgeon, as was the Roman satirist Juvenal.  More recent  examples of the breed include Jonathon Swift, Ambrose Bierce, and H. L. Menchen.  You’ve heard the old saw aboutlooking at an 8-ounce glass which contains 4 ounces–half full or half empty?  A curmudgeon doesn’t care, but is repulsed by the lip marks on the glass.  A curmudgeon knows that most people are more or less dishonest, selfish, fear-ridden, and unevolved.  It’s a dirt job but someone has to do it.  (Right now, a bunch of incredibly scurrilous political ads are running on TV, so rotten are they I even hate the one’s making fun of the Republican, who is a hack and a whited sepulcher of the first water.)

Next we have the codger.   Codgers are probably the most harmless of the lot, way too mellow to be a curmudgeon but not smart enough to be a gaffer.  Your codger is ineffectual but still pretty much functional, unlike the geezer.

Once you have reached geezerhood, your days are numbered.  Nursing homes are full of geezers.  Your classic geezers usually have had at least one stroke, and/or symptoms of Alzheimer’s  Being a geezer is no fun at all.

You may be wondering about where sourdoughs fit in.  The true sourdoughs have pretty much died out, as they came here over 100 years ago for the gold rush.  In their day, the most competant sourdoughs were gaffers.  Today, the sort of joke is that a sourdough is someone who is sour on Alaska but doesn’t have the dough to leave.

It looks like the weather will be shitty for the foreseeable future, so I will most likely be doing a lot of blogging this week.  Having been asked (again!) when I’m going to talk about the Polish twins, here goes.  But first, a few words about some other memorable customers I have had over the years.  Some times folks come by as tell me they bought a knife from me last year and do I remember them, and I usually tell them the truth, i.e., that I usually only remember customers who give me a hard time.  Then again, there was the thin, classic-leather jacket clad, redheaded teenaged guy who stopped at my stand when I was still setting up along the lighway–he bought a copper bracelet.  I don’t know why this stuck in my tiny mind.  Then there was the couple who stopped at the far end of the turnout (it is roughly the size of a football field), left something on the ground, then came to my stand.  I had recently gotten in some really nice fossil fish, near museum quality, nicely cut out of the matrix.  The guy really liked them and bought one, happily showing it to his wife.  She fixed him with a glare and said incredulously “You-bought-a-FISH?”  The poor guy, I felt so sorry for him.

Another guy I felt really sorry for stopped at my tand last year, and started tosalivate when he saw my four-blade congress made by Boker (Tree Brand)>  He is there “MY god, they don’t make that anymore, the book price is about $125!”  I was asking $79.  He didn’t get it because his wife wouldn’t let him.

A foreign tourist, late middle-aged and very affluent and conservative looking (I guess he was Swiss or German), bonded with this big outrageous fantasy knife.  He looked at it longingly, left, came back with a woman and they had a short intense conversation (all I caught was “Nein., nein” from the woman.)  He then said “I buy this!” handed over the $69 or so, and walked off proudly, obviously feeling ten feet tall and bullet-proof.  A good weapon will do that for you.

Foreign tourists can be the most fun, also the most frustrating, when they have little English and I know none of their language.  I remember a bunch of Russian climbers who bought several inexpensive knives among them. I remember a bunch of disgruntled tourists from India (they are often the worse to deal with, as they almost always try to Hindu me down on prices) climbing back on a tour van muttering “So this is that Talkeetna that they make such a big deal about, that is supposed to be so quaint.”  Chauvinist that I am, I was tempted to say something like “Okay, so we don’t have corpses floating in the river like there is in your filthy country, but it’s quaint enough for most people.”

Okay, cutting to the chase. . . .One day this summer, I noticed this very large woman walking toward me.  I’m talking maybe six feet of so, maybe 250 pounds.  She was wearing these bright green plastic sandals, a loose flowing skirt of somesort of purple gauzy material,m paisley blouse, bright pink headscarf, and her hair was braided into pigtails.  Walking next to her was another woman, same description.  They stopped at the stand and there was no communication going on.  They came back with this skinny ferret-faced dude who told me they (the women) were twins, and that they all were Polish, and that I should therefore give them big discounts.  Like 50-70 percent off my asking price.  Business had been slow that day, so I finally let them wear me down to where I sold them a Bowie knife marked $39 for $20 (in case you didn’t gather, knives are high-markup itmes).  What made this remarkable to me was that usually women are (or pretend to be) put off by the knives, especially the big fantasy jobbies.  Oh well, go figure. . . . .

Today’s rant, gentle readers, is about Alaska in general, and Alaskan politics in particular.  Those of you who have been thinking about re-locating to here may change your minds after reading this.  Alaska–The Last Frontier.  Plain-talking, straight-shooting folks.  A place where there is tons of freedom, and all are accepted.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Alaskans tend to be narrow-minded, racist, and homophobic.  For instance, the mayor of Anchorage recently ordered the city library to shut down a gay pride exhibit.  They were promulgating the unacceptable concept that gay people are people, and should have civil rights just like normal people.  More upsetting, the Anchorage paper did a public opinion poll, and the majority of respondents actually supported this Nazi’s decision.  Another thing–when an Alaska politician wants to safely smear another , he calls him a “liberal.”  We have politicians who make Vlad the impaler look like Phil Donohue.

Part of the political insanity that has been going on is due to the fact that for years, Big Oil pretty much paid for state government.  We have no state sales tax, no state income tax, and no politicians with the courage to speak the truth–i.e., that there is no way to have a balanced state government without eith stripping the Permanent Fund (more about that later) or imposing new taxes.  The only tax besides federal income tax that most of us pay consists of property taxes.  Wasilla (50 miles away, the site of the closest MacDonald’s, Wal-Mart and so on), has a 2% sales tax, but tere’s a $10 cap–that is, say yu buy a $20,000 new car–you pay $10 sales tax.

Right now, there is a gubenatorial race going on, and both candidates are lying, and smear ads against both candidates are polluting the airwaves on a daily basis.  The Republican candidate, Frank Murkowski, has been a US Senator for 20-some years and has never accomplished anything worth mentioning.  He routinely votes against funding for education, raising the minimum wage and votes for pretty much anything that will benefit big business.  Well, duh–he’s a conservative.  More troubling is that fact that, if elected governor, he will be able to appoint someone to sit in his Senate seat , and he refuses to give anyone a clue as to who this might be.  During his campaign, the spouts generalities that anyone with two brain cells to rub together could refute, and when pressed to explain his plans, once said “I won’t try to explain that because I don’t have to.”

The Democratic candidate is Fran Ulmer, now lieutenant governor, is better, but not by a whole lot.  She is trying to reduce the campaign to a one-issue race–she is pro-choice on abortion rights, and old Frank wants them to stay barefoot and pregnant.  Where Frank is pushing a reaganesque voodoo economics plan, Fran says she would oppose any new taxes until the Constitutional Reserve Fund falls under a billion bucks–this is gonna happen real soon.  But a columnist in the recent paper pointed out, correctly I think, that the first candidate to tell the truth will surely lose the election.

Meanwhile, we the people keep bitching about our lousy legislators and then re-electing them.  I once read that people tend to get the governments they deserve–if so, what the hell did we do to merit what we have?  I dunno.  Thus endeth the rant.

In case you don’t know about the Permanent Fund, this is a huge pile of money ($15 billion or so, I think) which is invested in everything from real estate to the stock market, the proceeds of which are divvied up amongst the citizenry.  This year, we will each get around $1500.  Rich folks use this dough for trips to Hawaii, snowmachines, or tuck it away to pay for college for their kids.  Folks like us piss it away on groceries, firewood, fuel oil, and the like.  The Reserve Fund is a few billion and can be used to balance the state budget when there are income shortfalls (which is becoming a routine thing since the price of Alaska crude is sort of low).

Well gang, I had just finished this great blog about street peddling and dickering and troublesome customers, clicked outside the box and it all vanished.  Gone to the cyberspace trashpile.  SuSu tried to retrieve it, and said you weren’t supposed to be able to do that.  SIgh.  The techno-idiot strikes again.  So here goes again, re-writing this whole thing, although maybe a tad abbreviated.

First, some helpful hints on saving money without being obnoxious at price-negotiable venues such as yard sales, flea markets, and street peddlers.  Timing is important.  The first few, and last few customers of the day can get the best deals.  We like to start the day off with a sale ASAP, and so may well offer better bargains to the first few.  Converesly, the last customers often get real deals, especially if we had a lack-luster sales day, and especially if we are selling something bulky, like second-hand safes, or stuffed Chinamen, or something else of that ilk. (Actually, we don’t have ilk around here–some moose, no ilk.  But I digress.)

About dickering–I hate it,  but will do it when necessary to make a sale.  SuSu doesn’t hate it, just refuses to do it–someone tries to Hindu her down on a price, she raises it.  So there!  If you do dicker (and at, say, flea markets, it is considered de rigeur),a low-key approach is best.  A simple “Would you take $7?” for an item marked $10 is cool, and often works.  ANother handy phrase is “Is that your best price?”  But don’t be a cocktease–if you dicker us down, you bloody well better buy the item–that has happened to me, and I hate it and the tease with a passion.

Something else to avoid is mindless repatition–if the seller refuses your offer once, don’t keep haring in in, hoping to wear him down and make yourself such a nuisance that he gives you a bargain just to get rid of you.  And don’t poormouth, especially when you are wearing $3000 worth of designer duds and diamonds.  I have had obviously rich folks try to dicker recreationally, trying to get me to go down a few dollars, seemingly just for the fun of it.  I recently put a nice Beretta lockback on sale, down to $39 from $59, and this diamond-encrusted yuppie bitch got me down to $29, barely more than I paid for it.  But it was early, and it had become a white elephant–the box was way shopworn.  Now for a look at some of the real menaces of customerdom–they are the kiter, the booster, the looky-loo, the be-back, and the don’t-get-up.

A kiter is a bad-check artist.  So far, I’ve just been hit by one, this nice lady from California with a cute little girl, who got over $100 worth of stones (including a really nice precious opal) for a worthless $80 check.  I would fillet her if I had the chance.  The booster is an out and out thief.  So far this year, I have been ripped off twice–some unsub got a gold nugget, and a really slick little kid with his mom palmed a stone ring right under my nose.  I knew he did it–I keep the ring displays full so it is obvious when one is missing–but I couldn’t prove it, short of  holding the little bastard upside down and shaking vigorously.  Which might have been satisfying, but probably would have hurt my hernia. Speaking of thieves, the Pinkertons did a study and found that 70% of the population will steal if they get a chance.  If you are honest, this will stun you–if you are a thief, you will think “Gee, is that all?”

Now a looky-loo is a special sort of thief, but doesn’t steal your wares.  He is a recreational browser, who thinks nothing of stealing your time and energy (not to mention fingering all your goods) for a few minutes of free entertainment.  A subset of the looky-loo is the be-back.  This cowardly asscrack can’t just leave without buying, but makes some lame-ass excuse like “I have to go back in the bar and finish my bloody mary.  Then I’ll come back and buy _____>”  (Some drunk woman actually said this to me.  I could cheerfully cure her drinking problem by simply severing her radial artery.)  To add a racist note, I have observed  that 90% of white folks do not come back–90% of non-whites do.  Just anothe rinstance of the perfidy of the Aryan superrace.

Finally, we have possible the most irritating–the don’t-get-up.  I have a folding chair I sit on between customers, and often some old fart will stop by and sort of flap a hand at me, saying “Don’t get up.”  That is a clear admission to being a brass-bound looky-loo, as well as a statement that he or she has already decided  that none of my wares are worth patronage.  I should add, in all fairness, that sometimes, a don’t-get-up will buy something, and that is a sweet victory.

Thus endith this, my latest rant.  Now, being as how I am off today due to an unpromising weather forecast for Talkeetna, I shall go to town with SuSu, go to the library and the old farts’ feed (aka the senior luncheon) at the community center in Willow,pick up a knife order (okay, SuSu will probably pick it up in deference to myhernia), make a deposit at the credit union, and get a shower.  (I can smell my beard–it smells like compost.  That is one good sign I need a shower.  You probably don’t want to know thw others.)  Then home and taking out some trash, pricing the knoives, and stayingout of the way of SuSu and Doug go back to the roof.  Meantime, happy trails!