Thrift Store Finds: Rejected Finds!

Most of the time when I buy stuff from thrift stores, I manage to squeeze a couple hundred words out of those purchases for a Thrift Store Finds post on Saturday mornings. Sometimes I’ll buy things and… I don’t know, it’s just not meant to be. Here’s a couple of rejected (but hopefully still interesting!) finds.

This was perhaps my favorite find in awhile: A plush ALF toy manufactured by Coleco in 1987. You all know I’m a big ALF fan, so of course I owned one of these in the Eighties… although I owned the Wisecracking ALF which included a voice box. This is just your standard stuff animal, although it’s in pretty great shape for being over twenty years old. I scooped this up for $4 bucks and I consider that a bargain. I rejected this for a longer post because… man, it’s just a stuffed animal of a beloved 1980’s icon. There’s really nothing much to say about this beyond “I found it and I’m happy with it.”

Another square-sized collection of For Better or For Worse I found for fifty cents, Pushing 40 collects a bunch of FBoFW strips from the late 1980’s… so Michael Patterson’s just starting puberty and there are lots of armpit hair jokes. I rejected this find for a longer post because I already wrote about Lynn Johnston’s work back in 2011 when I looked at It’s All Downhill From Here. I was pretty thorough in that post about how much I like FBoFW and I remain fairly proud of that piece.

Finally, TWO Nintendo GameBoy finds: 1992’s Looney Tunes for the GameBoy and 1999’s Looney Tunes Twouble for GameBoy Color. Two licensed games featuring many of the same characters separated by almost a decade; if I asked you to pick which one of these two games was the better, sight unseen, you’d probably pick the one made in ’99, right? You probably would and you’d be DEAD WRONG because Twouble is HORRIBLE. It makes a stab at being sort of a three-dimensional puzzle games and it just bites. The ’92 Looney Tunes cart however, is a completely solid and fun side-scroller. I haven’t played all the way through but you start as Daffy Duck, making your way through several other characters.

I rejected this find because, as always when it comes to GameBoy games, I don’t have a great way to show you the game I’m writing about.

Thrift Store Finds: Paradox Bookstore Finds!

Sorry for the interruption in blogging, folks. I spent the last few days in with my family at the Oglebay Resort in Wheeling, West Virginia. I’ve never spent any time in West Virginia so it was a fun new experience for me. The resort was beautiful, the cottage we rented was spacious and fun, and the days were full of fun activities for my immediate and extended family. We did a lot of swimming, mini-golfing, hiking, and (as with any visit to a new place) used book store trolling! Wheeling is home to the oldest used book store in West Virginia, The Paradox Bookstore. As soon as I read about it, I knew it would be a must-visit.

When we arrived, I knew I had found a great store when I saw this notice posted prominently outside the establishment:

THAT’S my kind of store!

The aisled were jam-packed with books to the point of toppling; when my wife Ellen knocked over a stack of mysteries, the clerk joked he’d like to send his St. Bernard for a rescue, but the dog had the day off. We carefully navigated the rest of the store and I found quite a few books to take home.

thrift store finds: it’s all downhill from here: a for better or for worse collection

(Thrift Store Finds is a mostly-weekly “column” of sorts where I discuss some of the cool books I’ve happened upon in my neighborhood St. Vincent DePaul store. Please don’t mistake me for an expert on any of the books I am writing about… I’m just a fan of a bargain.)

I thought I’d take a different approach to writing about It’s All Downhill from Here, a For Better or For Worse Collection, published by Andrews & McMeel in 1987.

I found a church bazzar a few weeks ago. Instead of trying to write something cohesive that sums up my feelings on the book in question, I’m just going to do a bullet list/random sampling of things I find interesting about the book, the comics collected in the book, and the strip itself.