Hello folks, and welcome to another wonderful weekend in the art of... wait a minute. This is the great white north. Why is it raining!? Looks like today is going to be a brutal day. Ah but no time like the present to dive into the treasure trove that is Festival City... Stratford! I would have saved a picture of the lackluster weather, but it fell victim to the lack of available internal memory on my digital camera. "What do you mean I can only take 12 pictures? I paid good money getting you for Christmas, damnit!" But I digress... on with the show!

I know what you're thinking. Why would I want to steal the bible?

This was my first stop. Do you think the organizer of this particular sale was trying to send a message? A subliminal message on how I should go about doing my drunksaling? Who are they to tell me what to do, eh? Lousy bible thumping... hey, wait a minute. They're actually selling theirs. I guess that makes them bible.... tossers? It would actually, in fact, turn out to be a rather interesting foreshadowing for the latter stages of my journey. But this was not what I was looking for.

Taz! Your surfboard is on fire!! Oh no wait that's only a clever paint job. And by clever I of course mean retarded.

This is what I was looking for. No, not him. On the left... no, not her... lower... lower... there you go. Turns out Taz was merely a decoy hiding the real treasure.

Back by a complete and total lack of demand... my bed. Sad thing is... my bed has now seen more NES carts than women.

This nice little score of NES games was found before my first half hour was even complete. I was convinced this bode well for the day - sorry kid was asking $3 a pop for these. Being the frugal bastard I am, I told him I'd pay a buck each, no more. "Sure..." he says. And thus my plot to buy all the NES carts in existence came into being. The ten carts I walked away with were: Blades of Steel, Rygar, Rescue, EPYX Winter Games, NARC, After Burner, Super Mario Bros. 3, BreakThru, Wizards & Warriors and finally GunSmoke. Extra copies of Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt and R.B.I. Baseball were left behind. So much for my plans to corner the NES market. Anyways, off to the next garage sale.

I'm sure there's some dirty joke I could make from this but I'm gonna behave just this once.

For some reason this picture just called out to me and I was unable to a pass up a chance to photograph some free pussy... errr... kittens. (Okay so I lied.)

This is what happens when you double check your photos in bad lighting. Don't let this happen to you.

It would seem that for all intensive purposes someone, somewhere has a crappy handheld (circa 1995) waiting to go into a garage sale. This is one such tragedy. Actually there's not much story to this one. I'm sure the second or third live action movie sequel to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was more entertaining than this handheld. But like this photo my memories of such things are blurry at best. *grin*

DA DA DA DA DA DA... do do do do doo... DA DA DA DA DA DA... do do do doo doooo

Just in case you or your children can't get enough of the cheap smarm and gossip that ET now dishes out on a daily basis on all your favorite actors (that work for Paramount) you can sit them down and QUIZ them on all that useful and important information. Or at the very least showed them what really mattered in the world of entertainment back in 1983.

Just in case you're wondering those ARE burned CDs over on the left. Bad pirate...

This is about the newest thing I was able to find today. And one look at the price tag told me the kid had priced it. Nothing of interest in the games stacked on the left or the right, unless you're a big fan of Driver. Lots of sports games floating around too. Wonder why that is what with new versions only coming out what every year or so? About this time it started raining, so as I watched the PSX get wet, I toddled off looking for shelter and found something just waiting for a loving home.

Say what you want about sinks... no really, say what you want. I got nothin'.

Another item that I rarely seem to avoid when I go out garage saling is the ever present kitchen sink. Why in gods name would I want to buy something that the previous owner did all kinds of mysteriously pro and non-hygienic things in/on. Who knows what various body parts had made their way onto this classy number. Considering the neighbourhood I'm sure at least one child was conceived on it by a rich yet horny teenaged couple. But perhaps that's just my sewer swilling mind gone totally amok - you be the judge. But this isn't quite what I meant when I said I had found something just waiting for a new home.

You would think by this point I would be double checking the pictures better but ohhhh no.

First things first I did not grab the PC games. I haven't starting collecting those... yet. Plus I already bought/pwned [ed. note - this is the only time you'll see that phrase uttered on this site] SimCity 2000 many years ago. No nostalgia there as I shook that game to its core. No, what interested me was the Super Nintendo beneath it, complete with only Super Mario World and one lonely controller. After breaking my one and only controller after playing Super Mario Kart for a mere half hour, I had been sans controller for some time. Luckily this was a garage sale being run by a friend of mine and, so like a beacon from the heavens, this box called out to me and it said "Leave the console... get the controller... give it a new home... and maybe grab the game." So being one to acknowledge strange unexplained voices, I orphaned the console (not that it was of much use without the RF adapter and Power Supply). Being allowed to do this, my friend pointed out rather vigorously, meant he must like me in order to let me put it into such a state that it probably wouldn't be sold. At least he made me pay for them otherwise that might have meant he liked me in a completely different and decidedly non-platonic manner. But I digress - $2 bucks for a controller and a game isn't bad.

On a side note, I witnessed an odd thing for such a small town. Some dude came into my friend's garage sale and bought a plush ALF doll. Then when he was browsing before he left, he proceeded to grab a handful of vinyl records and walk away with them tucked under his arm. Thankfully an off duty cop that lived just down the street was there talking with the family and was on him right away. They had an animated discussion before the culprit walked them back. [ed. note - I agree - buying an Alf plush doll is a pretty odd occurrence.]

Buy and sell land or get my ego stroked. Suddenly all the dynamics of cutthroat real estate dealings are available all in one place!

I can't really add much to this picture except to say that I'm not sure how the Chicken Soup concept could possibly function as a form of entertainment when board games are designed for those with relatively short attention spans. How much of an attention span does one need to just read a book? Not terribly long, last I checked. About the length of time it takes to have a sit on the crapper, judging by the number of THOSE types of books you see in the Coles and Chapters stores these days. Where's my "Remixing NES Midi Music for Fun and Profit" bathroom reader?

Let us see. Crap. Crap. More crap. Huge piles of crap masquerading as video games.

Moving down the row at this location brought me to a stack of games that most people just don't play anymore. Who remembers the adventure game Titanic? How about Take No Prisoners? There are some redeemers here, and two I actually already own, more specifically the culprits being the Williams Arcade Classics and Quake II over on the right. For some reason people in my neighbourhood get overly curious when you just start taking pictures of their stuff. Crazy humans. Anyways, I got small talked by the person running this particular garage sale. I somehow gave her the impression that I was a newspaper writer. First and last time I think I'll be asked what university I attended. I've been published on the Internet. That makes me some kind of freelancer doesn't it?

There are enough copies of this particular game just floating around town to choke a talking donkey.

Never mind owning this game already. Never mind having not only seen it on the last Chi-Style Drunksaling article [ed. note - He's hallucinating folks, we've never seen Space Quest 6 for sale. Space Quest 1 and 3, yes - but not the sixth]. Never mind I saw this game at least once LAST time I went garage saling. Never mind my own mother owns a copy. Did I mention I see a lot of these in my travels? Why take a picture? Perhaps I was just hoping I could steal its soul so that it would stop surfacing all over town. Perhaps this will prove to be the last thing we all see before Space Quest 6 CD cases take over the world.

[ed. note - Now now, we don't need Mac vs. PC flamewars in our drunksaling articles.]

Hey yeah now this is what I'm talking about. Oh, wait a minute. It's just a Mac. And not a fancy iMac or eMac or anything like that. Just a slim older version. At least it has the floppy drive. Not shown are various meese (mouse in the plural), floppy drives, hard disk drives (the biggest being about 1.7 gig) and a daughterboard ISA card. And a couple sticks of RAM just to make things interesting. Then on the ground nearby, an illegal digital satellite receiver console. We don't have that stuff up here in Canada unless you're with one or two specific companies, and then they provide one for you. If you own one not of the specific types you get from said companies, you're using it illegally. Which means getting a new card every week or so after your card is repeatedly "zapped" by the satellite companies in order to deter theft. Apparently I'm surrounded by pirates and thieves. Oh well, if you can't beat them, join them.

Four Comics in one handy package? How did I cope before this shining moment??

Okay so here I am taking a picture of some obviously retarded looking crap that kids just love these days. Those crazy Pokemon, Digimon and DragonBall Z characters. Always getting into amazing situations and then saving the day in the nick of time. How do they do it over and over again?? *ahem* And of course while I'm taking said picture of pure crap I'm being harassed by the supposed owner, a kid all of 12 years old. "Those are 2 bucks each; you get four comics to a package." I give him a look. "I'll sell you three packs for $5." Something tells me that I'm finished for the day. So I head off to the local Goodwill, to see what will tease and titillate me this week.

Ah the good old days, where you played video games like you were listening to an audio tape. Yeah, it never made sense to me either.

As if to mock me for my refusal to buy its parental unit the previous week, this cassette playing unit for the Commodore makes an appearance, and thus makes it useless to me. If I had gone and picked up the C64 instead of wussing out not once but three times after almost getting it to the checkout, I would now have something to play the "datasette" tapes that will no doubt show up about a week after THIS disappears as well. Sometimes you just got to go for the gusto. And by gusto I of course mean useless old crap I'll never play with past the first week.

Moosehead... Moosehead... I know there's a joke in there somewhere.

And thus ends my second week of amazing and fantastic drunksaling while sober! Of course one does attempt to compensate by staying up the entire night before hand, but this rarely achieves the "I can't walk straight" feeling this single bottle of Canadian beer gave me. Oh well, better this than having yet another bike wrecked.

Find of the Week: I would have to go with the Super Nintendo items simply because I made another unit whole again (mine) while making another unit completely worthless. (his)

Lesson of the Week: Finding a bunch of Coke collectables including an old fashioned Coke cooler and six 6 packs of old style bottles = $560 CDN
Calling your sister, who is a rabid Coke collector, just to mention that you "found" a mess of neat coke stuff but didn't buy it = Priceless