Living in New York City (With Books)

Finding Books on Your Floor
I have limited shelves in my apartment--one big shelf on the east wall and a smaller shelf on the west wall, looking at each other across the room. These shelves are full of piles of books. Not books stacked in a neat orderly alphabetized horizontally regimented arrangement on a shelf as per a library. No. My books are piled like 7 high all along the shelf, piles of 7-high-stacked books, 7 piles to the end of the shelf, 49 books to the shelf, all with their titles hidden. On the east wall on two shelves I have a horizontally arrangement of a complete set of the 35 books my brother got published in his lifetime; two of those books are large special edition artsy-fartsy coffee-table monstrosities that I have to lay flat on the heads of his other books. Also on one of my brother's shelves are my grandmother's book of poems and her novel, along with a folder crammed to the spilling-over point with New York Times Book Reviews that contain pieces by my brother or a criticism of him by Larry McMurtry and three long reviews of three of his books and a set of proofs of an ad for one of his books Knopf ran in a NYTBR at the time.

These shelves are, I might add, a gathering place for conventions of various dusts and grimes. Books and magazines and newspapers attract dust and grime and bookworms by the tons--bookworm bodies all over my shelves. On another shelf are books by and about Henry Miller; Jacob Wassermann's Doctor Kerkhoven (a man of great wonders); Van Wyck Brooks's New England Indian Summer, a wonderful book, at least in my way of reading; Noa Noa, a novel written by Paul Gauguin; my old best friend's book on models for decision making in management; and above my old best friend's book is an autographed copy of A Long Day's Journey Into Night; and to the right of those books is a pile of old magazines topped (or "toppered by" or "hatted by") by A.E. Hotchner's Papa, a great book about Hotchner's meeting Ernest Hemingway in Habana with a television deal and at the Hemingway finca becoming Papa's henchman/sidekick and then getting the privilege of traveling by car (a beautiful new Lancia) with him through France, Spain, and Italy, ending in Spain in time for the bullfight season that produced Hemingway's hugely overwritten wild piece called "The Dangerous Summer" (Hemingway at this time was drifting off into the netherworld of schizophrenia already--I mean, the man had a multicrashinjured skull and a much bruised brain--a water tank fell on his head in London during WWII; then he was involved in two-in-a-row small plane crashes, the worst of those the crash on the bluff above Victoria Falls. That crash really botched up Papa's old skull and cranium--I think that was the final blow to his head that knocked him to the schizophrenic canvas for the final count out. That final blow caused him to see peace not in living but in dying). "The Dangerous Summer" was eventually published wholly in Life, contracted to be around 50,000 words and ending up way over 100,000. "Hotch," as Hemingway called him, was there in the last days, too, seeing Hemingway at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, only a short time before Papa went back to Ketchum and the next morning blew the whole top of his head off in front of a mirror in the entrance hall to his Ketchum house using his custommade Belgian big-game rifle to do the trick. Mary Hemingway, his fourth and final wife, heard the shot and ran down to find her husband fallen forward, his head missing, his brains and spurting blood sloshed all over that mirror. How fucking traumatic was that! Mary humbly said in a press conference later that day that Papa had accidentally shot himself while cleaning one of his many guns. I remember the day well. I was just out of basic training with the US Dog-Soldier Army and back home trying to write on a novel I had started back while I was still in college and a poet. Hemingway's death hit me so hard that when the Life magazine commemorating his life and death came out later that week, I devoured the article and was particularly shaken and haunted by a distant wide-angled lens photo looking down on the Ketchum Cemetery with the Sawtooth Mountains in the background; it's a cloudy day. The focus of the photo is on a line of automobiles parked on the cemetery's main access road, the black Caddy hearse first, followed by several swell-looking but unexceptional cars, the line, however, ending with one of the most ever exceptional US automobiles, a completely restored 1941 Lincoln Continental ragtop convertible with the patented Continental spare tire kit on the back, that which distinguished this great custommade USA automobile as a Continental, as per the French Citreons or the Spanish Hispanolas or the Italian Bugattis. Off behind this row of cars, down a small slope, you saw a small gathering of people standing around the grave, a priest prominently in the picture (Hemingway was a converted Catholic), as Papa's casket is being lowered into the ground there, his head toward the Sawtooths and his feet toward his Ketchum house, his last house, its large plate glass front window looking back at him and at that Sawtooth Range and down at that cemetery.

After reading that Life edition over and over, I then took a wad of my Army mustering out money and went to a bookstore and bought all the Hemingway books I could afford--Scribner's nice paperback editions of A Farewell to Arms, Torrents of Spring, In Our Time, The Collected Short Stories, and Across the River and Through the Trees. Then when I asked the clerk if they may have had a The Sun Also Rises in the storeroom, she said, "No, but I have a personal copy that I've finished if you'd like to have it." She pulled out a drawer in her counter and handed me a Penguin paperback entitled Fiesta. I looked puzzled--all I had read of Hemingway up until his death was a passage of A Farewell to Arms in a college composition class, that opening paragraph, which is one of the best-written paragraphs of all time to me, and a paragraph that stuck on me then and I wanted to read the whole book then but back in those days between looking for love and trying to pass my courses I had no time to read. She saw what my puzzlement meant and said, "That's its title in England. I bought that in Heathrow coming back from London last month." After I was home, I treated those books like royalty--and they had set me back quite a royal penny--Farewell to Arms, The Collected Short Stories, and Across the River cost the most, $2.50 each, if I recall correctly--the others $1.95 each--so that was $11.40--a hefty chunk of change since my mustering-out pay was only $72--and I was planning on putting some of that down on a car, too.

I started reading those books that very day and I read them one after another on into another week and another week, reading, drinking French Market Chicory Coffee with Balzac-like devotion, and devouring every precious word of first A Farewell to Arms--wow what a great book about the Spanish Civil War--a war FDR could have stopped and instead turned against the Republic and let Hitler and Franco (that asshole) have their way bombing the fuck out of the poor Spanish whose only help militarily and financially came from the Soviet Union. The famed USA Lincoln Brigade who fought so bravely in that Civil War, most of them artists and writers from New York City, one of them Alvah Bessie who later went to Hollywood as a screenwriter, came back not to praise but to being branded "Commies," and later Alvah Bessie was brought up before Tailgunner Joe McCarthy's HUAC committee where he was humiliated and blacklisted and then sent to prison! What a sad time in the history of the White Man's stolen and made-up nation he called the United States of America--which I now call the United Snakes of Amurica! Even wolves are smart enough to not trust snakes--especially those snakes that are in the grass. And then I read the short stories, "The Big Two-Hearted River," holy Moses what a fantastically written short story; "Up in Michigan," too--the short stories the jewels in Hemingway's crown--"A Clean Well-Lighted Place"--and the old man on the bridge with the cat story--and then the vignettes that open all the stories in In Our Time--how can a wannabe writer not be caught up in such writing and if he's a serious writer, how can not his goal be, like Hemingway's goal was to knock Shakespeare out in as early a round as possible, to knock old Papa out in as early a round as possible? Hemingway confessed he'd never been able to knock old Will out after all; and I without having to really confess it confess that I've never even come close to knocking Papa on his ass no matter how many rounds--though, dammit, I'm still trying. "Put 'em up again, Papa, I'm gonna cold-cock you with this story."

And there's another stack of books behind Hotch--I see a book about building the Golden Gate Bridge my niece edited and under that a cookbook featuring several recipes cooked up by my nephew the primitive artist who died on the operating table in L.A. County Hospital a few years back--one of his primitive recipes a recipe for a peanut butter and catchup sandwich--one of my favorite recipes of all time--complete with instructions on specifically the kind of peanut butter to use and the kind of bread to use and then a note, "Any catchup is fine for this recipe," which I thought added a dash of spicy reasoning in just the right place.

The bottom shelf of this bookshelf is piled and packed with my many coin catalogs and numismatic and philately and ephemera reference books--huge books on Mexican paper money, Oklahoma trade tokens, how to identify Persian coins, a book on how to read Persian, catalogs from NYC coin shows and auctions, pricing guides for ancient coins, a pricing guide for Mexican coins, a catalog of Texas Military Tokens (hey, this one is autographed to me by its author), a stack of Lloyd Mangrum's golf books--4 different printings of the same book published under several titles and 2 different editions back in the 1950s, and, why I don't know, stuck in amongst these items is Bertram D. Wolfe's great biography of Diego Rivera--and I love the part that's all about Frida Kahlo sneaking out of Diego's bed and going down and fucking Leon Trotsky--fucking him once on the desk at which the U.S. U of Chicago Neo-Con's (see Leo Strauss) hero was sitting when his enemies drove a hatchet through the center of his skull and spilled his brains out all over that very desk. Frida, by the way, had a perfectly good reason for cheating on her beloved Diego--she'd found out he'd been banging her sister behind her back. Besides, Diego was an old Commie and she knew if he found out she was fucking Trotsky it really would piss him off--he was a Marxist-Leninist!

A trip through my book shelves is sad since a lot of these books have sat for years gathering dust, being unopened, being unread (a very sad state for books--surely they cry when they sit for years on a shelf with no attention), but it's also exciting when you rediscover books you'd forgotten you had.

With my bookshelves overflowing, there are also books to be found on the floor of my apartment. There's a pile of books behind my complete set of Lloyd Mangrum signature Golfcraft golf clubs in a huge leather Titliest tour bag I just bought. That pile includes my dogged and abused copy of Mencken's great The American Language and a paperback copy of the real Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel. There's a pile of books sitting on a piano/guitar amplifier I no longer use, topped by a copy of Machiavelli's The Prince. And then, yesterday when I was looking for a certain picture frame, I moved a bunch of supplies (copy paper, packing materials, a bag of cotton balls) to uncover a big plastic bag of minor league baseballs, which when I pulled it out from under the table I uncovered a double stack of about 20 books, all suited in dust and grime, pestered by dust spiders and dust devils and odd hair-looking balls of several decades of grime that has congregated on their proud covers and edges.

The book on top of that dingy pile after I had dragged it out into the daylight was Ivor Montagu's With Eisenstein in Hollywood! It's a book I had totally forgotten I had. A book I hadn't even seen in 20 years I'll bet ya. I dusted it off--I had to wash it off actually it was so encrusted with the normal blown-in dirt and other New York City-airborne crap-- then I crawled up in my loft bed curious enough about the book to start reading it again--(E.A. Poe defends the dash, dammit) and, Jesus, I have a book shelf in my loft bed, too, and I notice it and it is crammed with VHS tapes but also magazines--hundreds of coin journals, coin club newsletters, Steve Album's Islamic coin lists, book auction catalogs, more sales catalogs, auction price results, pamphlets, a very rare book on Republic of Texas monies, a line of books on Lester Young, a row of Freud's books, several Ezra Pound books, a couple of Hilda Doolittle books (my fav, her little book on her time spent with Freud), a D.H. Lawrence biography I've never read, several Henry Miller books, a row of books on Charles Ives, and then by my bedside a stack of about 20 books I'm currently reading (at), including one of my bibles: my book on Gestalt Therapy. Once settled down in my loft bed, I began reading Montagu's With Eisenstein in Hollywood.

I've recently gotten into a teevee program that airs sort of constantly on one of my new HD teevee added-on channels, the Universal Sports Network, an NBC concoction. It's a program produced by Russian television called "An American in Russia"--or something like that--featuring this All-American dude (from San Jose, California) named Mark Ames. Ames goes all over Russia from the Mongolian highlands, through Tuva territory, down to Black Sea Russia, then up through Moscow and on up into Siberia, visiting Russian cities most of which I've never heard of all along the way. Like the rather large City of Tula, an arms manufacturing city that was closed to outsiders during Soviet times! And dammit if I'm not finding Russia a damn fine looking country--some parts of Russia are just outright fucking beautiful and I can see literarily inspiring. On one of his shows, Ames visits the Tolstoy Estate. It was eerie. They've preserved, or so they say, everything in the big main house the way it was the day Tolstoy left the coil; his big desk sealed under glass; the child's chair he used when writing still at his writing table in a nook off where he slept, his bed still there in this quaint old-stock Russian room (Tolstoy's mother left the Estate to him). Then Ames walks out onto the estate. He walks where Tolstoy walked every day and then he came to a spot where he said Tolstoy loved to just come and stand and absorb nature--a place overlooking a misty pond that must have been the pond in that great novel, at least I think it's a great work of writing art, Anna Karenina--a great creepy wonderful exciting novel of fomented love [Mr. Ed: Did any of you catch the Wolf Man's colossal error in the unedited post that was published yesterday? Plus, he has no idea if there's a pond in Anna Karenina!]--also, Resurrection--I read Resurrection in one sitting I was so involved with it. What a fucking great writer old eccentric Leo was. And just think, he wrote all those tomes by hand--they show his many pens on his desk, quills as well as an ancient fountain pen. Ames says Tolstoy hated trains and stage coaches were so uncomfortable, he would walk from the Estate into Moscow and back. It took him seven days to make the trip each way.

So I was already up for some Russian-related reading--Soviet-related when this Montagu book was published--published, by the bye, by the old Commie publishers that were once down on Park Avenue South here in NYC, the International Publishers--

--in fact, let me pause my normal ravings at this point and give you a list of some of the old-time Commie writers we got to read back in the New Frontier/Great Society 1960s, a whole lot of 'em published by International in paper and at $1.25 each: here ya go: obviously Karl Marx and Freddie Engels; but how about W.E.B. DuBois?; or Herbert Aptheker?; let me rattle 'em off: William Z. Foster; Claude Lightfoot; Henry Winston; Ho Chi Minh; Gus Hall; Victor Perlo; Philip S. Foner; Sidney Finkelstein; Desmond Greaves; Fidel Castro; V.I. Lenin; Le Duan; Mark Twain; Yvonne Kapp; Walter Lowenfels; Maurice Cornforth; William Patterson; Benjamin Davis; Hyman Lumer; William Pomeroy; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; John Reed (before Warren Beatty bought the rights to him); Cheddi Jagan; Ernesto Guevara--and that's not all of 'em listed in International's list of authors--and, no, I've not read all of these folks but I recognize a good many of them and I have read another good many of them and I used to read some of them in magazines like Dissent, a very well-written-and-edited magazine published by A.J. Muste, an old-time NYC socialist-commie-anarchist)--

...and now back to our story:

[Russian-related reading] and especially reading about Sergei Eisenstein. Sergei Eisenstein was an amazing man. The first time I saw "The Battleship Potemkin" was in the basement depths of the old Museum of Modern(e) Art. This was back in the 80s when the MOMA one season showed all the classic Soviet films--Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mother--whewwww, lawdy lawd, what a film, what a deep dark Russian film, filmed in the real, in a peasant hut, with actors seeded amongst the real peasants, and there's this creepy Volga-boatman-like dude drinking vodka, old potato vodka, until he.... WOW! I'm not a film fan but I recognize true art when I see it no matter the medium...and at that time in my life, I preferred the black and white over color. I thought the Kodachrome process in movies (and movie cameramen use a lot of color-altering filters in their process of following the "color suggestions" of the script) was too thick; too real to the point it was unreal. I mean a camera is a magnifying glass really and when you film something like a flower to me it comes out totally staged and even though a real flower not real in the same sense as if you're looking at a flower with your naked eye. Black and white just seemed to fit my naked eyes--it let me fill in the colors with my own imagination--and in terms of this mother Mother, if it had of been done in color it would have lost its whole meaning--I think those days in peasant Russia weren't very colorful--they were much more realistic in black and white (their use of shadowings of blacks and greys and their use of fades, and also they used smoke glass filters, too, to change the daylight or eventide light, but also wide-angle sun-absorbing shots, too, some shots almost solid white in their sunlit intensity)--shown in a dark movie house on a big screen...frightening, man, frightening. You leave the theater saying, "Here, let me shoot the Czar and his whole worthless family."

After seeing Mother, I definitely made it back for The Battleship Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky [made in 1938 after Eisenstein returned to the Soviet Union] --three asskicking films--old, silent, creaky, but if scored right so powerful--like Prokofiev's brilliant score to Nevsky--I'll never get that "Battle on the Ice" scene's music out of my skull--that's heavy stuff. Prokofiev used saxophones in that scene.

But The Battleship Potemkin--whoaaaa, now that was, I mean, the direction, the camera work, the shooting off slanted roofs to get the Odessa harbor in and the camera work on the steps, the baby buggy--you gotta see this film to believe it.

And then later when I lived in Mexico City, I went one day into a dark movie house soused on mezcal, worms and all, with my chiquita by my side, and we watched a Luis Bunuel (expatriate Catalonian (he was kicked out of Spain by Franco)--was once hired by the Museum of Modern Art to restore Lennie Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, but they fired him when they found out from a book by Salvadore Dali that he was a Commie) festival (the only one I recall was Le chien du andulasia (isn't that Man Ray shaving his eyeball?)) and then I listened as my wife translated Bunuel who came out and made a little shy speech deep into which he talked about Hollywood and along with Ugarte Eisenstein there, hanging with him and Charlie Chaplin, adding that he found Eisenstein too fascinated by Capitalism and he found him not so interesting, though he did express his liking Ivan the Terrible [check out the eccentric character B. Traven for some Mexican cinematography adventure and fun--he wrote Treasure of the Sierra Madre].

The best thing I remember about that Bunuel festival was that I got to meet the American bullfighter, Sidney Franklin, there--yep, a genuine bullfighter, from Brooklyn originally, who ended up fighting his most fights in Mexico and ended up living in Mexico City, still alive and kicking when I lived there--and he later signed his photograph in my copy of Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon (I had to sell it to eat back during a cold winter in the early 1980s)--yep, Papa chose a photo of Sidney Franklin doing a veronica with a charging toro in a Madrid ring back in the 30s for his ultimate book on bullfighting--all that ever needed to be written about bullfighting as both a sport and an art via tradition. And I used to love going to plazas de los toros all over Mexico with my Tex-Mex-Choctaw-Welsh wife who all the Mexican men loved and romanticized over and gave special treatment to and allowed me to tag along as her esposo norteamericano--calling me a norteamericano when I lived and rambled about Mexico was to the Mexicans a insult lower than gringo. A lot of the interior Mexicans really didn't know what a gringo was--referring originally to US soldiers who sang the song "Green Grow the Lilacs" as they hopelessly chased General Francisco Villa [his real name was Doroteo Arango Arámbula] through the Chihuahuan desert after he'd made a successful attack on the little town of Columbus, New Mexico, where he burned half the town down and shot up the rest of it before hightailing it back across La Frontera and headin' back down into the Durango mountains he knew like the back of his hand with his Army of the North (Ejercito del Norte).

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

[To be continued]

Extra! Extra! Read All About It!
We've recently noticed an Internet site called "The Daily Beast." They are we are told a major player in new Internet journalism. We'd rather be Growlers than Beasts--wolves are beasts to backwards thinkers, same as certain humans are beasts to these same people.

Check out the scandal breaking on Eric Prince and his Teutonic Blackwater Private Armed Forces--now being accused of being murderers hired by Christian Prince Eric Prince to "wipe out any way possible all Muslim people--kill 'em, murder 'em." Eric is following the principles used by the Crusaders who went about slaughtering anybody who wasn't Christian on their way to save the Holy Grail and take Jerusalem away from the fucking A-rabbs, the Mohamedans in those days--and, yes, the Crusaders successfully captured Jerusalem--and isn't it ironic to note that when the Crusaders reigned over Jerusalem, they banned Jews from living within its walls. Isn't that interesting? The Crusaders eventually abandoned Jerusalem when they got bored and homesick and simply walked away from it, turning it back over to the Muslims (the Ottoman Empire eventually)--never ever being in the possession of the Jews until the 1967 War when Israeli forces took over and occupied the West Bank to unify Jerusalem into an Israeli city. Same ole same ole goes on.

Slick Willie in North Korea--on official business? We've since learned from Amy Goodman that Bill's adventure was paid for by a movie producer and the CEO of Dow Chemical (Dow must be wanting to do business with North Korea, you think?), after being asked to do this by good ole unimpeachable Al Gore [The Daily Howler is a great defender of Brother Al "the Bore" Gore (what happened to all his global warming activism?)--we here at The Daily Growler are not Gore defenders--we consider Al just another politician borned and reared of a politician, a politician first always and a pseudo-humanitarian later--plus who could forget Tipper Gore and her stupidity?]--rescuing the two pretty dingaling girl reporters who worked for Al Gore's world news organization (did you know Al had his own corps of young women reporters traipsing all over the world, these two "accidentally" crossing into North Korea [or how about the goofy hikers in Iraq who "accidentally" wandered into Iran--one of them a freelance US journalist]. How do these fearless kids get the papers and shit it takes to just traipse in and out of these countries where there are wars and threats of nuclear missiling Hawaii and threats of prison terms or worse if you get caught?

And now Hillbilly Hilary has been caught with her polyester suit pants down around her swollen ankles by warning Britain not to release evidence of torture by the CIA in a terrorist's Brit trial.

And how about Tony Blair being the top candidate to be president of the European Union! What's up with that? We thought Tony Blair was considered G.W. Bush's pet poodle? Why would you want such a wimp as president of the EU? Makes no sense.

And let us add, you know why Hillbilly Hilary is currently junketing all over Africa? Promoting Afro-Com, a US military presence in Africa, yes (Obama had already visited Ghana, the only African country that might be willing to allow the US to build an Afro-Com (a Bush invention) base on its soil), but also visiting Nigeria, Kenya, Angola...guess why? OIL! OIL! OIL! These countries supply both us and the Commie Chinese with oil! We recently saw a news forum in which Shell (better known as Royal Dutch Shell in Nigeria and in East Timor) (in a Malcom Lowry book where he's living on an island in the Vancouver, BC, bay he mentions that across from his cabin was a Shell refinery with a big red neoned SHELL sign on which the "S" had burnt out leaving the word "HELL" in big red glaring blinking letters wavering over the waters into Malcolm's drunken-dreaming eyes) and Chevron (Standard Oil of California originally) were defended "in their efforts to bring jobs and wealth to the Nigerian people," saying it was a humanitarian effort that places the Shell and Chevron workers and managers and big shots in dire jeopardy from local terrorist groups (yeah, the indigenous population that says that oil belongs to them and not these two giant US-government-subsidized (you better bet they are) oil companies. We the US Government, not the people, want control of all oil! Of all the world's energy! That was our main purpose invading and occupying Iraq; it is also the ulterior motive for us invading and trying to occupy Afghanistan, after the Russians warned us that trying to occupy and rule Afghanistan was hopeless and we would be bogged down there for decades if we tried, and then putting an oil company executive and puppet in as president of the new Democracy of Afghanistan! We maintain army bases in Uzbekistan and we want military bases in Georgia, too, for the same reason: OIL. We need to pipe Georgian and Uzbekistan (Central Asia is rich in oil--Kazakistan especially) oil down from the Central Asian countries through Afghanistan to get it to Europe--the EU has no oil of its own--why they want Turkey in the EU. OIL rules us. Without oil, how do we continue to war and war and war and wanting to war in more and more places?

President Obama is currently promoting military bases in Colombia.

President Obama is currently backing totally off defending exiled Honduran President Zalaya. Hilary Clinton badmouthed the guy saying he was reckless in his determination to reenter the country that elected him president by a national election we approved of. The administration is even saying now Zalaya was wrong in trying to make himself president for life--Zalaya claims the referendum he proposed was merely one asking the people if they'd back him on his effort in extending his term to a limitless state until he got the country back on its feet before holding another national presidential election. President Obama and Hillbilly Hill never referred to the coup as a coup. And now suddenly Obama is defending the coup--still not calling it a coup. We have to do this; we own Honduras; we have owned Honduras since way back before the Clintons had investments there or Obama was forced to back a dictatorship over an elected president who is not of the ruling class; Honduras is still a part of the Monroe Doctrine....

Aha, we say, that's the problem--the Power Elite of Honduras rules Honduras the same as the Power Elite of the USA rules us--our Power Elite, thanks to President Obama's reparations, now own us lock, stock, and barrel. The stock market going up recently! A SHAM! Trust us. [The stock market is controlled by hedge funders, George Soros types, the many huge pension pools that are controlled by union controllers, state controllers, or city controllers--huge pools of money the mere shifting of a small percentage of can affect the stock market's angle of ascent or descent. We the People being fooled like we are aren't aware that the Federal Reserve is currently leaking ahead to brokerage firms which companies they are fixing to give further reparations (stimulus money) to (and vice-versa, those that it's not giving reparations to) so those firms can divest themselves of companies not getting any FR stimulus money and buy up the stocks of the companies that are going to get the FR money...how sleazy is that, We the People? We are being trick bagged out of our money, our homes, our land, our drinking water--eventually we predict a corporation will start bottling and selling AIR. Look at the rash of ads on commercial television going strong 24/7 wanting to buy your gold FOR CASH (people don't know that gold is worth more than cash)--"Send us your 'old' gold...." Why would you do that? Why not take your gold to a legit appraiser and get it appraised and sell it that way?--why would you send your gold to a bunch of scammers? Like say what if you send one of these chislers your old college 14K gold ring--with real rubies and stones in a lot of them--and one of these 'We own our own refinery' crooks sends you back a twenty dollar bill? 14K gold high school and college rings sell on eBay for $300 or more. Wake up We the People! We're being Bernie-Madoffed by our own government! Wait until the HMOs start an human organ stock market!

thestaff
for The Daily Growler