RDCanecutter

Professor Taco Bell kicks ass and takes names.

Fuck school.

White Supremacist, huh? He got some bad branding advice-- he could have been a big deal in the Vampire cosplay world.

My NSF course, by the end they had us riding around like trained circus animals doing circus tricks. Except for the dudes who didn't listen. They got let go. One of their techniques saved me from a bingle the very day after the course.

If she's really rich, why doesn't she have live-in servants to prepare her something better than Instacart ground-beef Tex-Mex? #30000DollarHeiress

Mama take de live crawdad, th'ow it in a pot o' bawlin wawta.

Missed a great opportunity to give it a Millennium Falcon dash-board rap.

I do. They seem quite competent, unlike Hero Driver of story. Go hold him, comfort him, whisper words of managerial wisdom a hair's breath away from his sweaty ear-lobe.

We don't order shitty food from guys who can't get real jobs, Pussy McPussins.

You're a pussy and the driver's a pussy too.

What makes you think the guy is a rapper? Maybe he just naturally rhymes.

I'm mission-oriented but I'm gonna need more meth.

What if they feel that they cannot raise their sword against their fellow Californians?

So if you tell em you're a meth-head, the Army promotes you straight up to Captain? Dammit dammit dammit why didn't I ever know this stuff.

The Great Alabama Coin Recon Recap Apologies to Hank Williams Sr. and his friends and family. He did not pass away on US 31 headed to Nashville. He was way up in the East Tennessee-Bristol VA area, so I am guessing US 11 but don't know. Maybe US 31 was for happier times because it was the main route from his home-base in Montgomery to Nashville. In his own precious-metal fashion, Hank returned in a silver coffin to his mother's boarding house in Montgomery for what may have been the largest funeral in the state before or since. My dad, a fan, was there. "I saw him on the stage and in the casket." The metal all weighed out to proper specs, and I don't see any reason to worry about that. It brightened up nicely when I did the baking-soda-aluminum-foil-and-hot-water trick, a non-abrasive non-toxic way to transfer tarnish away. If you want a demo on how to do it, ask and I will show. The Samurai is the sort of thing I used to flog on eBay for about double spot, mainly just to drive views to the hundreds of other collectibles I had listed. But by itself it would hardly be worth it even if I got 40 bucks, with fees and such it might be $5 profit for an hour's work. I'll throw it in a drawer and let my son sell it to get whatever he wants one day. Buffalo really brightened up, Onza is spectacular and brings me joy. Faux-Peace-Dollar is still fugly, it'll be the first to sell if I need some cash. 90% is just 90%, bless its heart. I guess you'd still get Secret Service protection if somebody tried to make fakes.

It was fun. I realized that I'd had weeks and weeks of "work days," even when I don't work all that hard. It was good to have a dedicated fun day. Plus there's just no substitute for getting out and seeing stuff in person.

They tried to turn their own lack of craftmanship into anger at you. You could have gone away, or just stopped laughing, and their shitty flag rack would still be a shitty flag rack. But it's good that you laughed.

Saw in the NYT this morning, Brett Stephens mentioned that maybe the penalty judgement would "knock the fake out of Lake." I laughed. But no. It won't. It can't. She could maybe shift into an atonement grift, but it'll still be a grift.

What'd you think would happen when you decided to have a real name, hhm?

STORE 5: Alabama Gold Refinery in Homewood Sitting almost exactly at the population center of the Birmingham Metro, and walking distance from some of the wealthiest neighborhoods, we find the hidden gem of Alabama Gold Refinery. When the owner first opened, he pioneered having a website full of by-the-minute-accurate buy and sell prices. Not long after, he was the one leaning on the politicians to scrap taxes on bullion. I personally appreciate these deeds and it doesn't hurt that he paid me 50 bucks for an 18 karat earring my wife found on a walk. The vibe is an upscale jewelry shop, with fine watches, art work, and yes, a fair supply of gold and silver. They don't really do the 90% thing, but have plenty of bullion including hand-poured. Since this 70 mile trip is winding down, I'll relax with something timeless. I grub through a tray of generic, then tell them they accidentally left a Peace Dollar in there. They didn't. I'm wrong. it's a faux-Peace-Dollar one-ounce bullion round. I choose it to do penance for my false pride. $27.67 and my change are brilliant coins from a proof set.

STORE 4: Southern Coin and Collectible in Hoover For the rest of our journey we stay on US 31, the old north-south route that Hank Williams Sr was riding to Nashville on when he up and died. Nobody's listening to Hank Williams on this road today, they are listening to auto-tuned mumbling. I won't abide that. But I also don't much like Hank's music. I DO like Southern Culture on the Skids. If you don't, just hum you some Hank instead of clicking on S.C.O.T.S. Southern Coin is the biggest coin store in the area, a multi-generational concern packed with interesting artifacts, stuff like D. B. Cooper money, antique weapons, jewelry, and of course every kind of coin. It is the closest place here to getting to sit in on an episode of Pawn Stars, and for that reason I always let other people go first so I can be a fly on the wall. When I arrive there are three people selling, one has jewelry and seems like he must be a sub-contractor, another are a father and son selling silver Eagles and similar, and a third has 8 gold ounces. "2200 each for the gold," says the owner. "But that's not spot," says the customer. "It's higher than 99% of the country is paying, and it's what I can afford to pay now. If we don't sell them right away, we melt them, sell them to guys who'll pay us 1% more. I never thought I'd see us melt Eagles." It's true but hard to take. In earlier spikes nobody got full melt until the craziness settled down. But maybe the guy bought them a lot under 2,200. When it's my turn I pick out a samurai art bar by Golden State Mint. I bet it comes from the 80s when we were all supposed to read "The Book of Five Rings." It's 29. the Owner rings me up and says it's $28. Southern Coin does the complete sales wrap-up with receipts, even ceremonially listing sales tax even though it's 0% on coins and bullion since one of our politicians changed that years back.

STORE 3: Alabama Coin Shop in Pelham As we swing south of Birmingham everything turns green and bucolic, pleasant green hills and most places named after English villages so we enjoy some proper motoring, hardly ever drifting into the left lane, what. Then we come over a last ridge, t-bone into US 31 and a flat spot where they decapitated a small mountain, and there sits our first 100% coin store of the day, Alabama Coin Shop. It's a Spartan place, 3 or 4 cases of coins and room to look at them, which is now taken up by a man searching stacks of pennies, another one eyeing gold coins, and me, like Goldilocks, just right with the silver. The owner's got generic for 27, Silver Eagles for 30, and if anybody in town is underselling him, he wants us to tell him so he can beat their prices. There's quick turnover, high energy. He tells us how he just sold a 1997 Libertad to a dude for $200, didn't even have to eBay it. I think of my dozen-or-so Libertads at home. [spoiler, no 1997s.] When I ask him about 90%, he's selling it for melt. No-brainer! $1.40 face (1 ounce) for 25 bucks. Actually a smidge under melt. I cursed my 1 ounce per store plan. But it was time to move back up US 31 towards Birmingham. https://bobsykes.com/

INTERLUDE: Downtown Bessemer Car care, Tracker had not lost very much oil. RDCanecutter Care, I bulked up on some fried catfish that slapped. As I bit into it, Theme from Shaft came out of the speakers. Found a We Buy Gold place full of antique sewing machines, apparently only open on Sundays. I wonder what metallic oddities have been accumulating in their safe since the 1920s. But now is the time to turn our path back circling east, through the hills and far away.

STORE 2: Coin Castle West Bessemer is the Chester to Birmingham's Philadelphia. We head down the Bessemer Superhighway, which was quite advanced in its industrial heyday. There are still lots of trains and factories that make solid heavy things. Yet there is calm in the air. Coin Castle West is the survivor of a once multi-store family operation going back at least 50 years. The family have included new (and probably much more lucrative) operations such as vinyl banners and embroidering, so on any visit you'll hear the energy of robot minions clattering away. Yet it is still a coin store-- stacks of coins, interesting coins, slope like dunes in glass cases. The brother handles the coin buys and sales with aplomb. Once he rounded up a sale to me by one dollar after tossing a Barber Dime on the pile. Today, after gently working with an elder who'd come in with a clad Bicentennial Quarter, He showed me a pile of loose rounds for 28 and eagles for more. Peeking out of the top was one of my favorite coins, a 1979 Mexican sterling silver Onza. $28. Trato hecho. If I hadn't had a 1 oz limit per store, I'd have dug more cool stuff out of that pile. Such is typical of this store.

STORE 1: Hueytown Pawn & Coin Guns Utility Trailers If you don't hear Drive By Truckers in your head when you exit onto the Allison-Bonnett Memorial Drive into Hueytown, I don't know how to help you. Hueytown Pawn and Coin is basically a gun store with some used powertools as well. So I had fun talking about guns. Finally asked them if they had coins, the guy directed me to a square-foot area with maybe a dozen ounces in bars and rounds. I was suddenly seized by the realization that, no matter how honest these guys undoubtedly were, they didn't do enough volume to justify buying testing equipment. I even asked if they had 90% to cover my ass, but they were out that day. But I was on a mission for Surly, so I bit the bullet and chose a rather drowned-looking milky Buffalo round for $29. They were pleasant, this was my first visit but I'd come poke around again for a chainsaw and maybe more coins. They were just barely a coin store, but probably this is what most of America has nearby in smaller towns,