This afternoon and evening saw me listing on eBay several fistfuls of vacuum tubes left over from Dad’s estate, that have been sitting around in a box waiting for me to get off my duff and do something about them. I got stuck last year when I couldn’t find a tube tester to check which ones were good and which bad, but thanks to the kindness of the guy who owns the stereo shop where I take my turntables when they go URRRK!, and who keeps five different tube testers because he sells tube audiophile equipment, I was able to test just about everything, pitch thirty or forty that were bad, and determine for certain the other 119 were real, working tubes. There are still a few I couldn’t find the correct settings to test—a 46, a 0A2, a 5651WA, a 2050W, a 6T5, and an MX-408/A (dual-grid power amplifier, gaseous voltage regulator, voltage-reference, xenon-gas tetrode, cat’s-eye tuner, and ballast, respectively, if there are any tube-heads reading). The handy part of selling all these tubes is that I can use the same canned copy, only changing a sentence or two that describes exactly which tubes are in each lot. I can see I ain’t gonna get them all listed out tonight, which is fine; it’s easier on me if I have auctions that close over a period of days, so the packing and shipping don’t all hit in a lump when they do hit.
I only wish it was going to be so easy to come up with copy for a collection of high Cold War-era Civil Defense and nuclear-attack preparedness booklets I want to sell; I can’t seem to get the right degree of archness and camp into it, and I certainly don’t want to play this one seriously to the alarmists, the paranoid, and the militias.
Steven Spielberg controls the sinister scraper. Fnord.
