As you may know, vinyl is making a comeback; I think it's on at least its fifth comeback since CDs came in and gave it something to come back from. But there's still the glory of used records, and it turns out that Lansing has a used record show with dealers pulling tables full of boxes over and setting them up in the meeting halls of the Quality Inn. And it's almost in walking distance; how could we resist? Of course we wouldn't.
The shows --- there's one every couple months --- are free, at least if you don't want to get in extra early when you have to get up in the morning. We didn't care about getting in that early, and didn't worry that the best stuff might be picked over. If we found anything interesting we'd be ahead of the game, and in several meeting rooms with a dozen vendors and hundreds of boxes among them, and of course we would. For example, I found an early 60s comic album from Gene Wood, ``What Would Have Happend If'', that promises to take history in wacky new directions. This amounts to a lot of one- and two-minute sketches, riffing on historic scenes (Columbus calling out to the New World about how he's discovered them, and the woman on shore yelling back, ``You haven't discovered anything! This is Spain and I'm Queen Isabella and you're fired!'') and, at the point where the Stan Freberg sketch would begin, moving on to the next. Any one bit is funny enough, although all in a row the similarity in structure and lack of development gets wearying.
As mentioned, I have the power to make freakishly odd things appear. In this case it was only mildly weird: a 1978 Hanna-Barbera album of Augie Doggy and Doggy Daddy, Wilma Flintstone, and Snagglepuss reading various fairy tales (plus The Wizard of Oz). Because apparently that's just what was important to Hanna-Barbera in 1978 or something. It's actually less odd than the title suggests: the stories are told pretty much straight, in short but non-fractured form, and it's just the oddness of the premise that really stands out.
In other ironic purchases, 
bunny_hugger got a Slim Whitman record featuring Slim on the cover looking like nothing so much as a Saturday Night Like sketch about Slim Whitman, probably with Will Ferrell doing the impersonation.
Towards the end of the show we overheard some of the record shop owners talking, with one mentioning in short order 9/11, Ronald Reagan, Reagan firing the Air Traffic Controllers, the New World Order, and something about how ``it worked; they all got richer, didn't they?'' So we had a good idea when it was time to leave, besides from dealers packing up and taking their stuff out.
Trivia: International Olympics Committee President Jacques Rogge warned Vancouver, ahead of a plebiscite to determine public support for the city's bid, that anything less than a 60 percent favorable vote would kill the chances for the city getting the 2010 games. 64 percent of the voters (which were 46 percent of the electorate) voted in favor of the games. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle. (So, I really like the idea of the Olympics, but I have a hard time finding anything likable about the running of the games. The IOC has a non-seedy side somewhere, doesn't it?)
Currently Reading: Blackout, Connie Willis.