BobBlock

You know what they say, "there's no accounting for stupidity"

I've found that 1st class is just as fast as priority. So, I only use priority if it is over 14 ounces and they force me to. The people at the Post Office get pissy if use a plain box for priority and then don't put those red, white and blue priority mail stickers all over it.

My wife is a farrier and has clients all over the State. But she has a lot in Newtown. The pony club my son belongs to is in Newtown, my wife's trail club is in Newtown, and a lot my wife's horsey friends are there as well. Her text to me at 9:59AM this morning: "Im in Newtown and cops just flew by. anything on the news?"

Please say a prayer for the families up in Newtown. And hug your children. Sandy Hook Elementary School is less than 10 miles from our house. My kids' schools have been locked down most of the day. I'll be hugging my kids when I get home tonight.

Boy those look familiar Glad that you are pleased with your winnings Gary. I'd like to announce that all bidders have now paid, except for two. All packages have already gone to the Post Office, so anyone who hasn't received theirs yet, will get them in the next day or two. Consignor checks will be mailed on Saturday morning. I'll be finishing up the cataloguing of the next auction this weekend. I'm going to have to run the next one on iCollector again. My software developer has been MIA since early last week and is not returning phone calls, so he is not going to make the December 20 contract date to get my live site up and running. I'll end up dropping him next week for breach. I'm currently interviewing new developers and we should be back on track shortly. If you want to see the Ebay-style marble site that I'm opening, go visit www.themarblemart.com. It's pretty much ready to go, I had several people testing it over the past week and we seem to have fixed most of the bugs. I currently have a web guy working on a new skin for it. His exact comment was "the skin you have on there sucks". My response was that I'm an accountant not a web designer. But that doesn't change the operation of the site, just the look and feel. I'll be posting items on there next week, I'm trying to get the December MarbleCollecting.com newsletter done first.

Does the HxTAL fluoresce when it is dry?

I don't know if Joe Bourque is still around, but he had become friends with Clinton Israel before Master Glass was closed, and knew a lot of the history of Akro and Master Marble/Glass. So, if someone is still in contact with him, you might be able to get the full story. Joe bought a lot of the remaining stock of Master when they closed in 1971. The Akro and Hero Unique boxes were part of this, and they slowly dribbled out onto the market over the next 20 years or so. From what I've been able to piece together from various sources over the past 30 years, and some of this is speculation, the Heros and Uniques were never marketed as such by Akro. I've always thought that the marbles were short runs produced for Master Marble by Akro and Master actually stenciled the names Hero and Unique on the boxes. it is possible that Master then never actually sold the stock boxes, and they remained in the warehouse until the company closed. Has anyone ever seen a damaged Hero stock box? I think they never made it to retail. The fact that Master boxes have now turned up with the Hero stencil on them supports this theory.

The auction is this Sunday, so I figured I'd bump this up. You can get a PDF of the catalogue at http://www.blocksite.com/marble-auctions/block-s-marble-cyberauctions/ The online catalogue, bidder registration and absentee bidding is on iCollector at http://www.icollector.com/auction.aspx?as=24642 The Live Auction will be on iCollector on Sunday night starting at 8PM NYC time. The iCollector auction room is at http://www.icollector.com/bidlive/?as=24642. You can bring up the page that has the auction room on the left side of the screen and the chat room on the right side of the screen at http://www.marblecyberauction.com/index_chat.htm Thanks.

If you look closely at the images, you can see a light brown "wash" that is over the whole marble under the paint. It was applied to the sphere prior to painting to make it appear "aged". You don't see this on real scenics.

Assuming it is not a Scott Patrick fantasy, then it is actually an Akro oxblood corkscrew and is rarer than an egg yolk.

LOL. I was stuffing the turkey yesterday afternoon and my youngest boy (9 years old) was watching me. All of the sudden he yells out to the middle boy (11 years old) in the other room, "Ben, dad's stuffing celery and carrots up the turkey's butt! I'm not eating that!". True story.

Happy Thanksgiving

LOL. The two principals of Schiffer Publishing and my Dad all seem to have their wires crossed. Pete thinks the update to Marble Collectors Handbook should be next, Nancy thinks 100 Great Marbles is next and my Dad thinks the Akro/Peltier book is next. The all seem to think that I can write three books simultaneously while working a full time job and running monthly marble auctions. Which I find very amusing because they all keep insisting that I'm working on THEIR project. The order of the books is Marble Collectors Handbook (delivery to publisher Dec 15) 100 Great Marbles Akro/Peltier So, in answer to your question, I'll start working on it after the holidays with a delivery April 15 to the publisher.

I sent out the November issue of the MarbleCollecting.com Newsletter this afternoon. The lead article is about Marbles recovered from Shipwrecks. If you are not on the mailing list and want to read the article, the newsletter is located here. http://us6.campaign-...4&id=7c74267c6e

A buff will fix problem right up :-)

A gooseberry is a coreless swirl where the subsurface layer (only decoration) is a cage of evenly spaced white strands. Gooseberry brown is the most common, but they also come in clear, blue, amber and green.

They value their privacy, because the owner name is blocked on Whois

Thanks mysterious person who changed the topic title for me :-)

Oops, I put the wrong date in the title. Could one of the moderators change the date in the title to 12/9/12? Or delete the topic and I'll start a new one. Thanks.

The catalogue for Marble CyberAuction #1105, which will be held on December 9, 2012, is now uploaded and online. You can view it at http://www.icollecto...n.aspx?as=24642 Here's a few tidbits from the auction:

After the first couple of days you sort of get it into a groove. Water? We have a stream running through the south side of the property (we have 7 acres), so we carried buckets of water up from there for the first couple of days. We have 4 horses here, so the problem after Day 2 was getting water for them. The houses up in front of us have city water, so they had water pressure. As it became apparent that we would be out for a while (the town started over 90% out) we went out and bought several hundred feet of hose, moved the trough to the corner of the property closest to them and connected to one of their outside outlets. Now I have more hoses then I'll ever need (until we get another storm). Bathing? My parents and my wife's parents live the next town over in Trumbull. My parents lost power for 7 days, my inlaws didn't get power back until after us, 10 days. My parents have a gas furnace. While the furnace couldn't circulate water to the base boards, because the circulating pump is electric, they did have hot water due to city water pressure. So we went there for showers. Heat? We luckily have a wood burning stove in the playroom downstairs. We slept upstairs for the first two days, but the temperature in the house got down below 50 degrees inside the house both nights. So, we moved all the mattresses downstairs in front of the stove. The bigger issue was my parents, who are approaching 80. They had no heat and it got awfully cold at night there. They're stubborn and refused to leave. On Day 6 the temperature outside at night fell into the 20's. Luckily they got power back on Day 7, because we were about to forcibly move them to one of my brother's houses (they both got power back on Day 6). After sundown? Candles, flashlights, books, legos. We ran out of sterno for cooking on the 5th day. I was finally able to restock yesterday. I would highly recommend getting some of those new LED flashlights. I had bought some over the summer and I only had to change the batteries once around Day 6. It's amazing how long the batteries last in them! Cell phones, ipods? We recharged them in the cars. Note of warning, don't continuously recharge cell phones and ipods for more than a day without starting the car. I did it for two days straight at the beginning and had trouble getting the car started. Passable roads? We didn't drive out until the third day. Our road was blocked by trees for the first two days. It took them 7 days to remove the tree that was cantilevered over the end of our driveway on the power lines which freaked my wife out ever time we drove under it. I've posted pictures elsewhere here. Gasoline? Power was restored to the main street on one side of town by day 3, downtown didn't get power til day 5. I've emailed with Pete of Land of Marbles a few times. He lives down on the south side of Queens and is having a lot of trouble finding gas (even yesterday). They went to rationing last week (not sure what took Bloomberg so long). Kids with no computer/tv? School was cancelled for a week. Our kids are limited to one hour tv and one hour ipod a day, so it wasn't too much of a hardship for them. We substituted in 2 hours ipod which we recharged in the cars. The bigger hardship for them was that we had no wifi so my two youngest couldn't connect their ipods to play Minecraft. My oldest does mostly texting and the cell towers were functioning. During the day it was light enough in the house to not have to worry about seeing. It was an interesting experience, I'm sure my kids will remember it the way that I remember the 1964 blackout. But, this is the third time in 14 months we've lost power for an extended period of time (5 days in Storm Irene, 6 days in the Halloween storm last year and now 8 days), so I'm getting a propane powered generator installed.

Eight days without power, running water or furnace heat. We were lucky though. Only lost the contents of the fridge/freezer and the fish in the fish tanks. On the plus side, my wife and I spent a week sleeping with our kids because we hauled all the mattresses down to the lower level and slept in front of the wood burning stove.

Funny, someone emailed me about Hoover comic marbles a week or so ago. They are awfully rare, about as rare as Cotes and Tom Mix. I have seen less than a half dozen. The last one I sold at auction was at a Clum auction years ago (Les Jones was there, so that tells you how long ago it was). Unfortunately, I don't recall what it sold for.

January 12, 2013. Indianapolis Marble Show. Comfort Inn & Suites at the Pyramids, Indianapolis IN 317-875-7676. Contact Beth Morris 765-438-2318. The full marble show calendar is at http://www.marblecollecting.com/marble-community/marble-show-calendar/

I saw this marble in person last summer when I was in the UK. the pictures do not do it justice!