The Fribble Hunt

Since the weather was a little rainy yesterday the Commander and Lord Kadizzle decided to go to Sedona and entertain ourselves by wandering around the stores. We made the mistake of going into the heart of the fribble sales district. What is a fribble? Fribbles are the things you buy that have no practical use or value. For some strange reason when a person goes on vacation they feel compelled to buy some silly object that they can take home. Surely someone will come by and say "Where did you get that?". Then you reply, "When we were in Sedona, I saw this wonderful little shop...." The fribble industry is amazing. Ideally you have fribbles made from local junk. In the southwest this can be an old branding iron or whatever. I have always been amazed that just about anywhere you go in the Southwest you can buy large chunks of crystal glass. Since I am from West Virginia, I know where these come from. West Virginia makes a lot of high quality crystal. At a certain time they have to clean out the furnace that melts the glass. When they do, they end up with huge chunks of crystal, which are essentially garbage in West Virginia. However, in the Southwest fribble shops they look like huge uncut diamonds. So the fribble shops display them on a table, and make no claim as to what they are. Fribble hunters see them and pay five to ten dollars for glass that is dumped as garbage in West Virginia. So it goes. The commander and I have been thinking about getting into the fribble business. While hunting in North Dakota we noticed an old pickup truck full of partially decomposed buffalo skulls. In the Southwest we have come to find that the skulls sell for as much as $100 a piece. If you decorate them the price can approach one thousand. Following the principle that garbage in one state is treasure in another we may go into the fribble business.

Mexican fribbles drive me nuts. The commander has a weakness for Mexican fribbles. Someone in every tourist town has figured out that you can always sell Mexican fribbles. You simply go to Mexico and pick up truckloads of "art" made by starving Mexicans and bring it back to the states. When I used to do industrial work I was always amazed that Mexican junk dealers would come to North Dakota and pick up a truck load of industrial steel scrap. In the Southwest you can see what left North Dakota at $25 a ton has returned to Arizona for $25 dollars a pound as a modern art version of a Mexican playing a guitar, and we have the audacity to call these people stupid and lazy.