You know what chaps my hide? I mean, besides plant vandalism, of which I was a victim this week.
Not even sure that sentence is properly constructed.
Anyway, I’ll get to the real point of my post in just a second, but first I want to yell for a minute about the lame thugs of Old Town who tore all the leaves off my newly planted banana pepper plant.
Who does this? And why? And why stop just there? We also have a lovely and tender new Roma tomato plant just waiting to grow and fill its’ metal tomato cage. And what about my jalapeno plant? Why not just rip it out like you did my heart? Don’t even get me started on the herbs. But I suppose this vandal was too damn scared to walk up into the walkway and tear at the leaves of my mint and basil. The rosemary is far too scary, since it’s protected by the very thorny rose bush.
No, you just stood by the little garden box in front of our house and adjacent to the sidewalk and picked the leaves off my banana pepper. Did you know that we’ve never tried to grow banana peppers and we were so excited to see if we’d be any good at it? But no. You were probably standing around, talking to another one of your thuggy friends and needed something to do with your hands. Ugh. It really has made me so very, very sad.
Although, I guess I should be glad you didn’t just poop in my backyard.
RIP banana pepper. Or, better yet, fight. Prove us all wrong and fight your way back.
OK, now that that’s out of the way (I really didn’t expect to get so emotional on that). We at the XFE-PoeLog abode love us a little show called Storage Wars on A&E. Actually, we love both the original and the Texas edition. I can’t exactly even say which one I love better. I love them both equally.
But one thing that really confounds me is Dave Hester’s pricing. Dave, if you don’t watch the show, is kind of the resident jerk. He’s a teensy bit evil. He likes to run up other bidders just for the fun of it. He’s got a huge ego, and he wears a black shirt and hat, and likes to smirk a lot. He’s like the NeNe of the Storage Wars world – he’s loud, and conniving and confrontational, and annoying as all get out, but the show would be a lot less fun without him.
When Dave starts going through a storage locker and pricing the items for what he thinks they’ll sell for in his shop or auction house, he seems to just be pulling some very large prices out of thin air.
We were watching an old episode from season two last night in which Dave bought a unit that hadn’t been touched in 20 years. In it, he found a trunk that had some Italian travel stickers on it. Inside the trunk were a whole bunch of cheap disposable Christmas ornaments. Bummer. But in a nearby box, he finds a whole bunch of really tacky old yellowing lace curtains. Putting zero and nothing together, Dave surmises that these are in fact rare lace pieces made in Murano by blind nuns or something, and therefore are worth about $1,000.
Bull. Malarky. This guy overprices EVERYTHING. There was another episode where he found some old decrepit fur coats and declared he was going to get $200 a piece for them. Another time he found two guitars and said he could get $600 a piece for them. He inflates the value of every single item just so it looks like he’s made a profit, no matter what.
That’s way more annoying than him driving up the prices or making last minute bids.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he does sell that stuff for the prices he quotes. According to the Storage Wars Wikipedia page, Dave has made a profit of $3.26 for every dollar he’s spent over the first two seasons of the show, far outpacing anyone else.
But I’m also not the only one out there who questions Dave’s pricing. As these guys over at Grantland put it:
Also, as long as I have your attention, producers, how about a little accountability? If I have to watch Darrell look at an old Xbox and say, “That’s a 50 dollar bill” one more time, I’m going to throw my remote control through my television.
Maybe Dave has some sort of banana pepper alarm system he could sell me for a couple of thousand dollars.
That…was hilarious! We also watch that show constantly and you have Dave pegged. We don’t like the Texas version quite as well yet, but it’s just a matter of time I’m sure…
He’s entertaining for sure, but he does make you yell at the TV. The Texas version is ok, not as good as the original, but some pretty funny characters just the same.