A pipe going to an outdoor faucet cracked last week and leaked water all over the storage room of our basement. In the process of hauling out soaked cardboard boxes, I discovered a treasure trove of ephemera left inside an Old Milwaukee carton by the previous owners that included: an ancient telegraph key, a lineman's phone, a slide rule in a beautiful green case, a box full of petrified wood, and best of all, envelopes full of European coins from the 1920s and 30s! There was also a small collection of sales tax tokens from Missouri and Kansas.

In other news, I picked up the Ramones documentary, End of the Century. It was a fairly absorbing look at the lives of the 4 anti-Beatles from Queens with bowl haircuts who hated each others' guts with a passion.

What I found more interesting than the inter-band conflict, was how this film reminded me of seeing them for the first time. If you weren't there, then it's hard to imagine just how utterly revolutionary their music and stage show was in 1976. Nobody played 2 minute songs with no guitar solos. Nobody sang songs about pinheads, beating up kids with baseball bats, and sniffing glue. Nobody looked or sounded anything like them. My friends and I didn't know whether to laugh hysterically or bow down and worship them. Actually, I think we did both.

I also picked up the special DVD edition of Tim Burton's Ed Wood. I have to confess that I'm really not a Tim Burton fan; I usually find his films too self-consciously wacky for my tastes, and I'll never forgive him for the "Aperaham Lincoln" ending of his abysmal Planet of the Apes remake. However, his directorial excesses work well when applied to the over-the-top character of Ed Wood and his stable of misfit actors. Martin Landau's Oscar-winning portrayal of Bela Lugosi is a thing of horrible beauty.