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November 21, 2009

Dwain Walden The Moultrie Observer Sat Nov 21, 2009, 10:28 PM EST

What is it that makes the property of villains so valuable on the open market? And I’m not just talking about jewerly, cars, boats and gun collections. No sir, I’m talking about unopened packs of gum, Zippo cigarette lighters and bent butter knives.

My question comes about because in the recent auction of Bernie Madoff’s property, stuff you could pick up for four or five bucks at a yard sale sold for hundreds and even thousands of dollars at auction. A couple of Igloo coolers sold for $250 and a tree stump that had been made into a table brought $80.

Now the guy who bought the stump said he thought it might be crammed full of cash — some of that cash Madoff stole from his Ponzi investors. My guess is, when he cracked that stump open, all he found were some acorns, much to the chagrin of a couple of squirrels.

I suppose these would be conversation pieces.

“Yep, that’s ole Bernie’s cooler all right. I lost my refrigerator and freezer in his scandal, and I thought I might need something to put my bologna in.”

Apparently some people have trouble distinguishing between famous and infamous. They both can get you lots of publicity. But one in particularly can also get you jail time.

The money from the auction supposedly will be doled out to the people ole Bernie swindled. But given the many billions he stole, what the auction brought wouldn’t finance a decent picnic for the whole lot. I guess it’s the thought that counts.

Routinely I get calls from stock brokers from Chicago and New York who call me by my first name like we used to be fishing buddies. And of course they introduce themselves with only their first names, like I might give them my last can of Vienna sausage if we were fishing a bream bed.

Well, that’s a dead giveaway that they are trying to sleight-of-hand me. They are trying to make me comfortable with folksy conversation. What they don’t know is that when anybody talks to me about money, I sit on a very sharp stick. So if you can come up with some words that will distract me from the terrible pain, then you might have a chance of me hearing you out. It’s not a technique they teach in college, but I’m telling you it works.

The offer I got this week was from some guy trying to get me to invest in a movie production. I told him that I had 92 channels on my television, a video store just down the road, a multi-plex theater across town and a great memory of Randolph Scott and Johnny Mack Brown ... I could invest in movies without leaving the county. Or I could just close my eyes and replay movies that dated back to a time when cowboys named their horses and played guitars while they rode them. (I never could figure out where the full orchestra sound was coming from though. They must have been hiding behind the cactus).

I passed on that one. Thank God for sharp sticks.

So I did not buy any of Bernie’s stuff. I’ve already got two big coolers. I was tempted by the stump table though. But I got to looking at it more closely and it would have taken one of Sarah Palin’s just-released books to level one side of it. (Dwain Walden is editor/publisher of The Moultrie Observer. Email: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com)

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