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Thursday, September 15, 2005

Charity Auction: A Smashing Success

My buddy Al Hallonquist and I are co-moderators of the Astronaut Yahoo Group with about 500 members. The prime focus of the group is collecting astronaut related memorabilia.

As I mentioned a few days ago, Al and I decided to run a Hurricane Katrina Charity Auction. Group members would donate items to the auction with 100% of the proceeds going to the Red Cross or Salvation Army. We ended up with over 80 lots donated to the auction. We opened the auction to group members and/or anyone else that found about it on the various space collecting sites. I created the webpage and updated it with the bids every night.

The auction closed last night with $5,170 in charitable bids!! A smashing success. When we started last week we were hoping for a few grand at best.

I'm still on Cloud 9. ;-)

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Word Verification

Unfortunately, I had to add the word verification security feature for those that want to leave comments. Sorry for the extra step, but I was getting "comment spam"... much of it from these losers. This shady website was leaving spam links in all of my entries that mentioned PSA/DNA.

Fantastic Four 60 Newsstand Price Variant

Since I fell out of the running very quickly on this one, I don't mind drawing attention to the auction.

This is the first copy I've seen on eBay in over a year of looking. The results should be interesting.

What's odd is there is almost no interest in the other newsstand price variants. This issue was a 9 cent promotional issue in comic book stores, yet it is no more rare than the other newsstand variants. Whoever said collectors were logical?

Astronaut Group Charity Auction for the Victims of Hurricane Katrina

Al Hallonquist and I are organizing a charity auction of space memorabilia for the Victims of Hurricane Katrina. Many members of the Yahoo Groups Astronauts List were kind enough to donate items and shipping to the auction, and all proceeds will go to the Red Cross and Salvation Army.

As of this writing, bids are up to $3,800... we are hoping to hit $5,000 by the time the auction closes tomorrow night.

You don't have to be a member of the Astronauts Yahoo group to bid... the auction is open to anyone. For more details, visit the auction webpage.

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

So Trivial

Like most folks, I've been caught up on the horrible news from the Gulf Coast. I haven't posted because a) I haven't been inspired, and b) it almost seems wrong considering the horror some of my fellow Americans are living right now.

I know life must go on, but events like this should make us all pause and reflect on what's truly important. And collecting funny books, gadgets, ink on paper and the like really seems so trivial at a time like this.

September 11, 2001 was a life changing day in my life. I know what many of these people will be going through psychologically in the days, months and years to come. Sadly, there will be many who feel that the dead were the "lucky" ones. There will be many, many suicides, drug and alcohol problems and a whole gamut of post traumatic stress issues.

While helping these people now is critical to their immediate survival, they will need our help and attention for many years to come to battle the inevitable long term issues.

Let's not forget.