{"id":5657,"date":"2018-01-06T16:54:06","date_gmt":"2018-01-06T22:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tampaseo.expert\/focus\/?p=5657"},"modified":"2018-01-06T16:54:06","modified_gmt":"2018-01-06T22:54:06","slug":"ducks-trucks-hundred-bucks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tampaseo.expert\/focus\/2018\/01\/06\/ducks-trucks-hundred-bucks\/","title":{"rendered":"Ducks, Trucks, and a Few Hundred Bucks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Celine Sparks<\/strong><br \/>\n<em>American Pickers<\/em> sounds like something I would tell my kids not to do in public.\u00a0 It turns out that it&#8217;s a growing form of entertainment where you watch people pull over on side roads and scavenge through piles of dirty boat motors and Harley parts.<br \/>\nIf you grew up poor and proud of it like we did, the scene is too familiar.\u00a0 It just kind of looks like Thanksgiving at an uncle&#8217;s house, but get this \u2013 the stars of the show are trying to buy some of this trash, as in, with money.<br \/>\nAn owner cuts through the field in a Bondo-ed four-wheeler, and the negotiations begin.<br \/>\n&#8220;How much for this swing set pole?&#8221;<br \/>\n&#8220;450.&#8221;<br \/>\n&#8220;I&#8217;ll give you twenty bucks.&#8221;<br \/>\n&#8220;Make it twenty-two, and it&#8217;s yours.&#8221;<br \/>\nThey then hop into their van, and talk about how much money they&#8217;re going to make.\u00a0 This is all very interesting, I mean, when compared to the fishing show.<br \/>\nNow it is a fundamental principle of television science that once a show accomplishes a broad viewing (as in the entire membership of the <em>Wrastling Tee Shirts Which Are Just a Hair too Short Collectors International<\/em>), then other networks follow suit and produce a show which is unbelievably exactly like the other network&#8217;s show, but with a different title.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s why <em>The Partridge Family<\/em> was able to succeed because it was <em>exactly <\/em>like <em>The Brady Bunch<\/em>, only there was one less kid, the stairs were enclosed, and the mom cut off the flippy curl part of the hairdo.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s why <em>America&#8217;s Got Talent <\/em>and <em>The Voice<\/em> all have three unique (for lack of a better word) judges just like the other show, one of these judges being extremely abrasive, and for some reason, British.<br \/>\nSo when it comes to sorting through someone else&#8217;s trash and paying for it, the networks caught on quickly, and pretty soon we&#8217;re seeing people haggle at pawn stores and fights are breaking out at storage pods over things that can&#8217;t be seen because face it, people, the door is closed!\u00a0 Just saying, that if it&#8217;s like most of the storage pods I&#8217;ve ever had the horrible lot fall to me to go move the contents of, I&#8217;m thinking somebody ought to be on the other side of that door paying you to even take a look.\u00a0 Think about it.\u00a0 This thing is filled with the stuff a person does not want seen in his house.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s in there anymore than the next guy, but if I were a betting woman, ten bucks says it&#8217;s a waterbed and a box of puffy Christmas sweaters.\u00a0 Take a lesson from <em>Lets Make a Deal<\/em>, people.\u00a0 Nine times out of ten, when you take what&#8217;s behind curtain number one, it&#8217;s a goat.<br \/>\nWhat&#8217;s strange to me is that half of these shows are on the History Channel.\u00a0 When I was in school, history was about being bored to pieces by lots of aristocratic information having to do with tons of Richards and Henrys, and all of them had a beret and a sister named Elizabeth.\u00a0 Isn&#8217;t that kind of what you&#8217;d expect to find on a network with history in its name?\u00a0 I might have made a better grade in history in school if I&#8217;d have known it was about riding around in a carpet van and looking at yard sales waiting to happen.<br \/>\nSwitch channels to A&amp;E.\u00a0 Surprisingly enough, this does not stand for attics and\u00a0 elaborate poker tables.\u00a0 I believe the channel was originally named Arts and Entertainment, conjuring images of soft ballets and harsh operas, which are true life stories in which everyone sings instead of talking and you can&#8217;t understand a word they&#8217;re saying and people pay money to attend and shrug, and there is not even any popcorn.\u00a0 But that&#8217;s another article entirely.<br \/>\nJust a little channel surfing, and you soon find out why the &#8220;rts&#8221; part and the &#8220;ntertainment&#8221; part were dropped in 1995, and you just have A&amp;E.\u00a0 Not many ballets.\u00a0 Not many Italian laments.\u00a0 Not many field trips to the art museum to see paint splattered on a bent bicycle frame.\u00a0 When it comes to A&amp;E, it seems we&#8217;re more about the E than the A.\u00a0 This explains why all of America was taken captive, completely mesmerized, by a family of duck hunters who look entirely like ZZ Top.<br \/>\nHey, did you know the only member of ZZ Top that doesn&#8217;t have that long, trollish-looking beard is the drummer named \u2013 get this \u2013 Kevin BEARD?\u00a0 Sorry.\u00a0 Another article again.\u00a0 But back to the duck thing.<br \/>\nI watched a complete episode of that show because I felt I was the only human alive who wasn&#8217;t locked in, and I never saw a single duck.\u00a0 I saw the same footage over and over of one of the ZZ&#8217;s poking an alligator with a stick.\u00a0 I have lived in the Mississippi swamplands <em>and<\/em> the Mississippi Delta, so after watching thirty minutes of this kind of thing (and you can watch up to four hours of it in one sitting), one word came to mind:\u00a0 So?<br \/>\nThere&#8217;s more.\u00a0 As you go up and down the channels, you can watch people in all kinds of high pressure decisions:\u00a0 Flipping houses where we used to watch them flip pancakes; fighting over parking tickets where there used to be parking for fighting tickets.\u00a0 You can watch auctions and appraisals and stark raving mad women with coupons at the grocery store.\u00a0 You can watch lots of things that I would walk a block out of the way to avoid in real life.\u00a0 You can watch them, but when it&#8217;s my turn with the remote, I&#8217;m going back to <em>The Brady Bunch<\/em> or <em>The Partridge Family<\/em>.<br \/>\nThe only high pressure decision I&#8217;m making is this one:\u00a0 Do I want the mom with the flippy curl, or without?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Celine Sparks American Pickers sounds like something I would tell my kids not to do in public.\u00a0 It turns out that it&#8217;s a growing form of entertainment where you watch people pull over on side roads and scavenge through piles of dirty boat motors and Harley parts. If you grew up poor and proud [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[1250,1270,1252],"class_list":["post-5657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-think-excerpts","tag-celine-sparks","tag-january-2013","tag-lighter-side","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Ducks, Trucks, and a Few Hundred Bucks - Focus Press<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/tampaseo.expert\/focus\/2018\/01\/06\/ducks-trucks-hundred-bucks\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ducks, Trucks, and a Few Hundred Bucks - Focus Press\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By Celine Sparks American Pickers sounds like something I would tell my kids not to do in public.\u00a0 It turns out that it&#8217;s a growing form of entertainment where you watch people pull over on side roads and scavenge through piles of dirty boat motors and Harley parts. 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