Tag Archives: history

Pawn Star on Life & People

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I am something of a “Pawn Stars” Junkie.  Rick Harrison just wrote a book and was interviewed on NPR.  Some interesting observations:

“Two years ago, a man walked into the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas with a pair of diamond earrings.

Pawn dealer Rick Harrison asked him the typical questions — Where did you get it? Where is the receipt? — and the man readily answered. Harrison filled out the required paperwork and paid the man $40,000 for his merchandise.

The very next day, Harrison found out the earrings were stolen. The victim got her earrings back and the criminal was prosecuted. Harrison, meanwhile, was out $40,000.

“It’s the cost of doing business,” Harrison says. “That’s the way I look at it. … And Las Vegas is a crazy town at times. There’s a lot of high-end things I get. So you have to know about … really large diamonds, really expensive watches. … So it’s a lot different than most places.”

Harrison, a second-generation pawn shop owner, is one of the stars of The History Channel’s reality series Pawn Stars. The show follows Harrison, his father, Richard, his son Big Hoss and his son’s friend Chumlee as they meet and haggle with customers who bring in all sorts of objects to sell and pawn. Harrison and his relatives assess the value of the objects — and try to determine whether or not they’re fake — before offering their customers a collateral loan or money for their merchandise.

Harrison’s new memoir, License to Pawn, details how he became an expert in, among other things, spotting fake Rolexes (he sees at least one a day), customer relations, human behavior, antiques and economics — all through running his 24-hour-a-day pawn business over the past 30 years.

License To Pawn by Rick Harrison

 

License to Pawn: Deals, Steals, and My Life at the Gold & Silver
By Rick Harrison and Tim Keown
Hardcover, 272 pages
Hyperion
List Price: $23.99

Read An Excerpt

How Pawn Shops Work

Pawn shops, Harrison says, have been around for thousands of years and are among the oldest forms of banking. The way it works is simple: Customers provide a personal item as collateral to receive a loan from a pawn broker, who can then sell the product if the customer doesn’t pay back the loan plus interest in a set amount of time.

to read more, go to:    http://www.npr.org/2011/06/09/137033690/pawn-star-rick-harrison-on-his-deals-and-steals

Gregg Braden on Spirituality & Science

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The Wisdom of a Spirituality-Based Science

Posted: 06/ 5/11 11:17 AM ET

During the last years of the Cold War, I had a front row seat as a senior systems designer in the defense industry to one of the most frightening times in the history of the world, and the thinking that led to it. During the last years of the most potentially lethal, yet undeclared, war in human history, the superpowers of the United States and the former Soviet Union did something that seems unthinkable to any rationally minded person today. They spent the time, energy, and human resources to develop and stockpile somewhere in the neighborhood of 65,000 nuclear weapons — a combined arsenal with the power to microwave the Earth, and everything on it, many times over.

The rationale for such an extreme effort stems from a way of thinking that has dominated much of the modern world for the last 300 years or so, since the beginning of the scientific era. It’s based in the false assumptions of scientific thinking that suggest we’re somehow separate from the Earth, separate from one another, and that the nature that gives us life is based upon relentless struggle and survival of the strongest

to read the whole article go to:    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gregg-braden/spirituality-science_b_871483.html

Jerusalem Underground

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Beneath Jerusalem, an underground city takes shape

AP

    • In this May 17, 2011 photo, a view of Zedekiah's Cave is seen in Jerusalem's Old City. Underneath the stone buildings and crowded alleys of old JerusaAP – In this May 17, 2011 photo, a view of Zedekiah’s Cave is seen in Jerusalem’s Old City.
By MATTI FRIEDMAN, Associated Press – Mon May 30, 12:09 pm ET

JERUSALEM – Underneath the crowded alleys and holy sites of old Jerusalem, hundreds of people are snaking at any given moment through tunnels, vaulted medieval chambers and Roman sewers in a rapidly expanding subterranean city invisible from the streets above.

At street level, the walled Old City is an energetic and fractious enclave with a physical landscape that is predominantly Islamic and a population that is mainly Arab.

Underground Jerusalem is different: Here the noise recedes, the fierce Middle Eastern sun disappears, and light comes from fluorescent bulbs. There is a smell of earth and mildew, and the geography recalls a Jewish city that existed 2,000 years ago.

to read more go to:    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110530/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_underground_jerusalem