Naturally, close after the wake of the announcement that the USPS is thinking about stopping Saturday mail delivery comes the "news" that the USPS wasted $1 billion over the last 4 years. Stamp prices are up, and despite the fact that delivering a piece of mail from eastern Maine to Hawaii or the Aleutian Islands or servicemen overseas still costs only 34 cents for thousands of miles of travel, mismanagement, abuse, and fraud are rampant.

New Canadian stamp alert! To honor the upcoming Summit of the Americas in Quebéc this Spring, Canada Post is issuing a new stamp. Embedded deep within the announcement, though, is the tidbit that they're also issuing a commemorative envelope next week to honor the 25th anniversary of the International Postal Hockey Tournament. To clarify, it's postal employees playing hockey, not some sort of simulation like what's at What If Sports. Yes, BTW, that's a blatant plug for a fun site.

So the USPS wants to stick it to us again, huh? Have you seen the latest news? In order to erase the majority of an expected $3 billion dollar debt, they want to do away with Saturday delivery of the mail (except for overnight mail). They're cutting administrative costs, they're cutting transportation costs, they're raising the rate to mail letters ... what the Hell more do they want from us? Blood?

(Actually, they could have had some of mine earlier after the cheese grater incident just now.)

Maybe if they cut some of their unproductive workers, they might be able to dump debt and increase efficiency as well. Grrr...

Yes, I'm still talking about the meeting. I haven't even gotten to the good part yet.

So once the talks were over, there was a 50-50 drawing that I didn't win and then there was a mini-auction. The auction consisted of lots given by members, and it was generally low-powered ... most lots about a dollar or so. So I'm bidding on a couple things I want, particularly a couple of worldwide lots. For those who don't know, I collect stamps from around the world, not just those of the USA.

When I won the last lot I wanted, though, the guy I'd been bidding against -- a short, old Italian guy named Louie who I didn't know from Adam prior to last night -- he looked at me and said, "I hate you." I didn't really think much of it at the time, but after I'd paid for it, he'd gotten up to pay for the lot he'd just won (a similar one to mine) and made a fake punch to my mid-section, and I started to suspect something was up with him, but I didn't know what. I played along with it, though, and after I sat down, I got the whole scoop from him, face-to-face.

What I didn't realize at the time was that Louie worked with kids using stamps, and the ones I'd bought for my collection he was going to give to kids to help foster their interest in stamps. Now mind you, I didn't know this at the time he was bidding, so I was completely blind-sided by this. How was I to know? I only bought the lot because there were a couple of stamps in there I didn't recognize (or did because they were high-value). Next time I go to the club, though, I'll bring along a group of duplicates from my own collection to give to his kids, including the majority of the stamps I won in last night's auction. I felt bad, but not bad enough to just give up what I'd won, particularly not after his initially rude reaction to me. Plus, the next time another auction comes around, I'll include a few lots of worldwide of my own for him to bid on.

The last guy to talk spoke of the battle of Marathon. Marathon is a town in Greece, and way back in the fifth century BC, emperor Darius of the Persian Empire was angry at the Athenians in Greece for helping some of his enemies, so he had one slave remind him daily of what the Greeks had done to him. Finally, when his anger had grown to record proportions, Darius sent his army from what is now modern Turkey across the Hellespont and down the eastern Greek coast in their ships . The Persian fleet was hammered by a great storm and many of their ships were lost. The Persians put ashore in Greece, and their army was huge -- tens of thousands strong. The Greeks faced them with under 10,000 men.

And won. Handily.

Afterward, the Greeks sent a lone runner southwest to Athens to report the victory. He ran the whole distance there: 26 miles 385 yards. When he finally reached Athens, he paused briefly to utter a single word in Greek ("Nike.") and died on the spot. "Nike" means "victory" in Greek, and it certainly was that. Though the marathon was never part of the ancient Olympic Games, when the Olympics of the modern era were started in 1896 in Athens, the long race was added to track and field program to commemorate that soldier's momentous run. Fittingly, it was won by a Greek man by the name of Spiridion Louis, a Greek postal worker.

So anyway, the second talk was given by another member, but he was mainly passing along items of note. For instance, he passed around a copy of the new Pan American Inverts sheet and said that they were issued the previous weekend at the Spring Mega-Event in New York. The thing that really hit home, though, was that he talked about the current stock market crunch hitting stamp collectors, too.

He pointed to a 50-cent Columbian plate block of 10 in a recent auction catalog. The first surprise was that he once owned it. That's not a cheap item; he said it cost him $25,000 when he bought it. He'd sold it fairly recently at auction and got $35,000 for it. Here it was on the block again after less than a year. The story he told us was that some dot-commer had bought it for around $40,000 and when the stock market went bad, he had to make a quick turnaround, presumably to pay off the rest of his stamps that he'd bought.

I guess I should also be surprised that there are more stamp collectors my age (or younger ... say in their 20's) out there. It sure isn't shown in the attendance at most stamp clubs. At both the clubs I attend, I'm usually the youngest one there, and I'm 34. People in their 40's are usually in their late 40's, and most everyone else is 60-plus.

And male. The lone active female member at Queen City -- the one who encouraged me to show up at one of their meetings -- died in November. Jockey Hollow's female membership is only now beginning to climb. The lone female member had grown to 3 at the last meeting I'd attended.

So we need young women to join our clubs, OK?

I'm going to lead off in here this morning, rather than over in the home blog, so I can tell you about the stamp club meeting while it's still fresh.

I walked in a little late. Dad had called just as I was getting ready to head over there, and I hadn't talked to him and Mom in a week, so I talked to them for about 20 minutes before I left. When I got there, they were just about to draw the first door prizes, so I missed out on those. I'll live.

There were 3 talks last night. The first was from a member who'd recently returned from a stamp-buying trip to Germany. He's a dealer who specializes in German material, so a trip like this was only natural. The first thing he told us about was driving on the Autobahn. I've driven in Europe, so I'm well familiar with what he told us. Trust me, driving at 160 km/hr (100 mph) isn't fun if you're not used to it.

The second story he had had to do with an auction house he dealt with. He went to visit the office one afternoon about a week and a half ago and found the place utterly bare except for a desk or two, a table, and some computer equipment. It seems that the man who ran the auction decided to close the mail bid and formal auction catalog side of the business and go completely over to an online setup. He was doing as well if not better than he was with the old setup. The times, they are a-changing.

The last bit he told us about was his hostel screw-up. The last day of his trip was supposed to be spent in Wiesbaden at a hostel, which is kind of the equivalent of a bed-and-breakfast over here in America. He arrived late in Wiesbaden due to an accident on the Autobahn, but one of his forethinking buddies had picked up his key at the hostel and it was delivered without incident. So it was around midnight, and the hostel manager had gone home for the night by the time he arrived at the hostel, and he was surprised to find the clothes of another man in the room, along with various toiletries.

Not knowing what else to do, he went to sleep, but he slept badly because he figured the other guy would come in right after the bars closed at 2 AM. Well, he never showed up that night. The next morning, he got up and quickly tried to ready himself for the day to get out of the room before the other man came back. Well, wouldn't you know that the guy finally showed up at about 7:30 ... to see a naked American man shaving at his sink. "Oops" is an understatement at this point.

Well, after some exclamations and hurried attempts at covering up, the other man went downstairs to talk to the manager. It seems as if Mr. Manager gave the club member's German buddy a duplicate key to another room and not the one he should have received. He should have been in 22, but the manager had given him the key to 21. The German man took his clothes and went to another empty room, and the dispute was easily resolved. When our guy went downstairs to talk to the manager himself and pay for the bill, the manager refused to accept any money at all from him, not even a token few marks to cover the cost of breakfast. It seemed like everyone involved handled the matter with considerable aplomb, particularly the German man who found our guy in his room.

More later after lunch...