Yard sale effect on display in Pateros last weekend

t's a little-known law of physics, discovered in the late 1940s by Albert Einstein when he was a professor at Princeton. It's called the yard sale effect.

People go to yard sales, and as they leave stuff has appeared in their vehicle as if by magic. Of course it's not magic, it's a complex physical phenomenon and it took Einstein years to formulate the theory. (He first noticed the phenomenon when Mrs. Einstein would come home after a yard sale, or he would come home from a yard sale that featured tools.)

The yard sale effect explains the set of Christmas dishes. They turned up during the annual all-town yard sale in Pateros last Friday, August 15.

The woman who had them in the back of her car had good explanations for the yarn she bought (she's an all-pro knitter) and the boots and the other stuff. But the dishes-well, that was a mystery. They just somehow ended up in the back of her car, she said. It was the yard sale effect. Had to be.

There was stuff for sale all over Pateros, both Friday and Saturday, Aug. 16, a mix of the practical (a couch and chair), the inexplicable (the Jimi Hendryx posters), true bargains (new and almost-new jeans for 50 cents) and stuff that-well, what was that? People sold clothes, coffee tables from the 1970s, old books, tools, craft and sewing supplies, a stray record album or two, completely mysterious