Once again we visited the Duchess County Fair. It was great as usual, and here’s a list of ten things we saw:
1) Lots of rides! They were a little less dazzling after what we’d seen in Hamburg, but I still cursed my craven sense of balance that prevents me from riding them these days!
2) Prize winning wheat! Nearby were sunflowers about 10 feet tall!
3) Delicious fair food, absolutely worth the incredibly inflated prices! $9 for a cob of corn and some lemonade? No problem 😉
4) This amazing first-prize winner of the 7-10 year old ‘non kit’ Lego assembly contest. I kid you not, this was indeed the blue ribbon winner:
5) Some extremely sporty sheep!
6) A legion of Minions!
7) Fine, fine art:
8) Porky the giant pig! Enough sausage for 1000 people! Two 100 pound hams! (No we didn’t enter to see what was probably a sleeping pig)
9) A baby cow, born only minutes earlier:
10) And last but not least many animals for KLS to feed. She was scared of the camel because of his teeth, but he turned out to be a gentle (slobbering) fellow 🙂
A few weeks ago, I visited Notre Dame in Paris. It was a spectacular place, and I remember it fondly.
On that trip I purchased the following papercraft kit of this very same cathedral:
This was originally intended as a gift for my brother, but as these things tend to happen, I decided it would be mine! Here’s the contents once opened:
The fact all the pieces are pre-cut and pre-scored is a big plus, since craft kits of this type that require you to cut the pieces out of a book are massive pains in the butt (which I know from personal experience). Even so, the kit was a bit tricky to put together, mostly because of the complexity of the curved surfaces (especially the steeple). Here it is completed:
Impressive isn’t it! It’s about 20 cm long and stands about 15 cm high, and is quite sturdy and a decent recreation of the original building. For a model made of paper, I was quite impressed.
But I thought I could improve on the kit with a little modification of my own…
…such as by making a few additions:
That’s five fireworks, 4 small guys and one ‘Mini Californian Rocket Fountain’ (from which I had snapped the stick to raise it from the ground). I put my considerable pyromantic skills to work and filled the empty space inside the Notre Dame model with these five bundles of fun:
If all went well, this would faithfully reproduce the great fire (that never actually happened) that caused irreparable damage to Notre Dame in 17XX (that never actually happened). A quick trip outside, and here’s the completed modified kit sitting peacefully on our ‘fireworks launching log’ waiting for the flame…
Three fuses. Five fireworks. Could I light them all and get to safety in time? What would actually happen? Would it fizzle out? Burn? Be spectacular? There was only one way to find out:
OMG! Just… omg! Here’s the aftermath:
My Notre Dame papercraft model: it lived fast, died young, and went out in a blaze of glory. What more could it have wanted?
A few weeks back I went to a local convention and bought this:
I’m sure I don’t have to explain why, but in case you’re having a senior moment…
This, my friends, is a Zoid. Specifically from the series called ‘Robo Strux’, which were the US Zoid rereleases from 1985. Zoids are robot animals (often dinosaurs or predatory cats) and I’ve always liked their design. As a child we were too poor for me to ever own one, but I’ve been remedying that in recent years! I was agog to see such an old one for sale at my local con, and my agog-level doubled when I discovered it was unmade. A quick ebay search told me his price (at which I first baulked) was low, so I snapped it up. I was a very happy man that day.
Unquestionably the value of this product was mostly due to the fact it was still unmade and almost complete (only the sticker sheet was missing). Were I a fanatical collector, I would have put it somewhere safe and been happy in the knowledge I owned it. But I bought it to make it, and this past weekend I did. Here’s what was inside the box:
And this was between the pages of the manual:
So it was purchased in NYC back in March 1987, almost certainly for $9.99. That’s about $21.50 in todays money. Which is much less than I paid 🙂
The basic construction of the kits is remarkably similar to today’s models. There were several runners, molded in 5 different colours. It was snap together, and very easy to assemble with only cutters and a file (to remove the flash). However since the model is motorized and the legs need to move, some pieces were loose against each other and held on by interesting rubber caps:
Even after 30 years, the rubber was still perfectly pliable.
As a kit designed for children, there weren’t nearly as many pieces as one of the ‘High Grade Master Model’ kits I’ve been buying recently, but there were still enough to make it interesting and fun. The design was very clever, especially of the legs. Here he is the first time he was able to stand up:
Assembly took me about an hour, and was great fun. I wish the dude at the con had had more of these buggers for sale!
And here he is finished:
Oooh! Dangerous and mighty he looks, but Gordox (or more correctly Gordos) is apparently a specialized command unit more useful for his long-range sensor and communications than his offensive abilities.
