Robot Claw

Pandemic

March 13th, 2020

I climbed the hill, lay in the grass
A little dark-eyed girl drifted past
She said all the best is come, it could not last
And the worst, it has come true

That’s from one of my favorite Nick Cave songs. I’ve heard it countless times and often I think of what it would mean for the worst to have come true. Is that what we are facing now?

Back when I was in Japan I was reading about the novel Coronavirus as I sat in my Tokyo hotel room and texted Kristin that I thought it could “change the world”. I wasn’t being grim or fatalistic; it’s just that I had read about what was happening (before China officially admitted it) and had a feeling about the future. I returned to the USA and it was like it didn’t exist: no airport screening, virtually nothing in the media and almost no-one had heard of it.

Then China quarantined and it spread quickly. My idle comment had become portentous and I personally knew people that were affected in China. And still virtually nothing was said here in the US. When I signed and submitted my summer contract almost a month ago I asked what the backup plan was if coronavirus was keeping us all home. I was at least half serious, but there wasn’t any plan since most of the people in the office hadn’t even heard of it.

I wasn’t surprised by this. Even those of us who had been aware of the virus probably found it hard to believe it would shut down our ‘normal’ lives like it now has. Only three weeks ago a TA asked me if we’d have any classes after Spring Break (which starts next week) and I assured him yes since I couldn’t imagine the alternative.

Two days ago my school shifted all classes online for the remainder of the semester (2 months) and from now I’ll work from home. Yesterday KLS was sent home as well to work, and we’ve already bought her a desk for her computer since we have no idea how long this may last.

We’ve stocked up on supplies – our cupboards have never been this full – and personally witnessed the empty shelves in local shops. We’ve canceled appointments and are now prepared to stay here – in our house – until we need to go out and get more groceries every couple of weeks.

I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me shifting my course online (I have over 300 students who need to do the same) and there’s currently more questions than answers. Likewise for Kristin who must now adapt – with almost all her coworkers – to a distributed office communicating via the internet. We’re not just working from home; we’re learning (or rather devising) how to do our jobs in brand new ways from home.

And the virus only continues to spread as America and the world shuts down. Every day the news is grimmer and silver linings seem absent. The leadership in this country is a gaggle of incompetents who have made things worse and we can only hope they haven’t messed things up beyond the ability of the real adults (currently the state and local officials) to fix.

And yet I don’t think the worst has come true. The world has seen that China and Korea have waged bold and apparently successful fights against this, and I believe other countries will too. It will take sacrifice yes, but staying at home and skipping events and vacations is a small price for this victory. Like H1N1 in 2009 I believe the tide will turn with a treatment or vaccine, and right now everyone with the relevant expertise anywhere in the world is working on that (including at KLS’s company). It will take time, but someone will create it eventually.

Stay safe everyone. Stay home and limit your exposure in the interests of public health. Follow the advice of the experts and don’t be fooled (or scared) by misinformation.

This will be an uncertain and likely difficult period we are moving into, but there are sunny skies beyond. Look forward to them!

Posted in Miscellaneous, The Unknown | 2 Comments »

The PEZ Factory

March 7th, 2020

We went for a day trip today to here:

The PEZ factory! In case this is a mystery PEZ candies are those little sugar bullets that are sold in special dispensers. You flip back the head and a candy comes out. I’ve amassed a collection of Star Wars dispensers that I’m not proud of but I hate the candies and never eat them!

It was a bit of a drive away: over two hours and two states, but it was worth it.

It’s where they make the candies and package them (the dispensers are made in Europe). They have a factory and museum, but since it was a Saturday the factory wasn’t on. But the museum was fantastic.

They have an incredible amount of dispensers on display. Thousands I’m sure, in every category imaginable. Although I secretly hate them I was fascinated by the displays.

The older ones are quite crude (Peter Pan here was from 1969) but the modern ones – almost all licensed – are much more sophisticated.

They had an astonishing amount of slight variants of some of them…

Strange old foreign versions…

Super rare dispensers…

And some very old ones that predate the current ‘head-on-a-stick’ style…

They also had – to our amazement – licensed Japanese ones including Gundam and Ultraman!

But there was so much more than just the dispensers! PEZ is after all a candy (invented in Germany in the 1930s) and they also had an incredible amount of packaging and marketing ephemera on display:

And advertising posters (many featuring the ‘PEZ girls’ used heavily in European advertising):

Bizarre items such as vinyl records:

And then truly strange stuff like a calculator, CCG pack, electronic game and very old sticker:

I loved this museum! It was basically PEZ otaku paradise. I hate PEZ’s (surely they’re the worst ‘candy’ ever made?) but I really loved looking through the small but jam-packed museum.

They even had a treasure hunt going on that we completed and won a prize from:

It was absolutely worth the trip: this place was PEZ-tastic!

But I still hate the candies 🙂

Posted in Blog, Collecting, Otaku, Retro, Toys | 1 Comment »

Long Time Man

March 3rd, 2020

I saw an interview yesterday with a British bloke who is 112 years old. His earliest memory was from WW1 and was a Zeppelin attack on his town in the UK. This got me thinking of my oldest memories…

I lived an adventurous life as a baby, fighting off cannibals in the jungles of PNG before jet-setting half away around the world for an extended stay in Germany. I don’t remember any of those days, and the earliest memories I do have come from just before I entered Kindergarten, back in about 1976.

I have two very specific memories from that era. The first is of brushing my teeth at daycare. I would have been 4 years old, and while I have dim memories of the daycare itself (playing with Duplo, listening to stories being read to us and sleeping on cots) I have a strangely vivid memory of a lesson on how to brush our teeth where we all copied what the instructor (a dental nurse?) did in front of us.

The next vivid memory – also I suspect from around that time – was of a heavy metal cylinder falling onto my head and cutting me. It left a scar that remains to this day! Bernard was hoisting it up a tree for an inscrutable child-reason and I was standing directly underneath ‘helping’ when the string broke and it fell directly onto me. I recall crying and lots of blood! I bet mum almost panicked!

There are a couple of other trauma-related memories but they are incomplete and not as clear as the above: losing a toenail due to a fall, losing two teeth in one day, and cutting myself everywhere after a fall into a rose hedge 🙂

A year on and I have a very vivid memory from kindergarten about learning to write! We had books containing sentences that were missing words and we had to write using slates and chalk the missing words. As the book progressed we were writing more and more of the sentence until it was just pictures that we had to describe. I expect it’s all done using computers now, and that even in the day we may have found the slates old-fashioned.

Around 1977/8 my memories start becoming much more abundant and I can easily recall specific events at primary school or during the summers of those years. Maybe I’ve lost the correct order and I’ve certainly lost fine detail, but it’s reassuring to know my memories go back over 40 years ago now.

Over 40 years… where did all that time go?

Posted in Blog, Family, Miscellaneous, Time | 4 Comments »

Death Stinger

February 29th, 2020

With my birthday fast approaching I figured it was time to catch up on old birthday gifts… like this guy:

That’s a silly-big model kit of a robot scorpion ZOID! Do I know anything about ZOIDs? Not really, but they look cool and this is one of the coolest. I got this kit for my birthday 2 (?) years ago and dedicated myself to completing it before this birthday. So I did!

The box is massive. Here’s what was inside:

So many runners! So many pieces! And yet the instruction manual wasn’t the biggest I’d seen in a kit, mostly since there’s a lot of repetition.

Assembly wasn’t particularly difficult, but took me 4 weekends working maybe 5 hours at a time. As I reach my dotage I find that my developing arthiritis tends to make these tasks a little trickier, and Kotobukiya kits are harder than Bandai ones because they don’t shy away from very small pieces and complex connections.

Luckily I had assistance to help with the complex bits:

I’ll spare you the interim photos and get right to the finished piece:

It’s impressive isn’t it? It’s also quite massive; easily the biggest kit I’ve assembled. I’d say it’s about 10 inches from front to back (with the tail folded up) and wider than my outstretched palm. There’s an insane amount of articulation: not only do all the limbs and guns move but you can even open lots of the flaps and vents (probably to emulate cooling systems) which can make it even bigger than it is here. Here’s the scorpion head when you open up the head armour:

It was a lot of fun to build and looks great in our glass cabinet. I wouldn’t recommend this kit though since it’s a) way too expensive and b) not ideal for a beginner. If you like the look of ZOIDs start with a smaller kit, or even better a toy version since those are much less pricey.

Posted in Crafts, Models, Otaku, Toys | Comments Closed

Zoffy

February 14th, 2020

It was exactly a year ago today we lost our beloved cat Yossie. That was a difficult time, and the tears still flow if we spend time thinking about it. She was a big part of our lives.

But time moved on, as it does. The sad memories fade; the happy ones strengthen. And as all cat-lovers do we eventually took a new cat into our house. You already know who I’m talking about: Zoffy!

I did an update a couple of weeks after we adopted her, but that was almost a year ago and now that Zoffy has grown into an adult I thought it was time once again to feature her!

She’s all grown up now! At about 12 pounds she’s almost half-again as heavy as Emi and not too far off Yossie at her peak. As you can see Zoffy has a lot of dense fur which sometimes makes her look chubbier than she actually is (especially around her chest). She’s also got a ‘dirty mouth’ and a dark fur patch right under her jaw. Both are charm points!

Virtually every day since we adopted her she has eaten her own meals from these plastic bowls I bought from Target. We’ve settled into comfortable routine: she gets a breakfast when I do, and a ‘cat soup’ when I have my dinner. She sits and waits for both, except in the morning when she follows me around from when I get up to when I feed her. She loves her special foods! (Emi doesn’t get special food, and wouldn’t eat it anyway. She’s happy with her kibble and occasional treats.)

From a young age she adopted this pink puffy cushion as her own and she now sleeps on it every day and most nights. Her claiming this was – and is – quite adorable, since this was also Yossie’s cushion, and the two are very alike in personality.

This is most apparent in how close Zoffy and I are (much like Yossie and I were). We always know where each other is and usual what we’re both doing, and when I’m home she’s almost always very close by if not in my lap. Every weekend I usually spend hours in our library working on crafts or hobbies and she’s usually right there with me 🙂

She’s got her own hobbies too of course, and still lots of ‘kitten energy’. We maintain a good pile of paper and boxes in the dining room so her and Emi can play in and amongst them!

She’s also sometimes maybe a tiny bit naughty, such as here when she got inside a recliner for a bit of carousing. There’s also been claims I can’t keep my study door open like I used to do since a fuzzy bandit might jump up on my desk and steal some figurines… but no one has ever witnessed who this bandit actually is 😉

She’s also got a newish habit of looking out our side window. This is somewhat unusual in that no other cat has ever shown interest in this one, but almost every day I find her sitting on the chest looking out. I wonder what she watches?

She’s a wonderful cat, big in personality, charm and love. She’s not Yossie – no one will ever replace Yossie – but Zoffy filled the void and has effortlessly worked her way into our hearts. I look forward to many, many years of joy with sweet ‘little’ Zoffy 🙂

Posted in Cats, Family | 5 Comments »