Robot Claw

Halloween Decorations

October 24th, 2021

Covid ‘canceled’ Halloween last year, and nothing much happened in the way of decorations or trick-or-treaters. This year it seems people are making up for 2020, since the local decorations have taken it to a new level!

That’s a quartet of creepy children in a yard not far from here. They are on a framework which I believe spins when switched on. They’re quite disturbing even up close and I imagine a real scare for young children!

The same house has a hanging skeleton (with axe in chest) and a disturbing evil clown. The quality of these decorations are leagues beyond even a few years ago, and they’re so common this year!

All of the above is in our street alone! Giant animated inflatable trees, a massive pumpkin with a flame light effect, a dog skeleton and another skeleton rising from a grave!

One of the best in our street is this Sadako (the evil long-haired girl from the Japanese film series The Ring) sitting on a swing blocking a front door. I imagine on Halloween night they’ll light this creepily, and it’ll be terrifying for kids to have to push her out of the way!

But the most impressive decorations we’ve seen this year utilize these $80 posable life-sized skeletons sold at Walmart:

People have been so creative with these! Here’s one display not far from our house:

Mum, dad, child and a dog – all skeletons! They spent big on this didn’t they?

A little farther down the road we see this guy keeping watch next to a mailbox:

Fantastic isn’t it?

And then just down the road from our house the owners have put two of these guys and poles and even strung up a net and shuttlecock to make this incredible display:

Skeleton badminton players! And they’ve even lit it at night:

Let’s hope the children are out trick-or-treating this year. It would be shame for all these decorations to not be appreciated 🙂

Posted in Blog, Garden, Holiday, Miscellaneous | Comments Closed

Hexagons!

October 17th, 2021

Back in 2015 Topps released an unusual ‘collectible’ product called Galactic Connexions. Basically they were Star Wars hard plastic tokens with pictures on them:

They were Wal-Mart exclusives, not particularly easy to find in stores, and as far as I thought at the time, a very strange product that seemed like it didn’t have much of a market.

The ‘hexagons’ (which I’ll call them from now on) came in three base rarities (grey, black and clear plastic) with three further rarity levels based on the sticker finish (normal, foil, patterned foil).

In addition there were several levels of chase hexagon available in a variety of colours and foils, including stupendously rare 14k solid gold hexagons available via a redemption.

There’s also an additional rarity in the form of the blue ‘star field’ hexagons that were only available in promo bags given out at a Star Wats event at Walmart in 2015. This was in fact the first hexagons I got, since KLS happened upon a handout of these promo bags one day when she went shopping.

The backs of the hexagons are all the same, only with the ‘1st edition’ removed for later releases. Weirdly I have a single disc with the sticker from the back on each side. Was it some sort of promo? I forget…

So what are these for? We’ll it’s actually a game! Players form ‘decks’ of seven hexagons and score points by placing them adjacent to others a bit like dominoes. Scoring is slightly complicated and depends on the colour of the hexagons, the character shown and the lines at the edges of the image. I’ve never played the game, but I’ve read it gets boring almost instantly.

So they’re basically collectibles. A plastic hexagonal trading card, if you will. Given that almost all of them occur at each rarity then it’s a weird product to try to collect (since there could be up to 17 versions of each hexagon), and they’re not really as attractive as the average trading card. They’re also somewhat heavy in large quantities and trickier to store than cards. As I said, this is a strange product.

As far as I could tell at the time these failed quickly and spectacularly. I only purchased a couple of packets of them when they first came out, but I remember finding them in the clearance section within weeks. When series 2 and 3 came out within the next few months, they seemed to instantly be on clearance and I don’t remember paying full price for more than a very few of the 100 or so I now own. Series 3 was particularly tricky to find, probably because the line had failed by then and most Walmart’s didn’t stock them.

So I bought some, opened them, stuck them in a tin and forgot about them for 6 years. Then – to my amazement – I found three packs of series 3 at a local Walmart just a few weeks ago. And much like 5+ years ago, they were in the clearance bin!

Naturally I bought them, and opened them up. I retrieved the tin, took them all out for a second look (and this blog post) and was amused to see that I didn’t have any of the new hexagons I just opened. Unfortunately I didn’t get the redemption hexagon for the 14k gold one, which was probably for the best since the mailing date expired five years ago!

Now they’re all safely packed back into their tin, where they will probably stay forever 🙂

Posted in Collecting, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

The Biggest Apple

October 11th, 2021

We went to NYC for a KLS birthday trip. We stayed in the same hotel we always do and our room this time was amazing!

It even had a balcony, with a view of the city and Bryant Park:

Since dining-in hasn’t really returned (thanks Covid!) we made use of this balcony many times enjoying a meal with a view:

The city has also added many more tables and chairs everywhere for outdoor dining, which we took advantage of more than once:

So what did we do? Mostly shopping! We bought so much stuff, especially from the Japanese shops. Food, cosmetics, books, toys and souvenirs. I also sent too many postcards!

We walked everywhere visiting all our favorite stores and it was good to see they are mostly in good shape, obviously having navigated the pandemic well enough. There’s a lot of shops that haven’t though, with far more than usual shopfronts for rent. There’s more construction than usual as well, and this is in a city that is always busy with construction:

We also walked The High Line, a converted elevated rail line which is now a public garden. This took us to a brand new NYC attraction, Little Island, an artificial island/garden built on the Hudson waterfront:

Of course we went to Times Square as well:

And took a brief walk to Central Park to admire the newly opened tallest apartment building in the world, which was disappeared into the clouds the morning we saw it:

We filled our 3.5 days and had a lot of fun:

Covid is here to stay and I believe will be affecting our lives for years to come, especially in a country like the USA where a large contingent fails to take it seriously. It was reassuring to take a trip (including rail travel) amidst all the covid restrictions (masks, social distancing, vaccination cards etc) and still have as much fun as similar city trips we have taken in the past.

Posted in Blog, Trip | Comments Closed

Gorgeous Boy

October 5th, 2021

When we were in Salem back in the summer, we visited a tiny shop selling collectibles and rare toys and in a basket found two 1980s Boy George scrapbooks. They contained original cuttings from magazines and newspapers glued onto the pages with occasional comments. They looked a bit like this (although were much more impressive):

We were both quite taken by these since they were so well made and the creator obviously loved Boy George. I asked the shop owner if she knew anything about the person who had sold them and to our surprise she said they were hers!

Even more astonishingly, she told us an incredible story about how she, as a teenager (she was about our age), actually met Boy George! I forget the details but she went into a ladies bathroom (at a hotel? Restaurant?) in a major US city (New York?) and he was in there. She was starstruck and asked him what he was doing in the ladies bathroom and he replied “The same thing you’re doing!” 🙂

I felt very strongly that she shouldn’t sell the scrapbooks, and told her as much. My opinion is that they were an important part of her personal history, and the short-term gain of a few dollars would never be worth their loss.

She said no one in her family cared about them (including her kids) but admitted she herself had never even looked through them in years. I dared her to look through them and not be overcome with happy memories and nostalgia, and I think she got my message. Before we left, she said she was going to remove them from sale at least long enough to read them again.

I hope she kept them, because they were both amazing. If I had made those scrapbooks, I would have liked to still have them today.

Posted in Blog, Celebrity, History | Comments Closed

Let’s Cook Desserts!

October 3rd, 2021

Yesterday we made these:

It was fairly easy says KLS, who did most of the work. The box contained only three things: the meringue powder, an icing pen and a bag for piping. The power was mixed with egg white and whipped until fluffy:

Then the meringues were piped onto oven paper:

Here they are before cooking:

We then baked them on lowish heat (200F) for 75 minutes, then iced them before eating:

And they were – in a word – terrible! They tasted like the glue I used to eat as a child, and the aftertaste was even worse. My happy memories of melt-in-your-mouth meringues from my youth have now been corrupted by these sticky, inedible travesties!

But there was a secret! We chose the alternate cooking method which involved the addition of tonic water. This is basically sparkling water that contained quinine, which phosphors under UV light:

Apparently adding a tiny bit to the mix makes the meringues ‘glow in the dark’! Did it work? Judge for yourself:

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