You’ll recall a few weeks ago I asked for help identifying a few toys. The success of that got me thinking about other toys I remembered as a kid that I couldn’t identify. The one that jumped to mind was a tiny, cheap plastic UFO toy I owned. My memory was so vague that I [...]
After seeing The Muppets earlier this week, it got me thinking of my personal favorite incarnation of the franchise, Muppet Babies. As I mentioned in my article last week, to me, Muppet Babies was Saturday morning. The show was well-written with lots of heart and good lessons for kids, but made it more palatable than a lot of [...]
Every year starting mid-November to early December local churches and synagogues start having their annual holiday fairs. These bazaars are usually quite the spectacle, drawing people from all over. As a child I had fond memories of going to these fairs and I decided I wanted to try and capture that feeling once again by [...]
“Forest ghost brings you love and luck”. I never met Sharon, my mother-in-law. Sounds like the opener to a tired joke, but it’s the simple truth; my wife Tara and I got together in 1997, by which time her mom had been dead from lung cancer for nearly three years. By all accounts, it’s my [...]
One of my favorite stores in the Boston area is Comicazi in Somerville. The back room of the store is filled wall-to-wall with MOC vintage toys, from Star Wars to Star Trek to Simpsons to racks and racks of old Marvel and DC stuff, plus plenty of old Kenner figures. I went in yesterday to [...]
(click for larger version) Just for fun, here are the toys on my desk at work right now. (Apologies for the crappy cellphone pic.) From left to right: Toynami Bender DC Retro Action DC Superheroes Batman and Two-Face MOTUC Skeletor Funko POP Heroes Batman Tower Records Exclusive Knuckle Bear Batman Cake Topper (from my 30th [...]
As you may recall, last year I posted that I was on the lookout for a Kurt Adler Santa Claus decorations from the 1990s. The reason I wanted it was that it was basically an action figure (you can read a review of it here). Since that day last December, I had a saved search [...]
In August 2009, my wife and daughter and I moved from our short-lived home of Idaho to a city called Asmara, in Africa. Thus far, the experience has provided me with an incredibly valuable lesson in perspective, not least because our first few weeks here were a struggle to adjust to a lifestyle that seemed [...]
Hey everyone, Paul here again. Like almost any collector I feel like I must share my shame with the world, so this time I have something that I really enjoy. It’s a re-purposed Indiana Jones playset full of G.I. Joe action.
While I was down in Florida last month, I visited a local flea market that I’d last been to a decade earlier. It’s not a very big flea market, but in those sort of places you can always find at least one stall with a bunch of toys. To my not-so-surprise, I think half the [...]