Oh The Iron of It All

Tired of those plastic action figures and their comic book/anime origins?  



Try this one for a change: all the way from Baguio, a badass hunter of indeterminate superhero league or whatsoever affiliation.  Possibly he has a tribe, because in the store there are groups of them, but each of them could be operating solo.


This little hunter here is made of ironwood.  If you'll notice, he's got the string of the bow all taut with minimal effort, the string even magically stretching without him touching it yet.  


Anyway, this sculptural error can be forgiven as Edge was able to get Mr. Hunter for just a little over 500 Pesos.  In Baguio, they sell the black wooden sculptures (which cost less because the wood is lighter), and the expensive brown ones made of ironwood.  We saw a pair that costs PhP 3,500--but Edge is not really a fan of men with giant schlongs and giant-breasted women.      


If you know how to haggle, you can really drive the price down, which is what we did to get this guy who otherwise would have probably cost PhP 800 to 900 elsewhere.  


Incidentally, the salesladies will tell you it's expensive because ironwood, being ironwood, is hard to carve.  As it turns out, ironwood is an umbrella term for woods all over the world that are, well... hard.  In the Philippines, kamagong and mangkono are considered ironwood, the latter being the hardest variety in the country.  


At Mines View Park (where we didn't find Mr. Hunter) I found a nice pair of arnis sticks made of kamagong, their weight very, very nice on my hands.  Just PhP 200.  But since I'm no longer in college and it's too late to take P.E. classes in arnis, and since I don't know, too, where I'm going to use them, I simply said Pass.

Nano, Nano, Nano, Nano

What commercial had that theme song?  Na-no, nano, nano, nano...  It can't be NanoBlocks because I don't think those tiny guys existed back then.

Oh well...  Here are Pentax digicams with NanoBlock skin. 

I've seen Lego bricks used as USB flash disks, even wedding rings.  But I think I like the tiny sleek NanoBlocks for my digicams, thank you very much.

Crazy Nuts

Damn Gravity | Optical Illusion

This won 1st place in the 7th Annual Best Illusion Contest last year.  

Check out the other winners and finalists here:  

Best Optical Illusions of 2010


P.S. I like the soundtrack to this one.

Now We're Getting Lost

Remember those plastic rulers slash mazes in grade school?  

This I would love to see in real life.

The ones with tiny ball bearings inside you have to maneuver through a kind of dinky, half-hearted maze the entire length of the ruler.  It was so easy that even an infant can get that tiny ball from point A to B just by shaking the ruler, and you just have to wonder why the manufacturers bothered at all.  I mean if you're going to make a maze, might as well make it grand.  Make sure that ball gets lost, because then what is the point?  

Well it turns out a ruler is the wrong medium for a maze.  It's so 2D.

Let's have a ball.

A sphere is much better, such as Michael McGinnis' maze inside a ball called Perplexus (and a much trickier one, Superperplexus)

Two days ago I got hold of a Perplexus ball at the Hobbes and Landes at Shangri-La.  No, I didn't buy it, just toyed with it because it's right there on the shelf, and boy was it hard.  Think M.C. Escher's famous mind-boggling stairs because that's what it felt like.

I had to put it back down after a couple of vain attempts to navigate the ball because I didn't want the store clerk suddenly springing a "Time's Up" on me.  

Anyway, high price and rather thin plastic used for the ball aside, it's an ingenious game.  And to think McGinnis hatched the idea for his 3D labyrinth back in the 1970s, but only got to pitch it two decades later because probably the technology wasn't there yet.  

The whole time I was tilting the ball in my hands, I was thinking about the laborious process of designing the pathways just to have that ball bearing inside a grand time.

Now, we're getting lost.

Who's The Red-Shoed Robot?

Or if not, a robot, a man with a jetpack, and still the red shoes.  

Readers of this blog might know that in the Little Colonel Saga, I've named him Go, from his eternal pose of looking like he's about to go.  He has this haste about him, a sense of urgency, albeit frozen.  Frozen haste, mmmm. 

Or maybe because if you have a jetpack, you always look like you're about to go at a moment's notice.

Other than that I have no idea what his real name is, and what cartoon/anime, manga/comic book, toy line he comes from.  All I know is that I picked him up at a garage sale, one of those Japan surplus store that sells overpriced furniture and stuff.  So Go hails from Japan, one more thing I'm sure of.  

Did he come from a gashapon?  Was he a freebie from a cereal box?  We'll never know--unless you happen to know, and in which case, you'll do me a huge favor.

The first time I saw him I couldn't help but admire the color.  He's not really off-white, more like a silvery ecru, if there's such a thing.  And then the more I looked at him, he reminded me of Rockwell Kent's long-limbered figures in Voltaire's Candide.

* * *

The day I found Go, I was attending a cousin's confirmation ceremony.  She had chosen me as as her sponsor.  I had momentarily put the robot/man with the jetpack inside my shirt pocket and walked to the altar, not knowing the pocket had a hole, and that gravity was still at work.  Minutes later as I got back to my seat I realized with a dreadful pat on my chest that he was gone.  Hopelessly gone because there were about two hundred kids inside the church, and one of them was sure to pick up my toy and pocket it, with me none the wiser.

But still I went back to the front row where I'm sure it fell, and stared at the hands of the little boys who must be naturally tinkering their new-found friend right now.  No little boy had busy hands though.  Damn, the nuns must have found it. 

After about five minutes of squinting to the very best ability of my near-sighted eyes, I finally recognize his prostrate figure on the marble floor, slightly hidden from my view by the electric fan.  Oh good Lord, thank God for kids with short attention span.

And thus I still have Go, the robot/man with the jetpack, and yeah the red shoes.

Oreo Fun Barbie Doll | Retro Toy

The disastrous merging of Mattel's Barbie and Nabisco's Oreo in 1997: The Oreo Fun Barbie.

Just because little girls love the Oreo biscuits doesn't mean they won't mind it when their beloved doll carries one as a tacky shoulder bag with matching Oreo-inspired outfit. 

Incidentally, the term oreo (black on the outside and white on the inside) means an African American who speaks, acts, and has the values of white guys, often used by blacks insulting their fellow blacks. 

Needless to say, the African American community didn't think this "fun" at all, and the giant biscuit-laden was swiftly pulled out of the toy shelves.

The Miniature Action Figure Town of Marwencol

This is not the new promotional ad for Barbie.  This is the fictional city of Marwencol

by Mark Hogancamp done at 1/6 scale.

Marwerncol (a merging of the names of his two lady crushes and his own name) is mostly set in World War II, owing to Hogancamp's being an ex-Navy.

Admittedly, his laborious, surreal dioramas do not have any aesthetic or artistic aspirations, at least in the beginning.  In 2000 Hogancamp was badly beaten in a New York bar by five men, leaving him in a coma for nine days.  He lost some of his memories, his speech, and was unable to walk.  The Marwencol dioramas were his way to regain back a piece of his life.

So when funds were low and he couldn't afford hospital rehab anymore, he took to messing around with his beloved action figures, staging scenes and taking photos of them as a way to pass time and in the process rehabilitate himself as well.

 Each photograph is part of an ongoing narrative, much like a comic book or stills from a movie.  And eventually someone took notice.  (This kind of haunting menagerie is pretty much hard to ignore).  New York galleries exhibited Hogancamp's Nazi-invaded photos, and last year

filmmaker Jeff Malmberg made a documentary about Hogancamp simply called Marwencol.

The Ship Inside a Bottle Inside a Bottle Inside a Bottle Inside...

Chances are you have this at home: a ship inside a bottle, or else a nipa hut enclosed.  As a kid I've often wondered how they manage to deftly put the thing inside.  Via the bottle's mouth or a hole at the bottom to be sealed back later?

In the Philippines, before everyone was forcibly made to dance Thriller en masse, prisoners used to make these painstaking bottled crafts to earn extra.  Maybe, they still do.

Watch Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones where Mark Wahlberg plays the role of a dad with a huge collection of bottled ships he then proceeds to smash when his daughter dies.  The collapsible ship fits effortless through the neck, and then you just tug some strings to unfurl the masts and sails.  

Maybe the nipa hut is devilishly harder, but I still I cringed when Wahlberg tosses them ships to the wall.

Here's Julia Morley, sweating it out over Lego bricks for three days.

SS Lego

Toy Robots with a Moral

This toy blog's borrowed image model: the Wii Cardboard box robot created by Japanese designer Kiyohiko Azuma in 2007 for the comedy manga Yotsuba&!.  The toy robot goes by the name "Danboard".

And since we're showing recycled robots, here's more:

Me likey this black one. :)

Ruro, the Japanese-speaking robot advocating recycling.

And here's a blunt one (the poster not the robot) advocating the proper disposal of e-waste.   
 
Nokia, btw, has bins where you can chuck off your broken cellphones and chargers, dead batteries, and other beyond-repair electronics.

Coloring the Dinosaurs

Here's the possible coloring, feathering, and anatomy of anchiornis (the "near-bird" dinosaur), scientifically deduced by a team of scientists using geologist Jakob Vinther's research on dinosaurs.  

According to National Geographic, this marks the first scientifically reconstructed dinosaur. 

Incidentally, Jakob Vinther's findings also overhauls the fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex, now sporting tufts of feather and a plumage (dinosaurs need weather-proofing too), a bird-like posture, and a dash of coloring.  That certainly dampens the T-Rex's scare factor.

If that's the case, Jurassic Park should have a re-edit.   And Satoshi Kamiya might have to redo his T-Rex diagram too.

Cartoon by Gary Larson

Maybe I Should Have Bought That Dinosaurs Sticker Album After All

Lunar Promises and Moon in My Room

In the old days, energetic young Filipino men wooed the girls of their dream by way of a serenade and sugar-coated poetry.

 

The boys' promise-laden spiels usually included a vow to do everything for the maiden--with a reference sometimes to plucking the sun, stars, and moon from the sky.

Amazingly enough, many women actually fell for this.

Now, with Uncle Milton's Moon In My Room, you unload the moon from its box, hang the darned thing on your wall, turn off the lights, and click the remote control.  Easy.

Guys should really make good their promises, astronomical or otherwise.

* * *

What's a fake moon hanging on your wall good for?, you  ask.  Well, besides being a fancy night light, and something you can use to teach a kid werewolf (the virtue of restraint, for instance), the Moon in My Room can teach kids the 8 (or are there 12) phases of the moon.  (Nah, it's still a fancy night light.)

* * *

Back to the courting young male.  Should their vocal chords and way with words fail, there's always the option to offer one's self for an indefinite period of back-breaking house work (plow a field, chop firewood, fetch water, build a missile silo, protect the family from vampires)--all rendered and suffered good-naturedly to wow the maiden's family.  Actually, this is obligatory, so they might as well skip the song and dance number and the long rambling speech (just like this entry.)

* * *

Fond of rainbows instead?  Uncle Milton also has a toy that projects, well, a rainbow on your kid's wall.

Plush Toy Cats with a Penchant for Ouch

Nowadays, it's not enough for plush toys to be cute and adorable.

They also have to have ample tolerance for pain.

From sheepielove on deviantart.

The one on the left, by the way, has 97 pins in his head.

There's Romance and Microbes in the Air

Deadly is the New Cute?

The 5-second Rule states that it's OK to eat food that has fallen to the floor because bacteria still haven't contaminated it.  A scientific study on the 5-second Rule (or 7-second or 10-second, depending on your cowboy tendencies ) was even awarded by the Ig Nobel Prize.  The findings: you're safe from E. coli, so go ahead and pick up and eat that fallen food.


* * *
Microbes--now there's a nice stuffed toy for kids.  They're cute and morbid, cuddly and gory, and very, very educational--all at the same time.  And now that Valentine's day is around the corner, we all could use a stuffed toy that, for a change, is NOT corny, sappy, or too effing adorable.

* * *

Common cold virus

From the sick mind of ex-lawyer-turned toy entrepreneur Drew Oliver, these GIANTmicrobes plush toys are, well, inspired by viruses and bacteria, albeit magnified a million times.  (For illustrative purposes, each stuffed toy comes with a tag of the photomicrograph from which their appearance is based, and some clinical facts about the pathogen in question--the educational bit.)

From the common cold virus to something as icky as Chlamydia or  Herpes to something as gruesome as the Black Death to something as romantic as the Kissing Disease (Epstein Barr)--GIANTmicrobes has it.  (BTW, All caps GIANT, lowercase microbes.)  And there's even Mad Cow Disease.


Now, why would you want to give/receive a plush toy in the shape of a deadly virus?  

I suppose this poses a problem for people still in courtship stage.  If a guy forgoes the usual teddy bear and instead gives the girl a stuffed toy resembling a bacteria, should she take offense?

Call it exposure therapy, call it our undying fascination with death, call it just another ironic product of Generation Irony.  Call it whatever you want, but there's a certain endearing quality about viruses rendered all hairy and soft and harmless.  Personally, I wouldn't mind having my own cholera virus sitting on my desk, lovable and fatal.




* * *

Don't know what your favorite pathogen is?  Flip open your Merck medical textbook; there's always a handsome bacteria you might like in there.

Maybe I Should Have Bought that Dinosaurs Sticker Album After All

The canteen in my old Mater Carmeli school sold snacks, school supplies--and Panini sticker albums.  I wonder if it's still around, the sticker albums, not the canteen.   On the glossy-paged album, you stick on the dinosaur stickers, which you also have to buy per piece to complete the book.  Otherwise, you end up with just blank white spaces of dinosaur outlines.  

It's kind of an extinction in reverse: you buy the album with just an empty ancient terrain and then one by one you stick on the dinosaurs and bring them back to life.

Somehow, I still remember the name Panini even if I never bought the album nor the dinosaur stickers.  The knight with the looong jousting stick was kinda hard to forget too.  I wanted that sticker album so badly back then, but it never occurred to me to save up for it. 

My cousin Ryan had it good; he was a proud owner of that album of my dream--out of sheer frugality probably or maybe because his parents just gave him more pocket money each day.

The Panini dinosaur sticker albums preceded the dinosaur animated film Land Before TimeJurassic Park.  My childhood was full of dinosaurs, it seems.  Land Before Time made me cry (and want the Little Foot toy), while Jurassic Park had my jaw dropping in amazement.  Man, those were a lot and the landmark film of running dinosaurs on the field. 


When you're that young and dinosaurs appear onscreen, in full living, breathing detail, they're scaly skins up close even, their movements rendered as scientifically accurate as possible--your jaws will drop.  The old sticker album is now really brought to life.  Things will never be the same again. 


Nowadays, kids don't have that.  They don't have a point of reference; they don't have a past to look back to and compare with the now.  Sure, they can watch the old copies of movies and compare, but it's a different thing.  There's simply no transition to awe, not like the first time you saw Jurassic Park back in 1993, the same way they'll never know what the cassette-tape days or Famicom days or rotary telephone days were like.  So we're lucky, in a way.

Now I feel as old as a dinosaur.

Crush Me, Says the Stress Ball Chick

I went to this year's Feast of the Black Nazarene at Quiapo and this is all I took a photo of: a stress ball in the shape of a chick.  It lights up too, when you give it a squeeze.



A stress ball in the shape of an animal might be cute, but shouldn't the animal rights activists be protesting or something?  We're unleashing pent-up emotions by crushing the poor thing.  

For what it's worth, they should make stress balls in the image of corrupt and inept politicians. 

Stress balls, by the way, are the one of the most popular promo gifts for employees and clients.  It's like saying, yes, we the capitalists make your life stressful as you make us richer each day.  Here's a stress ball for that.

Bye-Bye, Pacifier

One dad teaches his young daughter Ava the harsh and sad reality of letting go.  

Sad, because the little girl must be missing a good friend in her pacifier now.

And harsh, because the dad should have never let the poor sweetheart suffer a loss in the first place.

Not Good, This Yoda Toy Is

(In photo: Electronic Ask Yoda)  It's Yoda reincarnated as a Magic 8 Ball.  Pfft.  

Frankly, I wouldn't go as far as spending $67.95 for a toy Yoda just so I'd have someone to consult about my everyday affairs.  

I don't care if Yoda packs in 900 hundred years of Jedi Wisdom.  Just don't turn him into an updated Magic 8 Ball! 

Here's one from McDonald's Happy Meal.  A Yoda turned keychain, or at least a Yoda you dangle.

Interestingly enough, Yoda's the only anatomically-proportioned character in their Star Wars collection.  The others--Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, etc looked like caricartures with their bloated heads.  Yoda, on the other hand, looked solemn and dignified, pensive and calm too--as if he'd slash you in an instant if you so much as looked the wrong way.

So despite the puny burger and Coke it came with, and despite such a steep price for a dangly toy, I still bought it. 

This Yoda, apparently, detaches in half, like a peanut shell.  I could never figure out why the Yoda detaches in half.  It's not as if it's a locket or something.

And hey, Yoda in the Lego universe!  The lightsaber looks awfully big in his claw hand, but at least it glows.  And at least too the Lego people don't make Yoda dispense Yes or No advices for the day.

* * *

Back in 2007, a waitress in Florida got mighty pissed off when the restaurant she was working at refused to give her the right prize for winning a beer sales contest.  All along she thought she was getting a brand new Toyota car.  During the awarding ceremony, she was blindfolded, led into the parking lot, and given a toy Yoda instead.

She sued, of course.

Ellen DeGeneres Plays with BigFoot the Monster Toy | Video Included

If you were watching The Ellen DeGeneres Show the other day and were wondering about the remote-controlled animatronics toy she was playing with on the show, it's called BigFoot the Monster.

(Thank goodness my sister was paying attention; I googled "Ellen DeGeneres toy muscle man" and "Ellen DeGeneres robot toy", and came up with the wrong toy, or an 80's Japanese toy.  The oversized hands and feet should have given me a clue.) 

So this BigFoot is a sure laugh-out-loud toy, huffing and gruffing and singing as he exercises, walks forward and backward, and does a somersault.  He can be pretty emotional too, especially when you push him on the edge and have him over-exercise (He'll huff, "No more!" breathing heavily all the while).  It's like that A.I. film (with Haley Joel Osment), but less boring.  Oh, BigFoot is so sophisticated it prompted Ellen to say that kids nowadays have it so easy because when she was a kid, she just played with an old shoe. :)

Ever seen those heavy-duty remote-controlled cars that pick themselves up when they tumble down?--BigFoot can do that too. 
 
When BigFoot says Ouch out of nowhere, that's when it gets all the funnier.

Question: Who the heck does the voices for these animatronics toys anyway?  Who auditions for this stuff and is confident they'll permanently endow such a funny voice and personality to your toy?  Several other chatty animatronics toys were out last year, like Dance Star Mickey and Stinky the Garbage Truck, but our favorite has got to be BigFoot.

Here's Ellen during rehearsal with BigFoot.

Oh No, it's a Green Frisbee!

Camouflage

Bad purchase.  Me and Edge haven't really tried it out, but I have a feeling that green was a bad color choice for a Frisbee.  It'll just hopelessly blend with the foliage (like it did with our fridge [see photo]--yes, we have an avocado green fridge).  And then it'll be hard to catch.  Unless the whole point of a green Frisbee is to make the game more interesting..

Edge says we can always get ourselves a beach, for better contrast, but darn I've always wanted to throw a Frisbee at the Sunken Garden, not at the beach.

I hope Toy Kingdom allows exchanges on the grounds of resemblance with vegetation.  I hope SM is open tomorrow.  I should have picked the red one.  And to think I'm not even a Ben Ten fan.

It's just 59 Pesos (barely $2), so let it go, Edge assuages me.  Sure.  Like it's that easy.

* * *
The flying disc's inventor, Walter Frederick Morrison, was born on January 23, 1920 in Utah.

* * *

Brilliant toy, on the other hand: Glow-in-the-dark Frisbees.