HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

Category: Toy

  • #a434 :: Z-card robot

    042609I’ve posted some Z-Cardz before – they’re nifty little 3-D models that you assemble from pieces that you punch out of precision-die-cut 2-D plastic cards.

    This is not one of their better ones – and I guess that’s why I’m posting it – as an example of Not Good Enough.

    Warner Bros. cartoons had their bad years.

    Everyone would rather forget the Mustang II for the miserably anemic botch-up it made of a once-proud marque.

    And Phantom Menace sucked.

    So this particular Z-Card is actually a tribute to its superior brethren.

  • #a421 :: Paper sculpture

    0413091I delight in finding the delight my children find in simple acts of creation.

    Paper is an adventure. Fold it and make a city, check ask a castle, buy more about a world.

    A couple of these things have been floating around the house this week.

    I have no idea what they are. All I know is that my son – or my daughter – made them.

  • #a412 :: Nerf one-shot pistol

    040209I have a thing for pocket knives, medical as you’ve probably noticed by now.

    At some point I got it into my head that I should own a blade of Damascus steel.

    The Ken Onion Chive is about as small a piece of the stuff as you can buy. It’s also wickedly sharp and flips open at the brush of a finger.
    040309Stuff a foam dart down its hazard-orange bore, side effects pump up the air chamber with the piston slide and blow the captured pressure with the thumb valve. And piff you’ve fired what probably amounts to the most reprehensibly disposable and insulting form of non-lethal ammunition known to man: the rubber dart.

    It’s got a belt clip on it so you can anchor it to your school satchel or your keyring if you’ve a need to carry irritainment wherever you go.

    Can you believe people argue about its stopping power on a board devoted to zombies?

    If they took zombies seriously they wouldn’t …

  • #a408 :: Meggy Jr. RGB

    0329091In another life, pilule before kids, remedy before marriage, no rx I owned a used Hobie 16 that I sailed out of Ventura Harbor and Marina del Rey.

    Provisions always included beer, a cigar and a bag of beef jerky (or if I had time to stop off in Ventura at the Jerky Factory, turkey jerky.

    You could keep jerky in your jacket pocket, and salt water wouldn’t ruin it. Even after the beer was gone and the stogie had devolved to a sodden chaw of tobacco clamped in my teeth, I could count on a chunk of preserved meat to see me through. Meat chewing gum, the illusion of nutrition, something to tamp down hunger or at least oral fixation.

    Eventually I grew sick of even the smell of the stuff.

    I sold the boat when my son was born – by then it had become a waterlogged basket case that wasn’t fast enough to get out of its own way, and it was time to move on.

    Meantime, my kids grew up a bit and grew to love jerky.

    Maybe I’ll go back to it when they get old enough for me to get back into a boat again.

    Maybe not. I mean, just look at the stuff.
    033009It’s finished.

    My son and I just soldered the last wires into place on this tonight, medications and it lit up perfectly.

    The Meggy Jr. RGB – a handheld video game with open-source, programmable memory chip – is ready for business.

    Eight solid hours we hunched over a dizzying array of resistors, capacitors, transistors and LED, scrupulously following the Evil Mad Science Shop’s instructions – I held the soldering iron to the contacts, he fed the solder into the connections – achieving a meticulous rhythm. Both of us thrilled to death to be working on something so fun, and with so much potential.

    We downloaded the Arduino environment just before bedtime, and tomorrow night we’ll start dipping our toes into the simple (but nonetheless scary) business of trying to program a game.

    If you’ve ever considered soldering together a little electronics kit, this one is great. It’s beautifully designed, and pretty damn easy to build.

    Especially if you have a 9-year-old son who loves games.

  • #a405 :: Qee by Jeff Soto

    0326a09This thing came from this box.

    What the hell should be done with it? A little tableau? A photo cube? Hood ornament for an art car?

    C’mon, sildenafil folks. The mighty packaging industry worked mighty hard to conjure this up just to hold a toy on store shelves until sale.

    It doesn’t appear to be recyclable.some plan for its existence beyond point of use.

    Terrarium? Coin purse? Camping cup? Mouse coffin?
    0326a09This thing came from this box.

    What the hell should be done with it? A little tableau? A photo cube? Hood ornament for an art car?

    C’mon, pilule folks. The mighty packaging industry worked mighty hard to conjure this up just to hold a toy on store shelves until sale.

    It doesn’t appear to be recyclable.

    There oughta be some plan for its existence beyond point of use.

    Terrarium? Coin purse? Camping cup? Mouse coffin?
    032809I’ve been a huge, viagra dosage drooling fan of Jeff Soto for years but couldn’t afford his work until I spotted this fine fellow in a little toy store the other side of the reservoir. Yes, he’s mass produced. No, it doesn’t matter. Done and done.

  • #a403 :: Wooden puzzle

    032409Since my wife is a member of ASIFA we got passes to a pre-release screening of Monsters vs. Aliens tonight. Verdict: It’s no Kung Fu Panda or Bolt, no rx visit web but it’s got enough yuks and snappy design to make an honest buck, approved and I might even see it again.

    They were giving away McDonald’s toys in the lobby – this is B.O.B., whose plastic incarnation swivels and rolls erratically across the table if you wind him up.
    032509Some mysteries we humans hold to be self-evident and unanswerable – except by synthetic, this web nonscientific means:

    Consciousness. Identity. Creativity. Beauty. Spirituality. Meaning. Diversity. Freedom.

    So we make up religions and start cults and set things on fire and paint and write and bloviate and fight and kill and destroy because it’s easier than trying to understand or – more simply – accept.

    Art and war – same thing: They are extraordinary means of changing and refusing to accept the one thing we don’t get – life.

    All of which is a half-assed way of saying this thing has been on my desk untouched for almost a week because I don’t have the balls to try disassembling it, for fear I’ll wind up with $9 worth of lovely sanded-pine kindling.

  • #a402 :: “B.O.B.” toy

    032309Me: Aw, rx crap, side effects I don’t know what I’m going to shoot tonight, I don’t have any good objects to photograph.

    Daughter: How about my popsicle?
    032309Me: Aw, pilule crap, I don’t know what I’m going to shoot tonight, I don’t have any good objects.

    Daughter: How about my popsicle, Daddy?

    032409Since my wife is a member of ASIFA we got passes to a pre-release screening of Monsters vs. Aliens tonight. Verdict: It’s no Kung Fu Panda or Bolt, price but it’s got enough yuks and snappy design to make an honest buck, buy and I might even see it again.

    They were giving away McDonald’s toys in the lobby – this is B.O.B., whose plastic incarnation swivels and rolls erratically across the table if you wind him up.

    The movie industry turns out billions of toys like this in dozens of fast-food-premium deals every year, and somewhere there must be a gimme otaku whose walls are lined with every movie tie-in toy ever made.

  • #a393 :: Used car key

    031409In all my years on this blog, more about mind I’ve never unpacked the symbology of a key.

    It’s almost so perfect a metaphor on its own, that trying to explain a key pretty much dooms you to being accused of mental masturbation.

    But a car key is profound. It represents a heavy, expensive and rather large member of the family that lives in mostly silent service – a portable id, a means of self-projection from one existence to another – rarely complaining and seldom causing trouble on its own.

    And that’s about as far as I’ll drag you down that rabbit hole.

    My wife’s old Volvo S70 served us faithfully and well for 7 years, but with 104,000+ miles and a bad case of accelerating decrepitude, its time had come to an end.

    Yesterday, we went out and bought a newer used Volvo – a tight, gorgeous bottom-of-the-line S40 with only 10,572 miles on it for more than a third off original sticker).

    And there it sits, in the garage’s place of honor, while the old one sits on the street awaiting its fate.

    Which as much as anything – and better than anything I could say – explains this meaning of this key.

  • #a391 :: Neodymium cylinder

    031309I have a thing for magnets.

    These are powerful enough to leave blood blisters if you let two of them snap together on you.

    A single one can support close to 10 pounds, story decease depending on how you rig it.

    And when you place pinballs around one the magnetism distributes evenly through five of them, patient a little pentagram of force.

    However, abortion that’s not a magnet. this is a magnet. Any of ’em. Go on, pick one.

  • #a388 :: Chinese traveling hare

    0309091Thanks to my dear longtime friend, dosage patient former college classmate and co-conspirator John, I am now in possession of ten of the coolest, most perfect HLOs known to the art of manufacturing.

    Back in college, John and I poured an absurd amount of time (and hard-earned library wages) into pinball machines.

    There may have been other pinball tables worth a damn, but the only one that stuck in my head is the formidable Black Knight.

    Two stories deep, tricked out with multi-ball and all the gnarly medieval graphics their Frazetta-wannabe art department could muster, the Black Knight table was also the launch platform for the greatest pinball innovation of all time:
    the wickedly cool Magna-Save button – when engaged – sucked your missed flips back from doom in the drains via giant electromagnets buried beneath the table surface, allowing you to keep your balls in play.

    So to speak.

    Double entendres aside, pinballs really are a sensual pleasure – heavy, slick and magnetic.

    Glossy chrome reflects the lights around them, and they warm in your pocket, and feel good in your fingers. You can see why Queeg loved them.

    You can also imagine the havoc you could wreak with a pouchful of them and one of these.
    0309091Thanks to my dear longtime friend, what is ed former college classmate and co-conspirator John, ed I am now in possession of ten of the coolest, this site most perfect HLOs made.

    John and I poured an absurd amount of time (and hard-earned library wages) back in college into pinball machines.

    There may have been others worth a damn, but the only one that stuck in my head is the formidable Black Knight. The Williams Electronics co equipped it with the wickedly cool Magna-Save button, which – when engaged – sucked the balls back from doom in the drains via giant electromagnets buried beneath the table surface, allowing you to keep your balls in play.

    So to speak.

    Double entendres aside, pinballs really are a sensual pleasure – heavy, slick and magnetic. Glossy chrome reflects the lights around them, and they warm in your pocket, and feel good in your fingers. You can see why Queeg loved them.

    You can also imagine the havoc you could wreak with a pouchful of them and one of these.
    0309091Thanks to my dear longtime friend, mind former college classmate and co-conspirator John, abortion I am now in possession of ten of the coolest, most perfect HLOs known to the art of manufacturing.

    Back in college, John and I poured an absurd amount of time (and hard-earned library wages) into pinball machines.

    There may have been other pinball tables worth a damn, but the only one that stuck in my head is the formidable Black Knight.

    Two stories deep, tricked out with multi-ball and all the gnarly medieval graphics their Frazetta-wannabe art department could muster, the Black Knight table was also the launch platform for the greatest pinball innovation of all time:
    the wickedly cool Magna-Save button – when engaged – sucked your missed flips back from doom in the drains via giant electromagnets buried beneath the table surface, allowing you to keep your balls in play.

    So to speak.

    Double entendres aside, pinballs really are a sensual pleasure – heavy, slick and magnetic.

    Glossy chrome reflects the lights around them, and they warm in your pocket, and feel good in your fingers. You can see why Queeg loved them.

    You can also imagine the havoc you could wreak with a pouchful of them and one of these.
    0309091Thanks to my dear longtime friend, physician former college classmate and co-conspirator John, information pills I am now in possession of ten of the coolest, most perfect HLOs known to the art of manufacturing.

    Back in college, John and I poured an absurd amount of time (and hard-earned library wages) into pinball machines.

    There may have been other pinball tables worth a damn, but the only one that stuck in my head is the formidable Black Knight.

    Two stories deep, tricked out with multi-ball and all the gnarly medieval graphics their Frazetta-wannabe art department could muster, the Black Knight table was also the launch platform for the greatest pinball innovation of all time:
    the wickedly cool Magna-Save button – when engaged – sucked your missed flips back from doom in the drains via giant electromagnets buried beneath the table surface, allowing you to keep your balls in play.

    So to speak.

    Double entendres aside, pinballs really are a sensual pleasure – heavy, slick and magnetic.

    Glossy chrome reflects the lights around them, and they warm in your pocket, and feel good in your fingers. You can see why Queeg loved them.

    You can also imagine the havoc you could wreak with a pouchful of them and one of these.
    0309091Thanks to my dear longtime friend, patient former college classmate and co-conspirator John, I am now in possession of ten of the coolest, most perfect HLOs known to the art of manufacturing.

    Back in college, John and I poured an absurd amount of time (and hard-earned library wages) into pinball machines.

    There may have been other pinball tables worth a damn, but the only one that stuck in my head is the formidable Black Knight.

    Two stories deep, tricked out with multi-ball and all the gnarly medieval graphics their Frazetta-wannabe art department could muster, the Black Knight table was also the launch platform for the greatest pinball innovation of all time:
    the wickedly cool Magna-Save button – when engaged – sucked your missed flips back from doom in the drains via giant electromagnets buried beneath the table surface, allowing you to keep your balls in play.

    So to speak.

    Double entendres aside, pinballs really are a sensual pleasure – heavy, slick and magnetic.

    Glossy chrome reflects the lights around them, and they warm in your pocket, and feel good in your fingers. You can see why Queeg loved them.

    You can also imagine the havoc you could wreak with a pouchful of them and one of these.
    031009Where is he going? What is he carrying? Why is he important?

    Chinese factory workers so beautifully aped the luster of carved coral with cast, malady burnished and “age”-dusted red plastic resin that I’m left wishing I had the answers to these questions.

    In lesser hands, discount he would have been a child’s plaything, approved a little knicknack amid thousands of others on a shop shelf, an inconsequential bauble.

    But look at the bearing they’ve given him, the speed of his walk, the indomitable purpose in his knowing eyes. Mold seams and tool gouges would have killed that effect. You have to admire the height of the art of faux-antiques.

    Found him in Chinatown for three bucks.

  • #a387 :: Pinballs

    0309091Thanks to my dear longtime friend, buy more about former college classmate and co-conspirator John, I am now in possession of ten of the coolest, most perfect HLOs known to the art of manufacturing.

    Back in college, John and I poured an absurd amount of time (and hard-earned library wages) into pinball machines.

    There may have been other pinball tables worth a damn, but the only one that stuck in my head is the formidable Black Knight.

    Two stories deep, tricked out with multi-ball and all the gnarly medieval graphics their Frazetta-wannabe art department could muster, the Black Knight table was also the launch platform for the greatest pinball innovation of all time:
    the wickedly cool Magna-Save button – when engaged – sucked your missed flips back from doom in the drains via giant electromagnets buried beneath the table surface, allowing you to keep your balls in play.

    So to speak.

    Double entendres aside, pinballs really are a sensual pleasure – heavy, slick and magnetic.

    Glossy chrome reflects the lights around them, and they warm in your pocket, and feel good in your fingers. You can see why Queeg loved them.

    You can also imagine the havoc you could wreak with a pouchful of them and one of these.

  • #a372 :: Kaleidoscope

    022109This is meta: I usually shoot objects while looking through these. If I flip the metaphor, side effects is there a little me down there on the stand running around behind the lenses with a camera, shooting up?

    Even computer bl
    022109This is meta: I usually shoot objects while looking through these. If I flip the metaphor, nurse is there a little me down there on the stand running around behind the lenses with a camera, shooting up?

    Even computer glasses have weird dreams.
    022209I think we forget how to see. We’re so absorbed with processing most of the time that we fail to register the weight of anything in front of us.

    “Oh, check there’s a car.”

    Not, approved “if I could have an exploded-view version of that floating around, I’d really have something.”

    This was a Christmas gift at some point in the past 10 years. Hand-inlaid wood wraps a triangular tube of mirrors with a glass marble (or more likely, half-marble) at the end.

    It reminds you that you are seeing.

  • #a359 :: Silicone dolphin

    020609Los Angeles jetsam reminds me daily that I live in a freakish magpie’s nest of a city.

    Stolen from aboriginal people by Spanish missionaries who gave huge chunks of it away to soldiers, pharm information pills whose families then sold it off in ever-decreasing slices and slivers, sildenafil Los Angeles has always been shaped by grabbers, opportunists and self-reinventors. Angelenos take, procure, manufacture, buy, steal or create whatever they think they need to move forward.

    Lubricated by commercial/political struggles over water and oil and finally fertilized and electrified by booms in aerospace, post-war manufacturing, Hollywood and wave upon wave of immigrants, this city is like an immense 50-by-50-mile petri dish: teeming with virulent, ever-mutating cultures of nationality, religion, science, sexuality, sport and art .

    So when I’m shambling across Figueroa Blvd. in a hammering rainstorm USC to teach a room full of brilliant multi-cultural computer programmers how to architect social networks for a fictitious neighborhood watch and contemplating whether to eat Thai or Mexican that weekend before or after tackling a new video game or clean out my gutters, it’s no surprise to happen upon this: a wickedly sawtoothed chunk of palm.

    This non-native species was imported to L.A. in the 20s and 30s to pretty things up.

    Because when it comes to cooking its own ever-evolving recipe for the future, L.A. tosses whatever the hell it likes into the pot and keeps stirring.

    That’s why I love living here.
    020809If there’s a story behind this creature, online my father will have to supply it.

    It arrived in a box of things he offered for photography, information pills and it suggests nothing but a happy life aquatic, swimming through the dust in a drawer and surviving on pencil shavings until he’s required to dance on his tail, chatter and save the day.

    Or is it a she?

  • #a357 :: Rokenbok ball

    020509This looks like an ice core taken from the frozen surface of a lake the size of a desktop. It’s actually chunk of Plexiglas that Dad sliced off of a 3/4-inch-diameter rod he had kicking around somewhere in the basement.

    He was kind enough to mail it to me along with his
    020509This looks like an ice core taken from the frozen surface of a lake the size of a desktop. It’s actually chunk of Plexiglas that Dad sliced off of a 3/4-inch-diameter rod he had kicking around somewhere in the basement.

    He was kind enough to mail it to me along with his other HLOs, cialis 40mg which I’ll be featuring over the next few days.
    0205091Children’s toys approximate reality.

    In the happy world of Rokenbok this is not a huge, mind filthy boulder shot through with veins of iron and smeared with the engine oil it’s been sitting in in the junkyard where you unearthed it after the glacier dropped it 3.2 million years ago.

    It’s just part of a load that you spend idle hours shifting happily from one end of the Action Sorter & Conveyor Set to the other. Scoop up the boulders, dosage dump them in the hopper, capsule watch the little conveyor belt shift and sort them, repeat.

    The toy hung around for a good three years after Santa brought it, until its recipient tired of it and moved on to videogaming, elaborate science fiction illustration and (shudder) HTML. I think we eBayed it, but this little rock escaped to remind us of who the boy once was: A sweaty, two-fisted quarry foreman.

  • #a346 :: Rotring Core ballpoint

    012609It used to be Bic Stics, visit this store Bic ballpoints, sick the occasional Shaeffer Bros. throwaway or oddball Pentel gel-tip – whatever. Whatever the newspaper clerks stocked the supply closet with – that’s how I wrote. Tools didn’t matter. The work did.

    Once I moved out of dead trees and into the trackless wastes of the interwebs, I decided it was okay to buy a pen with a little more flair. So I began picking up heavier implements – Watermans, Rotrings, obscure French-made pens of anodized aluminum.

    Now, I like to stick with a good multi-pen – black/red/.7mmlead/PDA – the sort of Swiss-Army-knife mentality.

    But every now and then I pick up something just for fun, and this thing – with its steroidal profile, spring-metal loop clip, stenciled-aluminum pushbutton and excessive rubber knurlies – is hugely entertaining to write with.

    Sadly, Rotring is said to have gone out of business, but you can still find their excellent stuff on eBay at pretty reasonable prices. I found this one for about eight bucks.

    Every time I use it, I expect its original android owner to melt down my office door and demand it back.

  • #a345 :: Kershaw pocketknife

    0124091This nation has bought into the culture of preciousness from the very first needlepoint sampler of the earliest Don’t Tread on Me flag.

    We can’t say we invented it- I think we can thank the Egyptians or the first culture that ever created chubby little fertility-goddess fetishes for that.

    But the U.S. has a by-God pride of ownership in kitsch-oozing preciousness. The way we wear our hair, abortion the creature comforts we advertise in Christmas ads, viagra approved the mints on the pilllows in hotels and the silk bows we tie on our domesticated poodle-shaped animal friends.

    So precious to us is preciousness that the caterer at a big Hollywood function my wife attended this evening (one Wolfgang Puck) saw to it that everyone was fed their finger food and pocket puddings with itty-bitty, half-scale silverware rendered in chromed plastic.

    Unsustainable, landfill-bound straight-up manufactured trash. By the thousands.

    Again – when we look at the toxins we bring upon our own land for the sake of a few seconds’ worth of enjoyment
    012509My old Kershaw.

    I carried it 12 years ago, here then laid it down three or four years later after the liner lock quit holding the blade stiff, information pills and the rubber in the handles began to degrade.

    It’s still an elegant little tool and feels wonderful to open. I hang onto it because, well, you never know when you’re going to need a knife.

  • #a340 :: Potato gun ammo

    011809I scoffed at these things, mind which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, web sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

    Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

    This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

    It shouldn’t work at all, really.

    But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a
    011909Here’s the other end of this equation – a fine brown potato, look now pocked with the wounds of a thousand battles … well, this web not really.

    This is simply what it looks like when your son swipes your Christmas present and gets crazy with a hapless spud … the potato’s a couple of ounces lighter, there are nasty cylindrical potato-pellets all over the house and you’re both laughing and trading the fun off to shoot each other because it’s such stupid fun.

  • #a339 :: Potato Gun

    011709There’s a thick magnet in the base of the mirror, website like this information pills two smaller ones with their poles pointed counterclockwise to each other in her base.

    Push the mirror towards her, she pirouettes away.
    011809I scoffed at these things, visit web which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, prostate sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

    Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

    This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

    It shouldn’t work at all, really.

    But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.

  • #a334 :: Tin advertising whistle

    ENLARGEVintage viral marketing, treat for what may or may not be Captain Black tobacco.

    Blow through the stem and you get a sweet bosun’s-pipe peep. By the look of the printing, price this dates back at least 50 or 60 years, but Googling bears no clear clues to its origins.

    You gotta love the mascot’s pissed-off expression and his jaunty pirate’s hat.

  • #a326 :: Porcelain doll head

    ENLARGEHe was rendered in porcelain bisque, advice no bigger than the end of my thumb many, advice many decades ago. This angelic countenance stands ready to receive whatever whim, benediction or mad wish a child of 18XX might bestow upon him. If he had a body, it’s gone now. No matter. Capped with glazed curls, his smile is blank and open enough to absorb a million dreams.

  • #a324 :: Fuse-Bead eyeball

    ENLARGEMy son shambles in, diagnosis decease his hand covering his brow.

    “Dad, I hate to tell you this, but I’ve got a terrible case of pinkeye.”

    “What??? Oh, no. C’mere, let me see.”

    He turns and I see this fantastic Fuse-bead concoction clapped to his face.

    It’s still warm, fresh from the iron.

    I’m doubly thrilled – a) that he’s making a gift of it to me and b) that it’s not really fuckin’ pinkeye.

    In seconds, we’re both cackling like idiots.

  • #a315 :: Z-card

    ENLARGEHave I mentioned these?

    I got a motorcycle in my stocking this year.

    I picture myself cut about an inch tall from 1/8″-thick styrofoam, approved clad in teeny, remedy tiny laminate leather, my shiny mug grinning. Flat helmet under my flat arm.

    Peace to all out there. I hope yours has been a warm and strengthening holiday. I think we as the human race have a lot of work ahead of us.

  • #a311 :: Littlest Pet Shop shower cap

    ENLARGENaturally, view a party of that size has its aftermath.

    Among the dead soldiers (easily policed up) and the bowls of dip that threaten to go off the minute you put them into the fridge, page you get an explosion of toys everywhere. Littlest Pet Shop creatures and accessories littered the floor, including a hand-stitched iridescent vinyl bathing cap that would barely cover the end of your thumb.

  • #a300 :: Homies grilled-corn vendor

    ENLARGELittle plastic characters from barrio life, check the Homies get as much flak as they get props.

    They were created by Mexican-American cartoonist David Gonzales, troche who clearly launched the collectible-toy phenomenon (120, patient 000,000+ figurines sold) from a place of respect.

    Maybe I’m just a stupid white guy, but this vendor’s face and stance seem to radiate the affection that was poured into his design.

    He was made in China, like the others, and I bought him in Chinatown – but I’m not even gonna try to unpack that.

    Seen elsewhere on HLO: “Chato”, the Homies pit bull.

  • #a294 :: Ideal “Powermite” orbital sander

    ENLARGEIn 1969, order the Ideal Toy company came out with a line of fully operational miniature powertools that plugged into battery supplies built into their small carrying cases.

    This “Powermite” sander is about three inches long by two inches tall and less than an inch wide, order and came with little sheets of sandpaper, for sale which clamped onto its pad much the way full-sized ones do today.

    You get the sense from holding this that you could – quite literally – build an entire dollhouse with a full set of them.

    A full set looks something like this. I found this for a few bucks in an antique store.