Toys. I could say a lot about toys, but so little of interest. Growing up, I mainly stuck to He-Man and WWF figures, and it takes a certain kind of ten-year-old boy mentality to appreciate those topics. Even most of the other ten-year-old boys I knew weren’t really interested. Eventually, I learned to fake it well enough, but for whatever reason, it’s not something I ever grew out of.

This made it a bit difficult to choose a toy-themed blog topic. I know that nobody wants to read about why Modulok was the coolest of all the He-Man figures, and you don’t care why I found the late-80′s LJN “Ravishing” Rick Rude action figure so poorly designed. I got a great toy for Christmas, and recorded a video of myself playing with it, but really, I don’t have anything more to add to the description I posted: “I had this toy. Then I didn’t have it anymore. Then they remade it and I had one again.”

Is it wrong of me to find it funny and a little sad when the bowling ball does a header right into the burner?

Also, I think it says a lot about myself that my fridge is covered with drawings and I am wearing a t-shirt with a hot dog that says “I AM AWESOME.” ( Read more )

When I was growing up, my brothers and I played “guns” all the time. The rules were simple:

To shoot, you establish line of sight and call out something like: Pow! Pow! I got you!

If you’re hit, you fall over “dead”, close your eyes, and count to 20.

Your “gun” might be your hand, a stick, a flashlight (when playing at night), a store-bought toy gun, or one of the guns we carved out of wood scraps from the garage.

I have especially fond memories of those homemade wooden guns. We’d dream up a gun, sketch it out on the surface of the wood, then my dad would help us saw out the rough shape. After that, we’d file down the sharp corners and slowly but surely our custom gun would emerge.

Our homemade wooden guns had several advantages over store-bought toy guns: ( Read more )

In 1988, when I was just three years old, I wanted one particular toy for Christmas more than anything else. After seeing the commercial on TV, I just knew I had to have my very own Oopsie Daisy doll. Much like a real baby girl around 8 months old, Oopsie Daisy was learning to crawl, and, again mimicking reality, Oopsie Daisy would fall down fairly frequently because she was still learning, after all. But, rather unfortunately, the similarities to real life didn’t end there: Whenever Oopsie Daisy fell down, she would cry out “Mama, mama!” until someone picked her up again.

Despite this rather annoying premise, I still had my heart set on an Oopsie Daisy doll for Christmas, and my wonderful parents were determined to make my holiday wishes come true. ( Read more )