PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

What I Read In August 2009

Nine books for the month, seven new ones and all keepers, though I am waffling on The Railway Children. I'll probably wind up dumping the Nesbit books on paper and keep the digital versions. You can pick them up at the Gutenberg Project, as well as many other interesting books.

Cave of the Dark Wind - A Neverland Book - Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. This is the second of the series of Neverland chapter books which are aimed at the younger crowd. I have really liked the Peter and the Starcatchers series that they are spun off of and I enjoyed this book too. There's something that lives up in the cave of the dark wind. It takes goats the Mollusk's leave near the entrance. While Peter's away The Lost Boys join forces with Shining Pearl and Little Scallop to see if they can figure out what's living in the cave. There's some action and some comedy. There are nice illustrations and the book is short which means you can read it fairly quickly. There's a third book called Blood Tide but I haven't picked that up yet. I'm waiting for a used copy. A couple of weeks ago shiny new copies the fourth in the Peter and the Starcatchers series arrived in the stores. I haven't seen one used yet. As said I like 'em used, especially when I have a coupon over at Half Price Books.

The Mad Scientists' Club - Bertrand R Brinley. This was the first of the series to come out in book form. It collects the stories that appeared in Boy's Life magazine. They were edited for space in the magazine and Purple House Press uses the original manuscripts to restore them to what was originally written. The stories are fun, there are solutions involving science, and a bit of stuff to think about. That's a hat trick in my eyes. In one story the boys help Dinky cover his butt when he tells a big lie. He claims the reason he was late getting home was because he had seen a sea monster out on Strawberry Lake. The boys make a sea monster and run it about the lake. It causes quite a stir and puts the scare into some people. In another story the guys rescue a downed jet pilot using good common sense, scouting survival techniques, and some science. They haunt a house, they solve a 100 year old mystery and create a new one. The stories read well, are entertaining, and you could learn something. I like the cover on this book, too. I lucked out and picked this one up used and that prompted me to pick up the others. That was a few years ago, when I had all that nudie magazine credit. Now I'm finally getting to 'em. I know I'll keep this series to read again. Probably be a while, I still have a huge backlog and there seems to be a few new additions to the heap coming in each year.

 
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - JK Rowling. For some reason felt I needed to read the last three books of the Harry Potter series one more time. That way I will have read them all 7 times each. It seemed like the orderly thing to do. Probably some anal retentive shit goin' on there. I fight an constant battle between order and chaos. It seems less scarey than fighting a battle with Lord Voldemort. It might just be that any flimsy excuse to reread the series again is all I need. I feel I have to restrain myself from opening the books again and again. I seem to love the familiar even though I have such a nice backlog of intriging new books to read. Right now I'm fighting off the urge to watch The Saint TV series again. I just watched them a year ago. Needless to say I succumbed to the lure of the wizarding world and in July I read the 5th book. I still liked it and I liked the 6th book even better. I really enjoy the Tom Riddle backstory that Dumbledore passes along to Harry, arming him up for his upcoming battle. That's the Mary GrandPré cover to the special edition. It's Harry and Dumbledore in the memory of Bob Ogden. They are visiting the home of Voldemort's mother. What a piece of work is that family. Everything that's wrong with people and magic only makes it worse.

Bertrand R Brinley's The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club was sandwiched in between the two HP volumes. I took it to work instead of luggin the larger copies of HP around. I often have two or three books going at the same time. This is the 2nd collection of stories about these boys of science and adventure. The boys make it rain for the water starved farmers but when it doesn't stop the boys are in trouble. The kids buy an old WWII midget Japanese submarine and they fix it up so it works. That causes them some trouble. Then they build a working flying saucer that they buzz the town with. That gets them in trouble with the airforce. I enjoyed this almost as much as the first book. Some of the stories have the boys doing stuff that makes them less than heroes. Maybe they are a little older and more rebellious. Maybe it's Brinley. Maybe he wanted to remind people that even scientists fail and sometimes ego gets in the way. We never want our mad scientists to get too mad. No one needs that.

 
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling. That's the Ukranian cover to book 7 from publisher A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA. It's one of my favorite covers. There's so much going on. And there's so much going on in the 7th book. I still haven't gotten bored reading them. I'll try to wait a bit until the next go.

The Big Chunk of Ice - Bertrand R. Brinley was the last novel in the series. It never got published until recently. I didn't find it as satisfying as the rest of the series. The boys go over seas to Austria in a blimp with a professor from the local college. He's a cartoon character who's just there to give the boys access to the blimp they ride. He's not very scientific. They stay in a mountain town in the Alps and solve a mystery. It's not greatly mysterious. There isn't enough of the science for me. I would not go back and reread this any time soon. I'd read the first three more readily. Not to say it's a bad read, just not up to the rest of the series.

The Calder Game - Blue Balliet. This is the third book in the series. I thought it was ok but not as interesting as the first two. There's too many elements that seem contrived. Calder, a young boy named after the artist Alexander Calder, and his dad head for a small town in England. His dad has stuff to do during the day and he lets Calder wonder around on his own. Petra and Tommy are stuck in Chicago. They don't get along as well without their pal Calder, neither of them having been friends before. The trio and their class had just seen an exhibit of mobiles by Alexander Calder  a few days before Calder leaves for England. The kids seem to like the artist's work more than I do. When Calder arrives his finds there's a Calder statue in the town. A statue that the town's people don't like. A couple of nights after Calder gets there, both he and the Calder statue disappear. What a mystery? The English police are not up to it and they call in Petra and Tommy to solve the mystery. They do. That part of the plot didn't seem natural to me. Pulled me out of the story a bit. The series is about art and artists as well as these kids. I wasn't liking the art connection so much in this book. Maybe I'm just not enough of a Calder fan. I do like some of his statues more than his mobiles, but I only have a passing interest in his work. I know all the pieces they talk about in the novel. I've even seen them in their natural setting, the city of Chicago. I was at the dedication of the giant red Calder staute to the right. It's called Flamingo and when I was visiting Chicago in 1974 I just happened to be wondering by, so I stayed. There were balloons. I believe in coincidence and sometimes the real world seems contrived. That's why I so readily accept it happening in books and movies. I'll keep the book and probably reread it. It won't keep me from checking out future books in the series. I like the illustrator, Brett Helquest, though the cover is not a favorite of mine. There are more interesting illustrations inside.

The Railway Children - E. Nesbit. I wasn't sure how much I would like this 1906 novel. There were no fantasy elements in it. Turned out it's ok. Some posh kids get turned out of their house when their dad goes off somewhere mysterious. The kids and mom settle in a small house in the country. She goes back to writing children's stories for magazines to keep some bread on the table. The kids learn to be nicer than they already were and they have some low level adventures. The kids make friends of the locals. They watch the trains that go by the cottage and become friends with an old gentlemen who takes the train everyday. He later helps them out in a jam. They help out his nephew and he helps free their dad who was jailed for a crime he did not commit. The family is whole again.

Frognapped - Angie Sage. This is the third of the series. I found number 3 & 4 at Half Price Books and picked them up a few months ago. As I started to read these British copies I couldn't understand why Araminta Spookie's name seemed wrong. I went up and looked at the copies I had of the first two books. The UK version calls her Araminta Spook. I like the Spookie name better than Spook. It sounds better to me. I can only speculate why the USA publishers changed the name from Spook to Spookie. I bet you can too. This was as much fun as the other books in the series. Araminta lives in an old house with her uncle and aunt, and the Wizzard family. Mr. Wizzard is missing his trained frogs. He thinks Araminta had something to do with it. She hadn't but in order to clear her name she sets out to find those frogs. Turns out they were stolen by a local creep who wants to turn his mushroom farm into a tourist attraction.  Araminta and Wanda Wizzard inlist the aid of a ghost to retrieve the frogs and they score a pile of gold for their troubles. All turns out well. Angie Sage is also the author of the Septimus Heap series. I read the first two of those and am reading the third right now. Well, not right now. Right now I got to go to work. I'm late. Story of my life.

Science Fiction Sunday 52

I picked up another of the cheap MGM Midnite Movies at WalMart. 5 bucks for 2 movies, not a bad deal, though they are of  more dubious quality than the last two movie pack I got for 5 bucks. I remember liking The Land That Time Forgot when it was new in 1975 but that was long ago and I was less forgiving of the genre then. It's still mostly entertaining to watch. Doug McClure is on a boat sunk by some German's in a U-Boat. He takes over the sub and captures all the German's. The Captain misdirects the subs course by screwing up the compass. They wind up in the antarctic off the uncharted island of Caprona. It's a wacky place filled with dinosaurs and cavemen. It was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs back in 1918. You can read the novel at Project Gutenberg. I read this series of books just a few years before the movie came out. I read a bunch of Burrough's back then and enjoyed the novels that I did read. The Mars series, the Venus series, the Pellucidar series set in the middle of our own earth, and some of the Tarzan series. Except for a recent re-reading of the first Mars book, I haven't read any Burroughs in years. I did stockpile a nice little stack of them to re-read while I was working at DreamHaven. They are in a box somewhere, waiting for their day in the sun. Back in the movie Doug and the German's try working together to refine some oil. They can refuel the sub and escape. It doesn't go well and most people are eaten by dinos or stabbed by cavemen. Doug tosses a message of a cliff at the end of the movie so they can find it for the 1977 sequel. Patrick Wayne heads an expedition to Caprona to find Doug in The People That Time Forgot. Things don't go to well and the party gets stranded there too. There's even more whacky stuff going on with the second movie. It's not quite as good but there are more stunts and dinosaurs. Some of the dino puppets are not so good but the bad guys get tossed in a volcano so it kind of makes up for it. It's almost worth the 5 bucks, so I can't complain much.

Friday Night Movies 243

Sperhauk picked up a copy of the last Zatoichi film, Zatoichi, Darkness is his Ally, for under 5 bucks. It's a highly entertaining series of films about a blind masseur who travels about helping people by killing the local bad guys. He's blind but he's the best swordsman you'll run across. He uses his good hearing to detect where people are. As you can imagine he has an advantage in the dark. He uses a cane sword and like the lightning fast gun slinger of the American western Zatoichi can draw his sword, slash you, and return the sword to it's wooden sheath before you realize you're dead. Most of the movies are readily available on dvd or bit torrent. Shintaro Katsu played Zatoichi in 25 movies from 1962 to 1973, then he did 100 episodes of the Zatoichi tv series from 1974 to 1979, and returned to the character for one last movie in 1989. I hadn't seen this movie before, at least I don't think so. A lot of these movies blend together after all these years and this movie takes many of the iconic Zatoichi action pieces and works them into it's story, which was co-written and directed by Shintaro Katsu. There's a gambling den where a tricky Zatoichi tricks the bosses into a foolish bet, bad yakuza and corrupt officials working together to screw over the local population, a sexy woman who heats up a bath for our masseur, some cute kids, some down trodden villagers and a pretty good amount of sword play. On top of all that there's a bit of introspection as our hero gets older and ponders the way of the world in Edo period Japan. At 116 minutes it's the longest film in the series so there's a nice bit of extra time to get busy. Most of the 60's and 70's films were in the 90 minute range and were not quite so complex. Since I like the character quite a bit it doesn't drag for me. There's a great huge fight at the end and it all ends pretty well as the town's people dance about the corses of the Yakuza and rejoice in their new found freedom. It's a tough world in Japan, you take your pleasure where you can, a new boss will be along soon. Hope he's better than the old boss. Zatoichi moves along. There are always more people who need a killin' in his world. That would end Katsu playing the role. It's a great body of work, well worth seeing. There's a 2003 film with Takeshi Kitano as Zatoichi. You can see  the whole movie on Google video or you can buy the dvd which comes with another interesting Kitano film, Sonatine. A very unusual Yakuza film.

There's wasn't much unusual about our second feature. Zombie Honeymoon is about a couple of crazy kids from New Jersey who get hitched. Their uncle lends them his house up on the Jersey shore. While at the beach a zombie comes walking out of the ocean and falls right on the hapless groom. The zombie spits up some black bile and that kills the guy. He revives in the hospital and seems to be ok. Soon after he starts eating people. His new bride sticks with him for a while but he's just attacking too many people and he's starting to rot away. I don't think the sickness and health vows cover zombieism. Eatin' flesh is always a deal breaker. It's supposed to be part horror film and part romantic comedy. I see the horror in the zombie's, and while they are on their honeymoon, it's not too romantic. The comedy is weak ass, over whelmed by the melodrama as their relationship falls apart. Sperhauk payed two bucks for the dvd. I've spent more on worse. Now I've seen it and I don't need to see it again, nor buy it. You might like it, then again, you might not. Better if you don't find out. You can go watch Sean of the Dead if you want to see a good romantic comedy zombie film.

Judy at the LIC 10-21-09

   
I stopped in at the LEGO Imagination Center at the Mall of America at lunch time today. Judy was having a display of some of the sets that she has altered and some new stuff. The store encourages the employees to set up stuff and attract some attention. People seem to like looking at displays. Judy added a nice mirror image to the Green Grocer set and the Corner Cafe. Both look better though I think the GG works best. Can you spot the changes to the blue house? Her Pizza shop is much nicer than the skimpy set version. She uses these buildings for her train layout. Judy, and hubby Bill, haul a huge pile of LEGO about and set up at various shows here in the Midwest.

    

I really liked the green house and the big white house. That's getting a trim today, downsizing to fit the layout better. We did discuss briefly the problem with the cafe standard size. It's small, kind of a truncated reality with their little rooms and sparse furnishings. In that scale a green grocer is about 32 feet wide. That's about the width of my house and I live in a little house. The blue building is even smaller. It's just the way it is, I guess. I puttered about for a while and headed back to work.

Space Oddity vs White and Nerdy

 

That's the opening picture to Crimso Giger's Space Oddity MOC for the MocOlympics. I really like the yellow truck for some reason and that blue building is pretty cool too. Crimso and Chad have blasted up the ladder to round 5. The boys are working  in the Play It Again, Sam catagory. It's illustrating a song. Crimso picked a classic by David Bowie and I think he really knocked it out of the park. He's got some tough competition in Chas, who picked White and Nerdy by Weird Al. 

 

That shot of the rocket and the tin can Major Tom is floating in are just a couple of the great pictures Crimso has created in his MOC. Hope you enjoy the rest of the song if you stop over at MOCpages.

 

Chas has even more pictures than Crimso for his illustrated version of Weird Al's White and Nerdy and some of them are fun to look at. I always like those little dragons and that red and blue wall just buzzes. Or maybe that's the residual cold that I still have. I might need to go to bed soon. 

 

I like that orange chair and the Segway. Both of the guys are at the top of their game and the judges are going to have a tough time picking a winner.

TwinLUG meeting 10-18-09

  
We had our part trade today. I forgot to bring the sign in book so I'll have to go by memory. Besides me there was Max, Tom, Conner, Erik, Dean, Peter, Judy, Nathan and a small friend, Steve, Gary W, and Michael. Max was the only one who built a Yamato space ship and it was a nice one.

I packed a whole box of mostly small parts into baggies and brought them to trade and sell. The pieces were sorted into baggies worth 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 bucks each. I brought some sets but didn't get any trades for them. First came the trading and Judy had the most interest in my stuff so I got a lot of the junk great stuff that she brought. I traded $116 dollars worth of stuff for bricks and cash. Some people had nothing to trade and once the trades were open we passed cash about. The big red brick in the upper left is currently $15 on Bricklink but Judy was selling them for a five'r. 2 bucks each for the Bionicle rock pieces. Castle parts and columns from Mark were only a few bucks. Some slopes, purple flames, some UFO parts, some transparent parts, some ship parts and lots of other stuff. Since I traded mostly minifigs and small parts I wound up with a lot more bulky parts like the Life on Mars tubes. Toss in a few green plates, some dark red plates, a few random minifigs and I thought I did pretty well. I wound up with three bucks more than I started with.

After we had some snacks and hung about a while  Erik, Max and I went out for Mexican at a place over in West St. Paul called Chula Vista or some such. It was ok, not too spicey, and filling. Now I need to start working all this stuff into my collection. Maybe I'll actually build something with this stuff.

Science Fiction Sunday 51

I was shopping at the newly renovated WalMart near my work last week and they had a copy of a MGM Midnite Movies 2 movie pack for $5. Strange Invaders and Invaders from Mars. Neither was a movie I had been crazy about but the price was right. Both of them had been released on dvd back in 2001. This repackage is from 2005. Just wait and you can add lots of cheap movies to your collection. Both are 1980's movies set back in the 1950's. I'm a big fan of the 1950's science fiction film. Partly because those are the films that I grew up with and partly because they have a different outlook on the genre. More about the story and less about the effects. That's prehaps too simple an observation. I think some of the best SF movies ever made came from that period. The Thing From Another Planet, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and my all time favorite The Monolith Monsters. Some really great movies no serious science fiction movie fan should be without. Plus all the great monster movies of the 50's, who can't love those.

The two in the MGM 2 pack aren't quite as good as those above but they are enjoyable. I watched Strange Invaders first. Paul LeMat, not one of my favorites, is a divorced dad. Diana Scarwind plays the wife. She leaves their daughter with him while she goes to see her family in a small town. After she doesn't return Paul goes looking for her and finds that aliens have taken over the town. He runs away and tells Louise Fletcher, a government official, but she doesn't believe him. Nancy Allen works for tabloid. They hook up and start to investigate. The aliens come to NYC to stop them and kidnap the daughter. Paul races after them with Nancy in tow. Louise is in on the whole thing. Eventually they learn the truth and save the daughter. It's pretty entertaining though I wouldn't give it more than a 6 on the IMDb where it gets a 5.3. I was interested in the commentary by writer Bill Condon and director Michael Laughlin. That was pretty entertaining too. Condon would go on to write and direct the James Whale biopic Gods and Monsters for which he won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. Ian McKellan plays Whale, the director of the 1931  Frankenstein. Brendan Fraser plays the hunky gardner. He's just coming to terms with his gayness while Whale is an established queen. It's an excellent performance that puts to rest questions about Fraser's acting ability. Whale also directed The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, the Bride of Frankenstein, and Showboat. TODH is pretty entertaining, TIM is quite the movie and Showboat has Paul Robeson singing the absolute best version of Ol' Man River.

Invaders From Mars is Tobe Hooper's remake of the 1953 movie of the same name. It's a nice remake but I wasn't a big fan of the movie when it came out in 1986. The new version has better effects and aliens than the original but something just doesn't make me jump with joy to see it. It gets 4.9 on the IMDb and that's about right. Some kid sees a spaceship land on the otherside of a hill behind his house. There's nothing to indicate that aliens had landed when he looks the next morning. His parents, Timothy Bottoms and Loraine Newman, pass it off as a dream. Dad is first to get taken by the mind controlling aliens who really are hiding under the hill. Louise Fletcher is  the kid's teacher and she's a bitch. She starts hunting the kid and he runs to the school nurse played by Karen Black. In off screen life Karen is the kid's real mother. The kid knows a military man at the rocket base where his dad works. They enlist his help, and after convincing him that it's all real, they kick the alien's asses. It's got some good spaceship sets and some good creatures by Stan Winston. The dvd has a couple of making of's that turned out to be ok. Glad I picked up so cheaply.

Friday Night Movies 242

Sam Raimi returns to comedic horror with Drag Me To Hell. It's not as good as the 92% on Rotten Tomato's website but brief parts of it are fairly entertaining. Alison Lohman plays a bank loan officer who turns down a third loan extension to an old gypsy woman. The gypsy woman puts a curse on her after attacking Alison in the parking garage of the bank. Some weird stuff happens and after consulting a medium she learns that the Lamia will haunt her for three days. At the end of that period the soul taker will drag her to hell. We'd seen the dragging part in the prologue when a young boy who stole a necklace from the gypsies was dragged to hell in the house of another medium. It was 1968 (see picture to the right). We return to that cool house and the same medium 40 years later. For $10,000 the medium will battle the Lamia again. It's a cool scene but it doesn't work and Alison is doomed. Unless, she can pass the cursed button on to someone else. She can't even curse the sleazy co-worker who stole her promotion but she can gift the dead gypsy in her grave with the button. That doesn't work because of an all too obvious switch gag. There are some good bits of makeup, especially the gypsy woman, but the special effects often look fakey. There's some comedy and some slight scares but the whole movie left us pretty much unsatisfied, especially when Alison gets dragged to hell. Some reviews suggest that there would be a sequel. It's one of the first movies by Sam that I don't feel the need to run out and pick up, and I bought his baseball movie. Sam's last horror movie was The Gift and even though I bought that when it came out I never bothered to rewatch it. It's just not a happy film and that's the sort of film that doen't lend itself to re-watching, at least for me.

I wish I hadn't watched Yo Yo Girl Cop but that's because it was so damn boring. Joe read about it on Netflix and thought he'd take a chance. The cover makes it look pretty exciting but there's only one real explosion and it's not anything that great. A young woman of dubious nature is hauled back to Japan from New York City where her mother is being held for spying. The Japanese police want the young woman to be an undercover agent. They will bargin with the American's and get your mother out of her predicament. The mission is to go undercover at a private school where someone is making bombs and talking kids into blowing themselves up. Our young anti-heroine beats up some cops and not for the first time either. She goes ahead with the mission and gets beat up all the time by just about anyone who wonders by. She's armed with a yo yo but can't seem to work it very well. The movie spends a lot of time discussing teen suicide which seems to be a bit of a problem in Japan. There is nearly no action again until the last ten minutes when yo yo girl cop, armed with her now deadly yo yo, meets up with the bad guys. It's an even less satisfying than the previous movie. Give it a miss. I wish I had.

BrickCon 2009 - Micropolis

 
I had been so wrapped up in being sick and working on the Micropolis displays at the Danish American Heritage Conference and FallCon that I had not been looking at people's LEGO blogs. I missed most people's BrickCon 2009 pictures. I had a little time before I hit the hay and I clicked over to see what was new on MicroBricks. It's a nice blog and one of the guys who posts there, Peter, dropped into a recent TwinLUG meeting. He spent sometime with the guys at the Danish display. One of their recent posts was for the Micropolis display at BrickCon 2009. The pictures are by Thanel or yupa-suma. Thanel writes pieces over at the Brothers Brick. He posted a ton of pictures on his Flickr page. There is some cool stuff there. You can see more pictures here. That's a great pryamid and there are several other nice buildings. I love the Disneyland Main Street. Very impressive. I'll want to pour over these pictures to steal some ideas get some inspiration. Nice to see some other people having fun with the concept.

TwinLUG at FallCon 2009

 
Roy contacted FallCon and asked to see if TwinLUG could come back to the convention. We got free memberships and free food for putting on a display last year. I'm not so much interested in comics as I used to be. I buy very few anymore. It was nice last year to get to see Don Rosa. When he emailed the con about a month ago, Roy had said we could fill up a couple of tables. The week before the comicon Nick, the guy in charge, asked if we could fill up two pairs of 8 foot by 30 inch wide tables. They would flank the art show at the entrance to the room. It was really tight time wise but still a nice request. We'd pull something together. 

 

Just to the right in the picture on the left is the entrance to the huge cavernous room below the grandstand at the Minnesota State Fair Grounds. It was the second time the con was there. They used to be in the smaller Education Building. I thought it was cold at last years FallCon but this year it was even colder and we were right by the open door. We'd been having a cold snap and saturday it snowed a bit, just to add a twist of the knife. I only had a few miles to go to the state fair grounds in Falcon Heights, which is between Minneapolis and St Paul, and the roads weren't too bad. The bridges were pretty slippery. Brian said he'd seen several cars in the ditch on his way from Cottage Groove, which is probably close to twenty miles. I got to the con about 8am with a whole car full of boxes. I pulled up right by the door and Brian helped me carry the stuff I had in. He'd brought a two wheeler to move the boxes. We started to sort out which boxes go where. Micropolis went on the two tables to the left of the door and the street scene and miscellaneous mocs went on the table to the right. We were joined by Erik and Matt. In just over an hour we were all ready to go. Good thing too. It was so cold outside that they let the people in to mill about the open space while the dealers got their tables ready. Roy came after a bit and Matt left in the afternoon to go on theZombie Pub Crawl.

    
I had read about the gangster theme that LEGO had started but never developed into actual sets. I had all those great Indiana Jones minifigs and cars. I thought we could make a nice street scene with a bank robbery and some other things happening. Brian was interested and we worked on some buildings in the Cafe Corner format. Time and energy and other things conspired on me and I only finished two buildings. Brian managed much more. He added onto the Corner Cafe set, built the blue and green building and the yellow row houses, then added the Green Grocer set to the end of his work. I built the Castle Bank, it's little park, and Jim's Barber shop. Brian added the basketball court. That proved to be really popular. We both brought some vehicles and a lot of minifigs to populate the scene.

    
Since the street scene only filled up the first of two tables I brought some stuff that I had lying around and Matt brought a bunch of his space ships and vehicles. Kids (and some of their parents) liked Matt's ships and a lot of people really liked his mosaics. I hardly know who MegaMan is. People also really liked the turkey on the guy's head in Grampa's Iron Fist, though many thought it was a chicken. Some of our stuff got on the local news but I only heard about it second hand. It was the 30 second teaser at the end of the news program.
   

I think Micropolis had the most buzz around it. People were impressed both with the buildings and the idea that it was all modular. They liked the comic related buildings like the Hall of Justice and the Teen Titan's Tower. Many stared for a while and some breezed by. The comicon asked us to return next year. I sure hope it isn't so cold. Both Matt and I wore our long underwear on sunday. We were pretty miserable. The body heat helped on saturday but sunday there were less people and it sucked. I was glad to go to eat with Roy, Alice, and Erik then go home. If it's this cold next year I'm stayin' home where it's nice and toasty.