I'm late getting this posted for some reason. Been busy, I hope. Not as big a crowd as the last couple of meetings but there wasn't so big a draw as a parts draw. Besides me there was Max and Erik and Dean and Matt and Nathan and Charles and Gary and Tom and Roger. Everyone one is in those pictures above but Max. He's taking the photos. Matt brought the hour long special about James May building the LEGO house. He didn't actually build much, mostly bossing people around. Sometimes with a hand held loud speaker. He's a right old grinch making people work in the rain.
If you hadn't heard the story here's a bit about it. May, a regular on the Top Gear show, has been doing a series of shows called James May Toy Stories, in which he builds large objects with small toys. A 20 foot high house with LEGO bricks, a human size bridge using MECCANO, a large floral display sculpted out of 2.5 tons of plasticine, a giant road race set, a giant train set with 10 miles of track and a giant model air plane kit. I hadn't seen any of them. Matt downloaded the LEGO show and brought it to the meeting. It ran an hour and we used the pc projector in the ceiling. The Rondo Library where we meet each month lets us use the conference room and the projector. Where I work we have several of them installed in the conference rooms. People are starting to call them overhead projectors, perhaps forgetting overhead projectors had that name first.
May got a donation of 3.3 million bricks from LEGO and with the help of a 1000 volunteers and some probably paid designers, engineers and builders he put up a house on an open space in a vineyard in Dorking, Surrey UK. Unfortunately he didn't have a concrete plan for the house after he stayed the night. LEGO wouldn't let him sell the bricks and the Windsor LEGOLAND did not want the house because of the high cost of moving it. So it got smashed apart and the rubble donated to charity. Someone stole that cat. There's been a fair bit of coverage of the story but there just aren't that many good pictures from the demolition. I heard they were using chainsaws to cut it apart but couldn't find any pictures. The people seem to be smashing the bricks with rubber mallets. Probably they used a Saw-all type saw to cut the wood parts apart. That's how rumors get started.
I don't find the place all that attractive. Some of the furniture looks pretty fun but it's too hard and uncomfortable to be useful. The outer wall stripes are ugly to these eyes. It's not a practical medium for a house. It doesn't keep the rain out, I'm sure it would be super cold in the winter too.
Matt brought some new Micropolis modules. I like the bus shelter. I brought the lab I made for the Atlantis build we are working on for the May Comic Con. Roger brought his micro hockey rink, built after he bought a whole cup of 1x1 trans plates from the Pick-A-Brick at the LEGO Imagination Center at the Mall of America. Luckily no one has started to call the place the LIC-MOA. Don't take that as a hint to start. Sounds like a Bionicle. Nathan brought some samples of the new Micropolis Bluff standard. He's working on the specs and will post them up along with the new water edge standard. You can see more pics over at Max's Flickr page above.
Brian K has been knocking out the 32 x 32 baseplates full of deep sea goodness. Here's a couple of pics of his work so far. You can see more on MOCpages. That's Max's Manta ship for the display. It's all cool stuff and it should make a neat display.
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