We interrupt this blawg…
Apologies for not having much to say recently; I’m launching a fairly major new feature on the site next weekend, so just about all of my spare time this week is devoted to that, to say nothing of getting the rest of the usual features ready (gotta do something cool to celebrate Star Trek’s 40th birthday, mind you). You probably noticed that the site went into “reruns” during August (mainly because there was simply no way I could do new features, continue to work on the aforementioned major new part of the site, and get ready for OVGE all at the same time; in the end, it turns out I was only able to accomplish one out of the three).
Olivia’s going to be spending the night at the vet one night next week – she’s being rewired and front declawed. She hasn’t even gone into her first heat yet, so that’s a good thing. I remember how Othello and Iago used to act before they got fixed when they’d get “frustrated” – it wasn’t pretty and cost me at least one apartment deposit. Hopefully our li’l kitten will pull through this with a minimum of pain and inconvenience. She truly is the #1 source of joy in our household right now, so we’re understandably apprehensive about her going under the knife.… Read more
Maybe it’s the heat getting to me, or maybe it’s me putting into database format all those episode guide synopses from back in the day when I was completely and totally enthralled with Star Trek, but so help me, I’m missing my final frontier fix here lately.
It’s been a miserable, rainy, stormy day all day, and therefore a perfectly valid day for building the Death Star. Apparently the pride of the Empire already suffered a little bit of battle damage, and as a result, there’s barely enough pieces – as in if I’d been short one more support strut the deal would’ve been off – to have everything free-standing. The trash compactor is missing, but y’know, I think that was the first part of my Death Star to get ditched too. 😆 The cardboard scenery inserts are all intact, the elevator works, and the whole thing stands on its own – and yet amazingly, for being one of the biggest Star Wars toys of them all, it’s both bigger and smaller than I remember. If you didn’t have one of these, the best way I can describe it is that it was a sort of “pie slice” from the Death Star, with a few locations built into it that were vaguely reminiscent – very vaguely – of scenes from the movie. There was a crossover bridge that you could “swing” Luke and Leia over, the tractor beam controls with an impossibly narrow catwalk for Ben Kenobi, and one of the massive cannon emplacements. On the bottom level, there’s an open slot for an orange “trash masher” which came complete with chunks of foam, a green rubber dianoga creature, and a vise-like twist handle that would mash your trash (and whoever was in there with it) until the pressure caused a door to pop open. The trash compactor even had windows on the sides so you could see your plastic heroes getting squished! There’s just something endearingly funny about how harmless it all was back then (and really should be today – none of this stuff scarred me for life from childhood onward, or made me a more violent person).
The manufacturer of this one called it “psychedelic lights.” Kent called it a “color organ.” I called it “those disco lights in a box that looks like a speaker.” And Steve W. brought it to me at OVGE.
