End of July Notes

I saw some Olympic diving out of the corner of my eye last night and wandered over to the TV for a look. Svelte lads in ridiculously tiny suits -- wait, there are two of them jumping at the same time. Since when has that been an Olympic event? Shows you what I know: since 2000.

Somehow or other, I'd never seen synchronized diving before. Actually, I know how that happened. I didn't watch much of either 2000 or '04 Games and simply missed the contests in '08, when my viewing was less-than-fanatical.

A credit card offer came in the mail today. Nothing unusual about that -- based on the continuous stream of offers, you'd think there had been no painful recession recently. It was a Disney-themed card issued by a too-big-to-fail bank. But not just any Disney theme: a mockup of the card attached to the letter features the Sorcerer's Apprentice Mickey in full-magic mode. On the back of the card is Mickey and a couple of the broomstick servants he created.

I thought about that. He's one of the iconic Mickeys, of course. But he's also the one who inadvertently creates a catastrophe instead of the useful servant he imagined he was getting. It started small, but got out of hand. You know, something like a credit card can.

The toys of the moment for Ann are her Monster High dolls. They're Mattel creations, released only a couple of years ago now, and the conceit is that they're teen offspring of famed public domain monsters -- Frankenstein's, Dracula, the Werewolf, the Mummy, et al. Lately Ann has been creating derivative characters on paper based on monsters not mentioned in the series featuring the dolls. Sometimes she asks me for input.

So far, we've come up with the children of the Bogeyman, the Devil, Godzilla, the Loch Ness Monster, a Bug-Eyed Martian, a Roc, the "Seaweed Monster" and -- my favorite -- the daughter of Them. As in monster ants, the kind featured in Them. That was her idea.

She's also been taking pictures of her Monster High dolls.

In black & white, for some reason.

A Busted Pluto Platter

Until this weekend, I'd never seen a frisbee shatter before. We have a small collection of them, mostly freebies given away to promote something or other, and we've been careless about their storage. They're cheap, wholly replaceable items, after all. If you can't be careless about things like that, you're a candidate for one of the obsessive disorders.

That is to say, three or four of them spent the winter on the ground near the entrance to garage. Ann and I were tossing one of them around the other day, and I decided to throw one at the stout tree in the back yard. To make that mildly satisfying thump when frisbee meets tree.

The thing shattered into one large piece, something like a crescent had been taken off of the disk, and several smaller ones. I'd never seen such a thing happen to a frisbee. The elements must have made the plastic brittle and ready for breakage. I plan to see what happens to some of the other disks when I throw them at the same tree.

Blizzard! (Soon)

Jolly good fun ahead for the first of February, says the National Weather Service. All caps as usual, copied from the 3:20 pm bulletin for Cook County (and a lot of other places): THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN CHICAGO HAS ISSUED A BLIZZARD WARNING... WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 3 PM CST TUESDAY TO 3 PM CST WEDNESDAY.

SNOW ACCUMULATIONS IN EXCESS OF A FOOT ARE EXPECTED OVER MUCH OF THE AREA FROM TUESDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON.... WHITE-OUT CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED AT TIMES TUESDAY NIGHT AS VERY HEAVY SNOW AND STRONG WINDS RESULT IN BLIZZARD CONDITIONS. SNOWFALL RATES OF AT LEAST 2 TO 3 INCHES PER HOUR ARE POSSIBLE...

Guess it's our turn, then. Heavy snow has been slapping most of the rest of the North, and some of the South, all winter, but not so much here. In fact we'd slipped into a late-February-like winter stasis lately, with snow cover but mostly sedate air.

The weekend might have been a better time for such a blow, as far as most people are concerned, but I'm glad it didn't hit yesterday, when Ann had her birthday party. This was the rush to open presents.

As usual at my daughters' birthday parties, I learned about corners of the toy industry I didn't know existed, and yesterday was no different. One of the girls brought Ann a Lalaloopsie™ doll, a creation of MGA Entertainment. Turns out they were the It doll of the 2010 Xmas season. I missed hearing about them completely, and that's to my youngest daughter's credit. She didn't ask me for one.

Back in November, blogger Julie Ryan Evans wrote, "There are reports that the doll that typically retails for $24.99 is already being sold on eBay for $150." A price that caters to the more-money-than-sense demographic, which is large if not overwhelming in size. Now that Christmas is over, of course, the stores are probably full of the things again.

Zhu Zhu Pets

Time to write about Zhu Zhu Pets, a creation of St. Louis-based Cepia LLC. Apparently they were The Toy for Christmas 2009, but that fact passed me by at the time. No one here asked for one anyway, maybe because my daughters know that asking for a toy because it's The Toy of the season isn't going to make me go out to find one. Especially if the toys are difficult to find or inspire a ludicrous black market.

Now they're easy to find. Ann's birthday party was last Saturday, and one of her friends gave her a Zhu Zhu Pet; "Scoodles," according to the box. It's a (simple) robot hamster, which has the advantages of not needing food and not producing droppings. "Each Zhu Zhu Hamster has its own unique personality & whimsical sounds!" exclaims the box. "Let them scott, scamper, bump n' boogie across the floor or through their Hamster Habitat."

I hardly have to add that the Habitat is sold separately, as are eight other models (Patches, Nugget, Winkie, Jilly, Pip Squeak, Mr. Squiggles, Chunk and Num Nums), plus a bunch of additional extruded-plastic, made-in-China accessories. The toy itself uses its battery power to make tweeting and human-voice noise and travel across the floor unpredictably. That is, it backs up or changes direction without warning, but it will also turn around if it comes to an obstacle, after pretending to inspect it.

I was happy to see "two AAA batteries included" on the box. They turned out to be two Brand X batteries that were able to power the wheels for about a day. This caused consternation, since at first we thought the toy had broken after only a day. Fresh batteries revived Scoodles' exploring spirit, however.

Ann thinks it's the greatest toy ever. She might even think that for a few more weeks. I'd say Cepia hit that the sweet spot of that tricky market, early grade-schoolers, as surely as Robin Hood split the arrow.

New Sock Monkey in Town

The sock monkey takes many forms. Many strange forms that seem to be distant cousins of the original folk art.

I bring this up because a sock monkey appeared in Lilly's stocking this year. In fact, it practically filled the thing up. Somehow I realized that she wanted one -- one or another of her friends has one -- when I saw a display of them at a major drug store chain in the days before Christmas. Unlike those examples above, hers hews a little closer to the conventional form, at least as far as I understand the sock monkey archetype.

But my understanding is limited. Wasn't one of the 1,000 faces of the hero a sock monkey? I can't remember. Lilly's specimen, according to the label, is "All new materials, surface washable, 100% polyester fiber." And of course, Made in China. It has the distinctive red mouth that sock monkeys have, but more interestingly there's a distinctive red anus pretty much where you'd expect it to be, though the tail is in a curious position that seems to sprout from the monkey's lower opening.

Raggedy Ann & Beloved Belindy

Main Street in Arcola, Illinois, has one distinction that no main street anywhere else has, namely the Johnny Gruelle Raggedy Ann and Andy Museum. I'd probably read about the place sometime before we got to Arcola, but Raggedy Ann and Andy had made such a slight impression on me throughout my 45+ years that I anything I knew previously about the museum must have evaporated. So I was surprised to see it.



Not only that, I went in with some trepidation. Here's another rinky-dink museum that wants to gouge me for admission. I was fully expecting them to ask $5 or more -- museum admission inflation has gotten pretty bad in recent years. If it had been that much, I would have sent Yuriko and the kids in to look around, while I took a walk around Arcola.

Admission was only $1 each -- and nothing for Ann. At that price, I decided to look around. It turned out to be a small, thoughtfully designed museum not only about the dolls, but about their creator, the cartoonist John Gruelle, who grew up in Arcola. Previously I knew nothing about him and his creations, and now I know something. I'd say the museum did its job.

As you'd expect, it had a large collection of Raggedy Anns, but it had other, more interesting (to me) items, including an astonishing array of Raggedy Ann merchandise from across the decades. Gruelle drew political cartoons, and there were some of those; he illustrated children's books not his own, and there were some of those as well; and there were other characters he'd created, both as drawings and dolls that never achieved the level of fame that Raggedy Ann did. The most intriguing of these was Beloved Belindy, Raggedy Ann and Andy's mammy. I figure most people wouldn't know there was ever such a character. I certainly didn't.

Then again, as a former boy, Raggedy and her kin had little appeal for me. But wall of a magazine covers and various illustrations from the 1920s to the 2000s showed just how enduring the doll's appeal is -- hanging there were dozens of uses of Raggedy Ann in illustrations and photographs, mainly using the doll as a shorthand for the innocence of childhood or girlhood. In one, a Christmastime 1961 or '62 magazine cover by Norman Rockwell, a traditional Santa -- as you'd imagine he'd be in a Rockwell painting -- is wearing a Mercury astronaut space helmet. One of the toys he's carrying is a Raggedy Ann.

Tato-Head

Signing off for the year. Posting begins around January 2, 2007, if I feel up to it. Aught-seven, who would have thought we'd get so far?

The death of Gerald Ford, along with plumbing issues, distracted me from writing about some of our Christmas presents. I want to return to it before the subject gets too stale, especially because it involves writing about Mr. Potato Head.

Which is how it's styled on the box, meaning that his last name is Head. Maybe he has some less-famous siblings such as Mandrake Head or Nightshade Head (like Gummo Marx or Roy Krispy, brother of Snap, Krackle and Pop), but in any case a few days before Christmas I went to a nearby grocery store, and its toy aisle turned out to be a bonanza of small gifts. Among other things, I got a couple of Slinkies there, plus a rubber chicken for Lilly -- no home is complete without a rubber chicken, and we've been lacking one for too long now -- and a Mr. Potato Head for Ann.

I never had one myself. I never asked for one, and if you'd asked my childish opinion of it, I probably would have regarded it a lame toy, though I wouldn't have used that word. My newly revised, more mature opinion is that Mr. Potato Head is a fine toy, and Ann seems to think so too. Since Christmas she's been re-arranging his face according to whim, calling him "Tato-Head."

The basic Mr. Potato Head, made in China, comes with a potato body, pair of shoes, two arms, pair of eyes, two ears, nose, tongue, set of teeth, moustache, hat and pair of glasses. Years ago, he came with a pipe, but at some point Mr. Potato Head gave up smoking, even though tobacco is a black-sheep family member of his (as part of the Solanaceae family, you see).

How do I know about the pipe? Same way I know that plastic bodies started coming with the sets in the mid-60s, to take the place of the real potatoes that kids used to use for their early Mr. Potato Heads. I looked him up on the Internet, of course, and it turns out there's an insane amount of information here about the world's favorite plastic spud.

Naturally, Hasbro sells variations on the Mr. Potato Head theme, including Firefighter Spud, Space Spud, Construction Worker Spud, Glamour Spud, Safari Spud, and Birthday Spud. There could be hundreds more, I think. Just off the top of my head I thought of Attila the Spud, Tranny Spud (interesting removable parts) and -- to go with Construction Worker Spud -- add Indian Chief Spud, Motorcycle Cop Spud, et al. to form the Village Taters.