Saturday, December 24, 2011

Merry Christmas!

I guess I'm becoming the holiday blogger. Since New Year's is coming up soon, I'll have more than one post in a month. Believe it or not. 

Hope everyone (singular) who reads this has a great Christmas, or Chanukah. It's truly the best time of year to give presents to people. I mean, besides birthdays. 

I remember getting some great toys as a kid. Sure, they were probably filled with toxins, but they seemed way more sturdy than this stuff nowadays. There are some toys at my mom's house that I got 30 years ago. Yes, I'm old. My favorite toys, or at least things I really wanted, were the Firefox remote control car and Big Trak. 

The remote control car did end up being great. Sure, it couldn't climb sand dunes like in the commercial, but it worked. I could drive it anywhere in the house and outside. Then, when we got bored, we'd put tape on the wheels and do drifting around the house way before it became cool. 

The Big Trak was another story. You had to program it to do a specific task, which took forever, but in order for it to drive you had to tell it how many vehicle lengths to go, then what degree turn to do, etc. Am I supposed to be an engineer at 8 years old? How could I have it drive up to my cat and shoot at it? By the time I'd be done programming the cat would have kittens. But it did make cool noises that sounded like they were right out of "The Six Million Dollar Man." 

Oh, wait! I forgot about the Evel Kenievel stuff we had! The motorcycles were great. They would actually go, jump over ramps and all that stuff. I also had the Skycycle. That thing sucked. It didn't go anywhere you wanted and ended up crashing into things all the time. Which I guess makes sense. This was the thing he attmepted to jump the Snake River Canyon in and he only made it 10 feet before he crashed spectacularly. if I had known that I would have returned it before opening it. 

Anyway, I hope you all get nice presents this year. You all deserve it. And, don't give out crappy presents like I did to my mom one year. 



All this thing did was blow ashes all over the place. it kind of defeated the purpose. Sure, the smoke didn't get in your eyes or lungs, but the ashes did. What's worse? I should have bought her the food dehydrator instead.  Hell, the Pocket Fisherman would have been better.