Cop Story

I've got no pictures for this post, but I really wanted to post something, so I'll go with an incidental story.

Let's see...not yesterday, but the day before, I watched Robocop. Robocop is one of those movies that is rated R, is ultra-super-duper-violent with extra fake blood syrup, but somehow they decided to market it to children. Robocop had a toyline, and possibly a cartoon. Kinda reminds me of the whole Starship Troopers thing, ironically by the same director (Paul Verhoeven). I remember seeing a lot of Robocop toys sitting around with nobody buying them, probably because kids didn't know who Robocop was outside of his reputation. Anyway why pick a slow-moving shiny robot cop dude only armed with a pistol when you could pick Leonardo who can cut foot soldiers in half and give you another good reason to like pizza all at the same time? For that matter, they also made toys for Terminator, but I bet you they didn't make toys of John Connor's dead parents or a T-1000 with a finger-blade that really stabs out your eye.

I also learned for the first time that the phrase "I'd buy that for a dollar!" actually has its origins with Robocop, specifically from the fake TV show which plays constantly throughout the movie.

Well. The point of me saying all that about Robocop was I had cops on my mind that day. I've only had a run-in with the police once in my entire life, and it was pretty ridiculously stupid, but that's a story most people reading this have heard already. So here's my NEW story about running in with the Law. Sometime before she goes to bed every night, my mom likes to take a little stroll around the neighborhood. This particular night my dad was asleep so I and my brother were asked to accompany her. The time was probably somewhere around midnight, possibly 1 or 1:30. I don't know, my watch was off.

We saw a cop with lights and siren blaring drive past our corner, but my mom won't let anything stop her from walking so we just went on out. Not too long into the walk we noticed a helicopter circling overhead. I wagered that it was a police helicopter, and we were just waltzing right into a manhunt into our own neighborhood.

Yeah, that's what it was. Not too long after seeing at least 7 cop cars piled in one street, with men and dogs flashlighting all over someone's yard, a cop at a corner stopped us and had us wait there until he said so, because "the dogs might bite us." What that really meant, of course, was they had ED-209 on duty and it's still in experimental stage, so you know it might just give us 40 SECONDS TO COMPLY and then gun us down mercilessly.

Sooner or later the cop let us off, and shortly we were stopped by another cop, this time a stout woman, who warned us again about the dogs (experimental robot). Before she was done talking with us she got a call from the searchlight guy in the copter and took off in her car. Before speeding away she leaned out to tell us that they got the guy.

We saw a group of cops towing away a black pickup truck before we finished the walk, but that was the extent of our run-in with a manhunt. I did some quick research to try to figure out what was going on, but since I found nothing we'll just have to assume there was a dangerous DVD pirate/music downloader on the loose and the use of Robot Cops was necessary to take him down.

Also the cop who stopped us was really Robocop.

Ironically, today's comic also has to do with the Law.

A Packrat-Venture

I've mentioned before that I have a curse of hunting. Keeping that in mind, some of my absolute favorite places to go to are Fleamarkets, Yard Sales, and Thrift Stores. I like to hunt in those places without even knowing what I'm hunting for. The other day as we were driving to our self-storage place, I saw this:



What kind of a self-respecting hunter-gatherer could turn that kind of invitation down? Especially since we failed to get into the self-storage. Fortunately the Unique Thrift Store (hereafter referred to as the UTS) proved to be all that and more.

There are a few prerequisites that Thrift Stores must pass before they earn the right to be called true Thrift Stores. First, they must have a vague smell of grandparents or cats. I don't remember UTS's smell, but since it was brand new it may not have developed it. Secondly...



There must be at least one Mountain of Naked Barbies. All of the Naked Barbies in the world end up in Thrift Stores. Maybe there's someone out there who collects Naked Barbies, but whoever it is I never want to see or know them. In addition to Naked Barbies,



There should be a generous helping of Stuff That Nobody Wants. There is a thin line between Thrift Store and Garbage Dump, and even though I believe in the "One man's trash..." ideal, there are some things that will probably never leave Thrift Store shelves. Like Golf Sims, for instance.




Occassionally the aforementioned thin line is crossed. In this case, the line has been left several miles behind in a cloud of dust by a pole-vaulting horserider with a jetpack. This is the category of "stuff no one should want." And finally,



...you have absolutely unbelievably bizarre junk. Where on Earth or Saturn someone got a dark green, limbless, purple-finned, orange-mustachioed alien cow chair is beyond me, but I really hope this is just a sign that science has been lying to us about Saturn being an unpopulated ball of gas. The other minor prerequisites, like having plenty of old electronics and abundances of McDonalds or Burger King toys, the UTS passed with flying colors. They only thing they seemed weak on was the Extremely Hideous Sweater area. I'm okay with that, though.

By the way, I forgot to mention that the UTS, besides being Unique, is enormous. It's easily the size of a half dozen normal Goodwills or Salvation Armies laid out in a neat grid pattern. I think it's the largest Thrift Store I've ever been to, beating out Mobile's "America's Thrift Store" and another one I went to in Illinois by a margin. Unfortunately the pile of NES or Genesis games I was hoping to find alongside a pile of forgotten game systems was not present, but I didn't go home empty handed...



This may just look like an unassuming bag of standard thrift store-grade toys, but remember, this is the UNIQUE thrift store we're talking about. The UTS won't allow itself to be one-upped by any standard bag o' junk. No sir, this is a bag full of dinosaurs. Now that may sound pretty amazing in itself, but the UTS further proved that it wasn't limited to just normal dinosaurs. Take a look at just some of the loot pulled from this bag of treasure:


Little Foot. How can you have a bag of dinosaurs and not have Little Foot? Because when you think about dinosaur cartoons, I'm sure Denver or that "Dinosaur" CG flop don't pop in your head. Unfortunately it seems the carnivors in the bag have already eaten Ducky, Petri, Cera, Spike, and whatever other dumb extra characters came from the 1000 sequels.

Starship Troopers Bugs. While the movie seemed to be little more than an excuse to show off CG effects and as much goopy blood as possible, apparently someone decided that enough unwatched kids would see the movie to warrant a toyline. I guess they aren't dinosaurs, but I don't think Little Foot is about to tell them that.

Reptar. I will admit I once enjoyed watching Rugrats, back when Nick was cool and Ren & Stimpy was on my mind and I didn't have cable TV. Reptar is a nice homage to the Big G, and this one seemed to previously have a sparkling mouth feature, but it's just about as gone as Rocko's Modern Life.

Godzilla? This particular dinosaur looks like Godzilla, and probably wants to be Godzilla, but is just shy of actually being Godzilla. It also looks like it desperately wants to be a wind-up Tin Toy, but alas is neither of those things. Actually, this bag seems to be beating around the Godzilla bush as much as possible without actually having a real Godzilla figure, since next we have...

Spacegodzilla. Yes, he's everything Godzilla is, but with extra teeth and giant space crystals to boot! It's not too strange to see him in this bag, since the now-defunct company Trendmasters released a line of Godzilla figures in America sometime in the middle 90s. Oddly enough the only movie featuring Spacegodzilla had not been released in America at the time. Clearly, the Trendmasters were Masters of something, but certainly not Trends.

Tri-Cera-Tape. Yes, it's a Triceratops whose dorsal area has been carved out to house a tape dispenser. Moving on...

A Street Shark. Okay, now this guy is flagrantly not a dinosaur. Actually, judging by his appearance, he was scheduled for another bag, but he was so X-TREME that he just X-TREME'D his way into the bag of dinosaurs, because he wanted to. Street Sharks were not cooler than Ninja Turtles. But they were X-TREME.

Beast Wars Dinobot. Because the Dinosaur Bagging People at the UTS thought they hadn't covered enough ground yet, they threw in a transforming dinosaur. As you might expect, this particular figure was most of the reason I bought this whole bag. He alone is more than worth the entire $5 the bag cost, even though he's sadly tailless.

Also included: a generous helping of Jurassic Park dinosaurs; a Star Wars Rancor; a T-Rex keychain which makes a sound suspicously like Godzilla's roar; one of those evil dinosaurs from Primal Rage; a nice spattering of those tiny plastic dinosaurs which have been sold by dollar stores and supermarkets since plastic was invented.

With this, the UTS has proven its name IN SPADES. I didn't even talk about the wooden Duck Phone my dad got for his brother (we had a good laugh about that one). I plan on visiting the UTS again, because...the hunt must continue!

The SWAG Entry

swag

n 1: valuable goods 2: goods or money obtained illegally 3: a bundle containing the personal belongings of a swagman

I could probably write a whole entry about the perks of being a SWAGMAN, but instead I'm going to tell you about the valuable goods or money I obtained illegally from Japan, which I brought back in several bundles.

Okay, so I actually obtained it all legally. But I'm still a swagman, all right?

Anyway. This is basically the entry where I show off all the stuff I got in Japan. Most of it's toys, but Japan's toys are cool, so bear with me, huh? I'll break it down into categories. Let's start with, mm,

KAIJU



Kaiju is simply Japanese for "scary monster," but if you go to a store and ask for kaiju movies, you'll definitely be directed to the Godzilla section (yes, those do exist in Japan). Kaiju toys are kind of similar to Beanie Babies in that they all come with a tag and become less valuable once it's removed. As you can see I devalued my whole lot of Kaiju. From left to right we have: 2005 Gigan; Dinosaur Tank (from Ultra Seven); Gomola (from Ultraman); Gomess (a monster from Ultra Q which was made from a recycled Godzilla suit); Showa Gamera (from the 60s); King Joe (from Ultra Seven); Heisei Godzilla (from the 90s); Eviltiga; Ultra Seven 21. The last two are not really Kaiju but are actually heroes. Well, Eviltiga is the evil version of a hero, so he's kind of a kaiju.

Gigan is my favorite. Gigan's always been my favorite. This particular Gigan is from the 2005 Godzilla Final Wars, where he got his head blown off by Godzilla and then came back with chainsaws for hands. In the past Gigan's teamed up with the infamous Megalon, and some stock footage of Ghidorah. Although he did on one occassion make Godzilla bleed rather spectacularly from the face, Gigan unfortunately always loses. I guess I root for the underdog, huh.


Regrets: I bought Ultra Seven 21 thinking he was really Ultra Seven, but it turns out he's a fake. Faker!

TRANSFORMERS



Yes, Transformers. All kids love Transformers! Most kids grow up and sell theirs, but here I am at almost 21 still buying them. A lot of collectors buy Transformers for their poseability or their aesthetic value, and so do I, but sometimes I find myself buying Transformers based on their personality. Yes, a tradition for Transformers is to have their personalities, goals, and mottos transcribed onto clip n' save cards on the back of the packages. I can't read Japanese, but some nice folks have translated many Japanese bio cards for me and whoever else reads them.

Most of the Transformers I got was from the Japan-only line "Robot Masters," which was kind of a filler line with mostly old molds repainted and a very thin storyline involving worm holes linking together a lot of characters from different universes. These were criminally discounted at my favorite Bellhouse, so I picked them all up from there.

R-Blade: This little guy was discounted at 245 yen, or about $2. He's also a self-proclaimed knight. How could I refuse.

Delta Seeker vs. X-Gunner: These were a two-pack, also discounted way more than half their price. X-Gunner is a former good guy who constantly wants to upgrade his body, so he goes after his former friend Delta Seeker to try to pilfer his useful body parts. You know, like missile launchers.

Reverse Convoy: Cruelly discounted to 500 yen, this guy was too complicated not to pick up. You see, he normally has an Optimus Prime-shaped head, but a few flips and you'll find that he's also Megatron. Despite having two identities, Reverse Convoy/Rebirth Megatron seems to be evil all around. You can tell by his narrow eyes.

Megalo Convoy: This was the largest toy I bought in Japan. He's from a different series than the others, and I found him discounted to 2000 yen at Tokyo's largest Toys R Us. Actually, he's supposed to be even larger than he is, indicated by the tiny Optimus Prime included with him. Megalo is said to be from the "Giant Planet," where the robots have grown so large they need to have cute little Minicons to do small tasks for them, like make sandwiches and cook brownies. He sits down to transform into a vaguely-named construction vehicle, which has been theorized to be a bucket wheel excavator.

Regrets: Megalo Convoy was a bit ungainly to transport, but other than that I think I did a pretty good job. I could have bought a lot more, too.

ZOIDS




I used to be kind of obsessed with Zoids. They're a form of model kit, but instead of becoming a shiny car or a brittle airplane, they become wind-up or motorized robot animals. Usually with large guns. Zoids was on its way out when I visited Japan, so their prices were under repeated attacks by invisible monsters with price-cutting swords. Price-cutting swords, I say!

The recent Zoids, while not wind-up, are cool because their parts are interchangeable, allowing for cool stuff like this and this. They're also kinda fragile, so at least one got damaged in-flight and is now undergoing repairs.

Regrets: Well Deathraser up there got damaged in-flight. I still haven't put him back together yet, so who knows.

GACHAPON and SMALL FIGURES




You know when you go to the Supermarket and right before you leave there's always a little rack of machines which churn out Sticky Hands or Disgusting Teeth or maybe little Racial Stereotype Figures? Well, naturally, in Japan to one us up they have machines which sell highly-detailed and sometimes poseable figurines from popular properties. To be fair to the cheaper Americans, Japanese Capsule Toys cost at a minimum 100 yen, usually more. So we get Radioactive Goo or Mile-High Bouncy Balls for 50 cents, and for 1~300 yen the Japanese get monsters and robots. Take your pick. I picked Godzilla, Gundam, and Ultraman.

The left picture is mostly figures from capsule machines (gachapon) or from convenient store toy aisles. The right picture is a huge herd of small figures I bought in one bag for 800 yen. I think there's something like 60 figures total, about half being heroes and half being monsters and a small portion being absolutely unidentifiable weirdness. They're also hollow so you can put them all on the ends of your fingers if you're feeling extra wacky.

Regrets: Cheap stuff, so yeah, it's all good.

SD Gundam Force




Something about me initially hated SD Gundam Force, a semi-spoof Gundam cartoon featuring cel-shaded graphics and a lot of cutesy stuff. But, like athlete's foot, the show grew on me, and so did the toys. Especially the ones unreleased in America, from the unaired second part. Knight Zero Custom and Bakushinmaru here are a couple of representatives of those unreleased figures.

Regrets: Well these two were kinda impulse buys, to be honest. I think they were the last figures I bought in Japan.

AMDRIVER




I have a curse. It's a curse of hunting. See, I can't seem to take interest in anything which is readily available. Take Amdriver Dark here. I saw pictures of Amdriver figures at a couple different Japanese toy review sites, and vowed to myself that when I went to Japan I would find as many of these figures as possible. As it happened, nobody had Amdriver. I had to dig through the depths of the used figures in the cavelike halls of hobby shops just to find a few specimens. Fortunately since it seems that Amdriver wasn't too hot, such specimens came a relatively low price.

Above is the only Amdriver figure I purchased, who goes by the name of Dark Kalhole. The toyline is supposed to be about a group of future-heroes who don the "Amjacket" equipment to fight an invading army known alternately as the Bugscene or the Bugchine. Anyway no bugscene/chine figures exist so he gets to fight whoever I decide he fights. I only bought Dark, but I also managed to find a couple of Amdriver "Bisar," which are their transforming vehicles/armor.




To the left, the Neoboard Bisar "Lindwurm Type S," and to the right the Lance Bisar "Unicorn." Part of Lindwurm Type S transforms into Brigandeer mode for Dark to kick even more butt in, and the rest of it transforms into an absolutely huge sword, which is appropriately named Excalibur. Besides making Dark the king of England, Excalibur also transforms even further into some kind of super-duper overcharge extra-mode stuff. When he's not swinging it through aliens or pirates, Excalibur can serve as Dark's cool flying surfboard. Unicorn also turns into armor with a big lance, but it's really not that exciting.

Regrets: Unicorn is a bit fragile in certain areas, but Excalibur makes up for all of that.

HIGH-END FIGURES

These are the figures I spent more money than usual on. There's three parts to this one.

MICROMAN



Microman is kind of the G.I. Joe of Japan. In fact his origins can be traced to G.I. Joe, but because of Japan's famous lack of space he got shrunk to the 3'' or so that he is now. He's been around since the middle 70s, and since then has enjoyed bumpy success. In the current days Microman has been revived more for collectors, and now has something like 4,000 points of articulation and usually comes with 45,000 tiny accessories. They also tend to come with a ton of extra hands.

In the first picture, from left to right, we have Military Force "Techno Wave," who is a robot with very interchangeable and shiny weapons; Microsister El, the leader of the Microsisters who is armed with very feminine accessories; and finally Acroyear Xado's Acromuzan. Acromuzan is the lone villain from the trio. These are the kind of figures who look cool even if they're just sprawling on the floor, and it seems like even if you just haphazardly move their limbs around they still somehow end up in a martial arts pose. Except El, she just looks more and more like she needs to be rescued by strong, masculine arms.

Regrets: None.

HYBRID STYLE CONVOY



I don't know what makes him a Hybrid, but this is, quite simply, the best Optimus Prime ever made. He's very, very small, but he actually comes with more stuff, weapons, and features than the much more high-falootin' 20th Anniversary Prime, often considered to be the cream of the crop. He has everything a Prime needs and more, including die-cast metal parts and rubber tires, and cost a very reasonable 4000 yen (about $40). He doesn't do windows, though.

Regrets: No.

GUNDAM FIX FIGURATION



FIX Figuration is probably the highest-end kinda Gundam figure you can get without going over to Model Kits. The deal with these figures is they usually come with an insane amount of accessories, in fact they come with so many accessories that they can be assembled into a completely different Gundam if your fingers are feeling up to it. Mine weren't, so I left this Gundam NT-1 in the package for this photo shoot. I've removed it and played with it, but the tips of my fingers were raw for days. Just so you can see, here is NT-1 "Alex" and here is what it turns into after a few hours of tweaking and armor-shifting (both pictures from the back of the box).

Regrets: FIX Alex is almost too high end for me. I like my figures to at least have a little play value, but this one falls apart at the merest mention of "battle damage." Still, it does look good on its little white stand.

OTHER

Not too much to be put here, I did buy a couple of
souvenir chopstick sets from the Daibutsu and Mount Fuji, respectively; as well as that whole Famicom thing. I think I'll save the latter for another entry, as this one has gone long enough already. So, until next time, sayonara from the SWAGMAN.

And the comic makes its return.

New Look! Same Great? Taste!

I suppose you could say I grew out of Xanga. The perks of using Blogspot:

-It's a real (?) blog
-It pretty much looks better
-Everyone can (and should) comment
-I feel profeshyonul

I'm going to try to make it my new home. Since I'm not in Japan anymore, entries aren't going to come quite so easily but I'd like to keep it interesting. I'm near Washington DC now, so I'm sure I'll be able to make some reports on that before Harding claims me again, and when I'm there...well, we'll see.

For now I've got a few things here and there to talk about. First, direct your faithful attention to the right side and under the profile stuff you'll see some thingies which you can click and which will take you elsewheres. Let me just tell you what those are.

Under "influences" are some blogs and funny stuff which invigorate my imagination and take up time when I'm supposed to be doing other things. What they're about:

-Shortpacked: The world of Webcomics is a dark and angsty place, but sometimes you come across gems like this. This one is about a toy collector who works in a toy store, and four or five other people who work with him. It's not for everyone, but I think it's fair to say I'm addicted to it.

-X-Entertainment: Not what it sounds like. Actually it's a site which seems to be a blog, but also seems to have existed since before anyone knew what a blog was. This one guy writes about just about anything and makes it interesting, but most of it has to do with 80s-type nostalgia.

-The Comics Curmudgeon: A blog wherein a man named Josh critiques (hysterically) many of the oddball comics found in the newspaper. And you were wondering who actually reads "Mary Worth."

-Homestarrunner: The best internet cartoon that ever was and probably ever will be. People either love it or hate it. Obviously, I love it.

And below that, under "Favorite Haunts," you will find:

-For Video Games: I play a lot of Video Games which were taught in the Old School, and Digitpress is a website where these oldschoolers go to chat, vent, and do business. It's a lot less annoying than Gamefaqs, and a lot more personable than most other game sites.

-For Transformers: I collect them, so I go here for news. They seem to be pretty fast when it comes to reporting. Did you know there's a live-action movie coming out?

-For Movies: The IMDB. Useful for any kind of cold, hard data you need on any movie or actor or director or key grip from any movie from any country anytime. Somebody works really hard on this site.

-For Everything Else: Wikipedia is the greatest thing to ever happen to the internet.

-My Old Blog: The Xanga which many of you have hopefully been linked from. Gone, but not forgotten.

Finally, I dutifully took a couple pictures of my new home area. Care to see?




Here's my new neighborhood. The houses here were built just after World War II for returning soldiers, and originally were all exactly alike, but now most of them have been at least somewhat modified, some are nearly 100% different.



Since we live near Washington, it's obligatory that streets are named after presidents or important people in US history.

Finally, here is our new house, at 2930 Stuart drive. I think it's probably my favorite of the five houses I've lived in over my life, being not the biggest nor most beautiful, but definitely the most practical. I'd give it a blow-by-blow comparison with my other houses, but that doesn't sound like too much fun.

I don't think you can expect to see a new entry every day, but I'm currently scouring my brain for things about which to write, and some of those things may include video games, movies, or toys. I fear that may alienate some of the ten-summat people that read my previous journal, but I'll try to make it interesting for them too.

Also, I'm still recovering from Jet Lag and Laziness following my trip, so you're getting off without a comic this time. They'll be back, though! Yes!! Comments!!

Testing this thing.