Arrr! Let's Take a Gander at the Booty, Me Hearties!
Xmas came and went in a very satisfying manner this year.
Santa delivered the following well-deservéd rewards to yours truly:
| a): | The "Definitive Director's Cut and this time I mean it" of Blade Runner, which came with all the other "definitive" versions of the film, oodles of documentary-like things, a frame with an animated scene from the movie1, a folder of concept art, a plastic statue of the origami unicorn and a small metal model of the police hovercruiser to play with when the movie gets boring. All packaged in a silvery plastic attaché case. It's dead good. Thank you Mrs Stevie. |
| 2): | A DVD of the Call of Cthulhu silent movie. This is a brilliant visualisation of the old 1930s H.P. Lovecraft short story. Doing the whole thing as a 1920s silent movie with el cheapo sets and stop-motion animation was nothing short of inspired. Thank you Stevieling. |
| ♣): | A brand new model 425 Workmate, what can clamp stuff vertically and comes with an additional leaf for the work surface in case you need to play cards on it or something. It's so beautiful I cried. The mechanism to enable one hand vise tightening leaves a lot to be desired and I predict it will wear out before the mechanism loosens up enough for it to work as the designer envisioned2 but that doesn't really matter to me. The important thing is that I have one, thanks to Les In-Laws. |
| ™): | The complete series of Space: Above and Beyond on DVD. Oo-rah! |
| þ): | Two pairs of stain-resistant trousers. Apparently Mrs Stevie thinks my work is more exciting than I do. |
| n+1): | This year's Hess truck. Hess trucks are an institution in this state, and I have a collection I started in 1993. Hess issues a new design every year, featuring working lights. Some years the truck is a tractor-trailer rig with some load or other3, some years the truck is something different like an RV or fire truck. This year's is a big wheeled monster truck. It's dead good, and has two friction drive motor cycles (with working lights of course) in the bed. |
Santa was also good to the others in the house, delivering stuff I was too busy playing with examining my Hess truck or playing with evaluating my Workmate or playing with the Blade Runner hover cruiser examining the contents of my Blade Runner kit to make detailed notes of. DVDs and stuff. They seemed happy.
I love Santa.
- Achieved using superimposed polarised images. It is refreshing to see that technology in use when I was a toddler hasn't died out completely↑
- The original versions of this offered on other people's "clone" workmates involved a manually-activated clutch to link or unlink the cranks. Black and Decker opted for a sort of spring-tensioned ratchet that spends entirely too much time slipping and wearing away the engaging dogs on the clutch mechanism. WD40 and petroleum jelly have been applied to the screw threads with minimal improvement of the action. No matter. It wasn't a feature I valued on the model↑
- loads have included small cars with working lights, helicopters with working lights and spinning rotors and a space shuttle with working lights and a satellite deployed from the cargo bay, said satellite also fitted with lights and sound. Good value toys↑
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