You’ve just come home from a tough day at work, the end of summer is neigh, and with the Olympics and various political conventions we will have had four shitty weeks of TV. It’s time to take action.
As you know, the Narwhal, the Unicorn of the sea, is underappreciated - you don’t see them decorating the Trapper Keepers and harmlessly erotic dream sequences of little girls. But we know what it truly is: the fully armed terror of the deep.
Now Narwhal’s pissed and ready to act out - take out your stress with the Avenging Narwhal ($11.75). It’s a six inch vinyl figure with four magic tusks (crystal, onyx, ruby and ice) to impale adorable baby animals (koala, penguin, and seal).
Note that this is not geographically correct - as I often have to explain to Atari after years of conditioning from Coke commercials and bad TV, baby penguins are not found in the Arctic.
Filed under Toys In the attic.
Last time I checked, I already had a digital photo album, called my hard drive, but I was wrong. Sony makes the real deal - the lusciously named HDMS-S1D. I’m just going to call it “HudMuss“.
With HudMuss you could project every last hi res photo onto your TV, making your entertainment center as exciting as live streaming PowerPoints. Yep, it’ll store about 50,000 photos of your dog licking your baby, or your digital archive of Hooters waitstaff. And there’s a built in optical drive burner for backups. Wait a minute - you mean I’m buying this thing and it has no backup/redundancy? Uh-oh. Think I’ll go with the 1.2 terabyte NAS instead.
HudMuss will set you back 400 bones, shipped, BUT if you enter Goodyblog’s crazy free-or-riffic back-to-school-blog-party (say that three times fast) by next Friday, you could win one of your very own.
Filed under Crib Notes, Roombalogy, Utility Belt.
The liquor cabinet isn’t just about cheap thrills. It’s about power. With the goal of bringing power to and booze from the people, Horizon Fuel cell has introduced mini ethanol fuel cell, which generates electricity without internal combustion. You can run any sort of ethanol diluted with water, but given the low alcohol, high fizz of beer, I’d just stick to the hard stuff. It’ll run for hours on end, and is perfect for school demonstrations (except the alcohol part).
$100, and they start shipping next month. If you’ll excuse me I have to go to the ethanol store to buy some pre-enriched fuel cell supplies (vodka).
Filed under Edumacation, Toys In the attic.
Kids love worms, and Recycleworks has found an expensive way to tap into that desire: the Educational Waste Buster, or what we know and love as a worm bin.
Why worms?
Worms break down more food garbage than can be accomplished with passive composting, and according to City Farmer, can be done inside or outside. Yeah. I suppose that’s less disgusting, than say, owning a ferret.
The Waste Buster comes in three different sizes and has an optional window, and made from durable, sustainable FSC wood. They’re quite spendy - the smallest model starts at 150 pounds without the window. But if you don’t have 150 quid to throw around, you’ll just have to make your own, using a plastic bin, for about 7 bucks.
Filed under Edumacation, Utility Belt, Where Walden.
Say you’re taking your whole family to a Wilco concert and you want to protect your sweeties hearing until they follow in your path and start playing drums. Or your little helper wants to hang around with you and the chainsaw - you might consider Peltor Kid Earmuffs. Only $17, pink or blue, they should reduce sound by 20 decibels. So if you’re taking them to see Sonic Youth for the first time you only have about 200 db to go. Since Atari likes to stand directly in front of the stage at Rock N Romp, I think I might have to get a pair (provided he doesn’t rip them off because they don’t look cool).
Filed under Utility Belt.
The Micro Mobility G-bike can best be described as the Flintstones car for toddlers. It’s somewhere in that nether zone between a bike and a scooter. A b’cooter?
We recently tried to ride tandem with Atari, but bless him, his legs are just too short to make it. Some go with scooters before bikes to improve balance, so I suppose this is the next micro-incremental step in learning two-wheeled mastery. Ridiculous?
From what I could tell by the abhorrent Flash-driven site, there is no price. But if you can get onto Micro Mobility without your laptop exploding let me know.
Filed under Toys In the attic, Utility Belt.
The closest I get to golf is watching Happy Gilmore. I can’t play mini golf. I can’t even play Wii golf. I don’t have the patience. But if you want to encourage your kid to work on their drive, Vilac has the set of clubs for you. $55 will get you three wooden drivers and a ball. For age 18 months and up.
I’ve started exposing Atari to my own wide world of sports - we kayak together, he’s used the plastic climbing wall, camping this summer and this winter we’ll get him on skiis. Sorry kid, ice climbing is strictly for five and over.
Any odd sports you want to get your kids into?
Filed under Toys In the attic.
A furniture designer in Olympia WA offers the Rumba Musical table: it’s made with block modules, each with a musical instrument underneath. You can choose which instruments you want in your noisemaker, including a tambourine, snare drum, bongos, shaker, chimes, bell, cow bell, high hat, crash cymbal or bass drum. As you slap each square of the table it makes a different percussive sound. You can move the squares around, if you gotta have more cowbell.
Perfect if you’re expecting Neil Peart for dinner or you lose power and can’t play Rock Band.
The 2X2 table goes for $800 plus shipping.
And speaking of Neil Peart, you might as well see Rush muddle through “Tom Sawyer” on Rock Band.
Filed under Crib Notes, Toys In the attic.
Stan the Man Lee - who gave us Spidey, the X-Men, the Hulk, and the FF, now teams up with Disney on Time Jumper, a new comic book series that will released on every digital platform - computer, mp3 player, x-box, thermometer - that you could possibly imagine.
Comix have long been ready for an update. Marvel.com offers tons of books which you can read online -but they’re little more than a digitized version of the original book, which I already have in my basement. It’ll be nice to see some real web technology embedded into the stories .
Time Jumper involves a kid with a super-amped up cell phone - it can travel through time. If this were the real world, the kid would play with time travel for about five minutes, trade it in for an iPhone then go back to texting fart jokes to his friends.
Filed under Webslinger.
Every once in a while I imagine some sort of conspiracy in which Pisney/Dixar is making movies with characters designed so they can easily be converted to toys. Could that really be true?
Disney’s offering pre-orders on the adorable new robot hero for $249. It has motion and optical sensors, and can play mp3s. It can dance, follow you, and capture your hearts, buttering you up as they pave the way for a future dominated by our robotic overlords.
This week while on vacation we’ve been enjoying my in-laws’ Roomba and Scooba, lovable working robots who have charmed us with their ability to vacuum and scrub the floors. My ultimate verdict with the Roomba is it pretty much sucks if you have hairy, shedding pets or kids who leave their toys all over the floor (yes, Mom, I know, ain’t payback a bitch). But for the no-pet, post kid set, the Roomba does a fantastic job.
We are now hoping that iRobot will release Saamba, a circular robotic dance instructor.
Filed under Roombalogy, Toys In the attic, Utility Belt.
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