"That's Interesting" Tuesday

"No time for long posts, Dr. Jones!"

With vacation at hand I have all kinds of stuff to get settled up and packed. No real time to write anything deep and thought provoking (keep your snark jokes to yourself!) so going with a collection of interesting tidbits.

Short Story Favorite
My favorite short story is "The Cask of Amontillado":

THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat. AT LENGTH I would be avenged; this was a point definitively settled -- but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.

Poe at his best. Poe may have been the first Gold Bug as well, HA!

Pulled Pork Enchilasagna
I am so making one of these this season:
It was Inevitable

What the Heck is Yoda?
Even with the size of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, the species that Yoda belongs to is still unnamed.

Deepest Hole in the World
No it is not the US debt!:
Kola Superdeep Borehole

Blue Amber?
I would like to see some of this in real life:

When natural light strikes Blue Amber on a white surface, the light particles pass right through, and then are refracted off the white surface. The result is the slight blue hue of Blue Amber. When the same natural light particles strike the Amber on a black surface, the light particles don't refract off the black surface, thus refracting off the actual Amber. Hydrocarbons in the Blue Amber turn the sun's ultraviolet light into blue light particles, resulting in the glow of Blue Amber.

We should start an Amber bubble!

Secret Weapon
My secret weapon for difficult PCR reactions? T4 Gene 32 Protein.

Old Muscle
The 1970 Plymouth GTX 426 Hemi. Pure nasty.

Slot Cars
Remember the electric slot cars! They barely worked, you had to have an eraser and alcohol ready, and they broke after about 10 minutes. Still, every kids dream!:


Have a good night.

Toys on Tuesday

I had fun writing last night's post. As I am fresh out of ideas or any interest in things economic once again, here is another "off topic" post.

Toys on Tuesday
What kinds of toys you had as a kid I feel is a memory that never gets booted out of the attic. Economic Disconnect's attic theorem is thus:

Everyone's mind is like an attic. There is only so much room. For new memories to become permanent, other things MUST be moved out to make room. Everyone's attic varies in size.

By the rule I can no longer do calculus nor most organic chemistry, but I can quote "Point Break" in it's entirety. What's more important?

Anyways, here are some great and some terrible toys you may or may not have had as a kid.

The Best of the Best
These toys were the big enchilada when I was a kid.

1.) Transformers
No other toy could push a young kid of age 8 or so into making his dad bring to work on weekends on the railroad to make money to buy them. Yes I did, oh yes I did!

The best ones were of course Optimus Prime and Megatron:


Great idea, slick packaging, and a kick butt cartoon all made this line wildly desired by all young boys.

2.) Photon
What does every kid that plays war want? A way to be sure the idiots you are playing with don't keep cheating and saying you missed them! Before paintball, there was photon!:


Basically a gun that emitted a light wave which could be read on a detector and say if a hit had been scored. These things worked like total crap, but at the time it was heaven on earth. Second place goes to Laser Tag, but those were just way too expensive.

3.) Pogo Ball
A sure way to roll an ankle, but also a good time! These little contraptions were small pogo-stick like thingies that you could jump all over the place with:

Classic commercial:

Again, they really did not bounce very high, but at the time that was kept quiet in the haze of bouncing euphoria.

4.) Nintendo NES
The father of all games, the Nintendo OG-riginal NES:


Now my house only had one TV that did not have the hookup for this (it was an OLD zenith) and they were way to expensive anyway, so I never had one. All my friends did though! How many hours were spent playing titles like Punchout, Mario Bros., and Legend of Zelda? Some may say Atari paved the way, and I guess that is true but this console ushered in the gaming age the way I see it.

The Bad Stuff
From time to time you would get a toy from a relative or something your Mom thought you would like, but the toy was not anything you wanted.

1.) Go-Bots
When told you like transformers, sometimes a careless gift buyer would go out and buy a Go-Bot. These toys were crap. They barely transformed, and lets face it, the cartoon was for babies. When stuck with one of these things you sought out the one kid in school that thought these were cool and traded him for something else:

The toys were made by Tonka and they should have stuck to miniature trucks.

2.) Crystal Growing Kit
This was the most dreaded of the toys if you already tried it. I was no scientist as a kid, but even I could tell it was just salt, not real crystals! Maybe one of the most disappointing moments of child hood. They should have made a "grow gold" kit instead:

A lie told to children yet we knew.

3.) Stretch Toys
This toy looked cool on TV but when you had one you quickly found out that:
-stretching a doll gets old fast
-the only other thing to do is cut it open to see the toxic gel stuff leak out

That's it and that's all. Here is an example:

BORING!

4.) Light Brite
I guess my list of bad toys really is a list of being let down or disappointed. Light Brite looked awesome. It looked fun!:


First tip off that things were going bad? It was a box with a light bulb in it. really, that's all it was. I remember thinking that it should have been a little more high tech than that. Still, that was not the major issue. What was?

Well you had to be some kind of abstract thinker or an future artist to make anything that even remotely looked like something. Most of the time my creations were just blobs of various colors that maybe looked like something if you squinted and looked at the right angle. Close second was Etch-a-Sketch but at least you could write swear words on that easily enough.

These lists are not meant to all encompassing, just what I had in mind. Add your own in the comments section.

Have a good night.