Another Year Over, A New One Just Begun

Against all odds, 2009 has finally ended. I thought about doing a “Best of the Decade” or at least a “Best of the Year” post, but the internet is already full of them, and after the decade I’ve had, I’m just a bit tired. Instead of looking back and thinking about the best and worst of all the good and bad of the last ten years, it’s better to look ahead to 2010 and start thinking about ways to keep the next decade from looking like the last one. I’m now on a different side of the country, with a vastly different group of friends and a slightly different haircut than I had back in 2000, so perhaps things have already begun to change for the better.
2009 has certainly ended on a good note (minus all the financial problems and the 24 hours I spent stranded in the Atlanta airport—I love snow, but not when it leaves me stuck in an airport with nothing but Tiger Woods coverage on CNN for entertainment). I enjoyed Avatar a lot, even if it didn’t change the way I think about cinema for all time. A great 3-D action adventure yarn with jaw-dropping visuals and fun action sequences is good enough. I didn’t walk out yammering about how beautiful it was like I did after Titanic (Yeah, that’s right, I went crazy over Titanic like a 13 year old girl—what are you going to do about it?) but James Cameron has yet to make a bad movie. And though it’s gotten a lot less attention, I also had a ton of fun with Sherlock Holmes. It was more my style than Avatar—I don’t know about you, but I’ll take any story set in Victorian London over any story set in outer space any day of the week. Add in black magic mixed with 19th Century science, the always excellent Robert Downey Jr., and a complicated plot right out of a 1900s pulp magazine, and you’ve sold me. Both movies had a similar tone of wide-eyed adventure that made them feel tailor made for the 12 year old in all of us—they’re the kind of stories you find in yellowed old books in a box in the basement, Robert E. Howard and Edgar Allen Poe and Rudyard Kipling and the Hardy Boys and H.P. Lovecraft filtered through an explosion of modern special effects and thrilling soundtracks. What’s not to like?
But it’s not just the movies that have made the end of 2009 so much better than much of the previous year. I had a great time at a wedding down in Georgia with friends from California, a good trip to D.C. with friends from college, many hours spent enjoying the ridiculous two-player action of New Super Mario Brothers and The Beatles Rock Band, and a great Christmas complete with snow. When it’s not keeping me at the Atlanta airport, snow is great. Weather is something I miss a lot in California. There’s nothing worse than repeating the same thing day in and day out, whether it’s good or bad; a job or a TV show or a song or a game or even a thought. When you get stuck in a rut in California, you can’t even count on the weather to make one day different from the next. Everything is exactly the same.

That's my main hope for 2010. A philosophy, not a resolution; resolutions so often become an albatross around our neck. I spent so much time in the last decade doing the same things over and over again every day that the time just flew by, and in many ways I’m in the same place on New Year’s Eve 2009 that I was on New Year’s Eve of 1999—in fact, I’m literally in the same place at the moment. So many of the days bleed into the next because I’ve allowed them all to become exactly the same, and before I know it years and years have gone by. So for 2010, and for the next decade, it’s important that I try to do things differently every day, to find the variety in life even if it’s something very small. There’s more than enough out there to make every day unique and memorable, all we have to do is spend a little time looking for it. If not, life might end up like Los Angeles weather—pleasant, but not very interesting.

So goodbye, 2009. Let’s all hope for a better 2010!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! There's snow on the ground and schmaltzy Christmas music on the radio and I couldn't be happier. I had a lot of fun going down memory lane for some tacky 80s and 90s memories, and I got a lot of ideas for things to write about in the new year. It was a bit of a rush getting all those posts together, what with life stubbornly intervening time and again, but I made it!

At least for this year.

I hope everyone has a great day!

Final Gift: Bo-Bo The Dog (1983)

The final present I’ll be discussing this year is one I was too little to even remember getting. For my second Christmas, when I was about 18 months old, I got a brand new puppy. He was even named after me: Benjamin’s Bonhomme de Neige (Benjamin’s Snowman). Apparently you’re expected to name purebred dogs something that ridiculous. We always called him Bo-Bo, which conjures images of clown-like levity and innocuous childlike happiness. Given the name, it’s all the funnier that Bo-Bo grew up to be mean, surly, and anti-social. Friends were scared of him and the rest of the family was embarrassed of him, but I didn’t care. He was my puppy, and I loved him to death.
Bo-Bo was a Schipperke, a small stocky black dog with no tail, a lot of energy and a peculiar habit of standing on his hind legs and waving his front legs in the air—the “patty-cake.” My aunt had a Schipperke dog that gave birth to a group of puppies, and they were distributed throughout the family—my grandparents got a girl, Nicky, and I got Bo-Bo.

At first he was a sweet puppy, though a little rambunctious, as all puppies are. He chewed through every toy I had, and even today I will occasionally find some old plastic toy scared forever with his teeth marks. I think it happened to more than one unfortunate He-Man figure. As Bo-Bo grew into a foot high adult Schipperke, his tastes grew with him, and simple toys were no longer enough. Schipperkes have sheep herding in their DNA, and part of sheep herding is keeping the wolves away. To Bo-Bo, most of the world was a wolf.
At our old house, we had a giant yard where Bo-Bo got to exorcise his wilder instincts. For being a small dog, Schipperkes can really jump, and I have vivid memories of sitting on my back porch watching Bo-Bo chase down birds. He would literally leap five feet into the air and grab a bird in his mouth without any provocation. The unfortunate birds lost their lives simply for having the audacity to fly within Bo-Bo’s air space. Some dogs bring their owners their slippers, others rip birds from five feet in the air and rip them apart before they touch the ground.

With the yard to play in, Bo-Bo was a pretty agreeable dog. When he came into the house he was a good and faithful companion, loyal especially to me and my dad. Sometimes he would bark at strangers, but that just made me feel safe. Even as a very young child, I knew that if any monsters came in the night Bo-Bo would bark them into oblivion. Anything that got into that house would do so over the dog’s dead body. He was a solid mass of muscle and teeth, a worthy adversary for even the most fiendish of monsters.

Like most dogs, Bo-Bo like being petted, begging for food, riding in cars, and running around in random circles. He often seemed happiest in the snow, where he got to dig around with his nose and race sleds—despite his short legs, he usually won. I think he probably would have been happy as a farm dog on a big 19th century estate somewhere, free to roam and hunt and then come home and rest his nose by the fire.
Instead of moving to a big 19th century estate, we moved to a new suburban development where we couldn’t get a fenced in yard. Bo-Bo was forced to spend all his time in the house. He had his mean tendencies before, but this is when things really got exciting. Not long after we moved in, he got loose and bit a neighbor on the finger. He started getting a larger than life reputation among the neighbors. People were scared to come see him, and eventually scared to come to the house at all. We had to keep him locked in my parent’s bedroom whenever we had company over (except family, for some reason he was always tolerated family members, even if he didn’t like them too much.) Some of my braver friends sought to challenge Bo-Bo from time to time. Their hubris was ever their undoing. One of my friend’s little brothers once sneaked into the depths of my parent’s bathroom and cornered Bo-Bo, at which time Bo-Bo sprung out and bit him in the knee.

Before that, Bo-Bo chased another friend who had dared enter his lair around the house, down the stairs, and out the front door, until the kid finally got trapped in a corner of the front porch and wet himself while Bo-Bo stood growling inches away. In the dog’s defense, he never bit the kid, and never moved in to bite him. He just disabled him and snarled for a while before I pulled him away. Other times he liked to stare my friends down before giving chase. "Run up the stairs!" I'd yell. "The incline might slow him down enough for you to escape!"

Now I think about how the neighborhood must have gossiped that there was such a terror living at our house. Many of them must have conspired like Elmira Gulch to have the creature destroyed, but my family always stuck up for Bo-Bo. My dad and I treated him like any other member of the family. You can’t kick out a family member just for being mean. The kid that wet himself went on to live a productive life, and his cowering terror was always fodder for a good laugh.

But there were less funny incidents. Once, when a neighbor was taking care of him, Bo-Bo sprung out from under the bed and bit right through his foot. I must have had some very tolerant family friends for them not to insist that he be put down immediately. On another occasion, Bo-Bo became so territorial inside my parent's bedroom that my dad had to defend himself with a tennis racket to get inside. As the years went by, Bo-Bo became more and more of a problem for my mother. He would prowl the bathroom when she needed to get ready, snarling at her, and finally he lunged up and bit her in the leg. This was the last straw. I was in 8th grade at the time, and not even my dad could stand up for Bo-Bo. We had no choice but to take him in for his final vet appointment.

It might be hard for people on the outside to sympathize with Bo-Bo and the boy that loved him, but his biting issues were only a small part of the picture. Those people weren’t there to be woken up for Saturday morning cartoons year after year by the happy yipping of Bo-Bo at their bedside, didn’t see him slide around like a walrus on the kitchen floor when he got so excited he could no longer stand, didn’t see him tunneling his way through the snow in the blizzard of 1996 like a one-dog snow plow, and never got to witness him charging down the stairs at cheetah speeds every instant he heard the meat crisper open. Every time I took a trip, no matter how short or long, no matter how old I got, Bo-Bo would be there waiting for me by the door the moment I got home. He would get so excited that I couldn’t take two steps forward without him jumping around and around and around in a never ending circle, his small paws pattering on the hardwood floor.
What’s more, most people on the outside, who knew Bo-Bo only from his legend, failed to see his biggest problem. It didn’t happen too much when he was younger, but as Bo-Bo got older he became prone to violent seizures. I would wake up in the middle of the night to hear him howling from downstairs. When I went down to investigate my dad was usually already there, holding the dog on his lap in the Lay-Z-Boy. Sometimes he would stay up with Bo-Bo for hours while he shook and struggled to stand. All his toughness evaporated as he trembled, his eyes wide and terrified, without any conception of exactly what was happening to him. Watching someone in a seizure, whether they be dog or human, is a frightening experience, but my dad never stopped holding him and comforting him until it passed, no matter how long it took.

Bo-Bo was a purebred Schipperke, which probably translated to inbred, which was almost certainly the cause of his epilepsy, which was almost certainly the cause of his mood swings. A lot of times, and especially in Bo-Bo’s case, the things that seem the scariest are really the most scared. People who were terrified of Bo-Bo would be shocked to see him shivering in terror himself night after night. Pets aren’t just luxuries that can be arbitrarily done away with when they disappoint us. Bo-Bo stood loyally by us time and time again the best he could. We couldn’t just toss him aside because he was dangerously insane.

In the end, we didn’t. When we took Bo-Bo to the vet that day, the prescribed him some medication to help calm him down. He was already legendary at the vet for his bad behavior, but they sympathized with us and said that the pills might do the trick. They did, at least well enough to keep Bo-Bo with us for another six years. He actually got to the point where he loved the sound of his pill case rattling since he knew it meant he was getting some meat to go with it. He was never friendly, but his aggressive behavior diminished, and he lived with us in relative piece until my freshman year of college, when he finally took that final trip to the vet at age 17. He maintained his energy up until the very last few months, but on my first call home from college I was given the bad news that he was now chasing birds in heaven.

Bo-Bo is my favorite Christmas present not just for the memories of racing him through the yard or chasing him around the house, or the way he used to sneak onto the couch to sleep when we left the house, then jumped off and ran away the second we came home. It’s not just because of the way he used to rip birds out of the sky and chase squirrels across the yard, his ebullient reaction every time I came home, or his incessant yipping. The reason I’ve put him at the top of my list is because of the lessons I learned from our time together. Pets help to teach us that love is not conditional, that those of us who are stronger and smarter have a responsibility to care for the strange, the weird, and the weak. A lot of times, the most problematic people or pets are the ones that need the most love. Where my friends saw a monster, I saw only the puppy who had been my loyal friend from as far back as I could remember. He wasn’t a bad guy—he was my dog.
Anyone who's ever loved a dog knows that they'll wait for you no matter what, no matter when, no matter where. I don’t know much about the afterlife, or if it’s true that all dogs go to heaven, or if there might be an exception that rule for Bo-Bo. But I do know that somewhere there’s a door waiting to be opened, and Bo-Bo is sitting on the other side, waiting for me to come home. Hang in there buddy. Try not to bite anyone.

Gift: Eternia Playset (1988)

This was the big one. The mother of all action figure playsets. When I was six years old, Eternia was only a few inches shorter than I was, and there was nothing cooler on the face of the earth. If bigger meant better, Eternia was the best thing ever made. It had a battery operated monorail track, a giant lion/door that could eat action figures, five floors, about fifty accessories and a dozen things to keep your He-Man figures occupied—trap doors, prisons, laser canons, computer terminals; so much that I can’t begin to remember it all. It had everything you could possibly want out of an action figure playset, and not a single towel rack.

I never gave up on Eternia. I wanted it for three Christmases in a row before I finally got it, after He-Man had long faded from the public eye. Three Christmases is an eternity (whoa, I just got that) for a kid to want the same thing, but I was persistent. Mall Santa after mall Santa had no idea what I was talking about when I asked for it, and even my helpful crayon illustrations failed to get the message across. But that didn’t stop me from asking for it again and again and again. Nevermind that in actual He-Man lore “Eternia” was the name of the planet the characters inhabited, and the creation of the three towered “Eternia” was simply an excuse to release a giant playset. There was nothing on earth I wanted more.

By Christmas of 1988, I was close to losing all hope. I was still a fan of He-Man and She-Ra, but both shows were now off the air, only occasionally shown in reruns on USA. The products were gradually disappearing from stores as Mattel turned its focus back to Matchbox Cars and Barbie. Eternia was always hard to find, but by 1988 it was well on its way to becoming the collector’s item it is today. In 1986 there were plenty of other He-Man toys to occupy me, light the Fright Zone and the Slime Pit and…sigh…Crystal Falls. In 1987 I had Fireball Island, and no one would dare complain about that. But in 1988 the idea of Christmas without Eternia seemed bleak indeed.

Then fortune smiled on me. My grandmother, who back then did all of her Christmas shopping about 8 months ahead of time, had managed to find one. At a reduced price, no less! I don’t remember if she took credit for it or assigned it to “Santa.” I think the fact that I have absolutely zero memory of where it came from only emphasizes how excited I finally was to open up that giant box and see the familiar He-Man and Mattel logos. After four consecutive He-Man related Christmases, this would be the last time I would ever open one of those boxes.
But back then I didn’t have such a nostalgic mind. I ripped the box open as soon as I could and got to work assembling the thing in my room downstairs—I think I actually put it all together without much help from my dad, a big achievement for me at the time. It took hours, and I can still remember the smell of the new plastic, the way the rough edges felt on each small piece as I ripped them from their plastic frame, and struggling to perfectly press the “sticker flags” together. Like all of my action figure playsets, I had as much fun putting it together as I did playing with it, quite possibly more.

Once it was assembled, it took up an entire wall of my room (when you attached it to the Snake Mountain and Castle Greyskull playsets, of course, but what He-Man fan in their right mind wouldn’t do that? I’d had both of those since Christmas of 1985, and that year they enjoyed a well deserved revival.) I don’t know if I actually played with it all that much once I got it assembled, like I said, the He-Man phenomenon was definitely waning by that point. I mainly enjoyed getting out all of my figures, posing them around the three towers in action battle poses, sneaking away my parent’s camera from its hiding spot in the cabinet upstairs, and taking about a dozen pictures. Later on, the Eternia tower would be re-purposed as a miniature for movies I shot on my dad’s VHS camcorder, doubling for locations as diverse as the Empire State Building and Princess Zelda’s castle.

Owing to my increasing fussiness and pack-rat tendencies, any of my toys that survived, say, 1992, are still in pristine condition and stored in boxes in my parent’s house. Most of Eternia has survived to this day, though much of the monorail track and some of the smaller accessories are long gone. Even collecting dust in a forgotten corner of the basement, the giant lion faced tower still commands awe and respect. It’s not in anywhere near good enough shape to fetch the $800 a mint condition version can get on ebay, but I like it the way it is, a picturesque ruin that inspires memories of a lost age.

After wanting it for three years you’d think maybe I found Eternia a little disappointing, but if anything it was better than I hoped. Ever since the Star Wars prequels it’s become almost gospel that most big things are just big let downs. Not so Eternia. It was marketed as the coolest playest of all time, and it was. Some kids had their Death Star or their Ghostbusters Firehouse or their G.I. Joe Air Craft Carrier. Those were all awesome playsets, but nothing could ever compare to Eternia. Best. Toy. Ever.

(Dang. All this He-Man/She-Ra reminiscing has dredged up a lot of memories. Looks like I’ll be revisiting that topic in 2010. Stay tuned.)

Gift: Packard Bell Computer (1996)

Finally, redemption for all the video gaming misfortunes I’d suffered over the years. I pretended that I wanted a new computer for the educational elements, because I could get online and interact with friends, or so my family could finally get ahead of the technological curve. Those were all valid concerns, but they weren’t even close to the real reason. The mid 90s was the absolute zenith of PC gaming, and I wanted to be able to play games so advanced they put even the upcoming Nintendo 64 to shame. More than anything in the world I longed to get rid of our archaic 286 computer and finally use a computer that could run games that were the envy of my friends.

I had been buying PC games for several years even though my computer had no hope of running them. They were so much more interesting and complex then Nintendo and Sega games (at that time), with big giant boxes and long instruction manuals that talked about the game world as much as how to play the game. Some even included maps and charts and other goodies that made things even more fun. But I had no way of playing them.

My family was never very tech savvy, and they refused to understand the need for a computer that could actually connect to the internet and interact with the modern world. It wasn’t until 1996 when I finally sensed my wisdom was getting though, and so by the time Christmas rolled around I was fully expecting a new computer. If I hadn’t gotten a new computer, I would have probably just taken up a sport or started dating or something—it’s incredibly difficult to be a successful nerd without a good computer. Fortunately we’ll never have know what my life would have been like had I gone down that road. For on Christmas of 1996 I became the proud owner of a new Packard Bell 200 MHZ Pentium computer. Pentium, people. That’s like a million times better than a 486.
The first game I installed was Tie Fighter, part of a “Star Wars Collection” I got that included six Star Wars games of massively varying quality, from the ludicrously awesome Tie Fighter to the abysmal Rebel Assault. Star Wars was big again at that time—the Special Editions were about to come out, and the games and novels had been coming out in force for a few years. Tie Fighter gets my vote for being the best Star Wars related product ever, movies included. Nothing for me quite captures the spirit of what those movies were all about than Tie Fighter. Before the prequels Star Wars was a crazy gritty world of heroes and scoundrels, but the best thing about Tie Fighter was that you were just an average Joe imperial pilot trying to make his way in the Empire. In addition to being a great game Tie Fighter was the quintessential pre-prequel Star Wars experience.


I had also had King’s Quest VI laying around the house for a long time, an even older game that I nevertheless experienced for the first time on Christmas of 1996. Adventure games are long dead, despite occasional articles about a “renaissance” that never quite materializes, but back in the mid 90s they were still a viable genre, and some of the best ever, like Gabriel Knight II and Grim Fandango were just coming out. King’s Quest VI was from 1992, but it felt as fresh then as any new game, and indeed it remains one of the best Sierra adventure games ever made (good future topic: Sierra adventure games.) The backgrounds are beautiful, the characters are rich, and the game has so many memorable moments, from the very first moment you wake up on the beach to the climactic journey through the Land of the Dead. The production values and ambition were greater than anything I’d ever seen on Nintendo and Sega, and the game was from 1992!

Of course, the real highlight of that Christmas was a game I’d been fantasizing about for months. I rushed out with my Christmas money to buy it the second Wal-Mart opened up, and I don’t think a year has gone by where I didn’t play it at least once ever since: Daggerfall. Daggerfall is too huge a phenomenon for me to skim over here—it requires its own discussion. Suffice to say it was the most expansive, in depth, and atmospheric RPG I had ever played, and it really opened my eyes to what a computer game could be. I had infinitely more fun reading the Daggerfall instruction manual than I ever had with the Sega 32X.
There were so many other great games, and I got to play them all in one big burst during the first few months of 1997—Warcraft, Warcraft II, Diablo, Phantasmagoria (not great so much as memorable), Under A Killing Moon, the Pandora Directive, Ultima Online, and about a dozen more. I could spend days talking about any of these games, but I’ll refrain from that for now, since this was supposed to be about my introduction to the computer age. In addition to games there was also the world of AOL. Those years were the golden age of AIM conversations and online shenanigans—programs that could force people offline, internet romances, and personal geocities websites. Just the existence of the internet was a novelty—when I discovered that the cover of one of my favorite novels was online, I printed it out just because I could.

These days a computer is really just for the internet. There are still a few great games, but most of them have moved on to the Xbox 360 or the PS3. There are no more giant boxes filled with 120 page manuals and great junk—today computer games are just console games with inferior controls and difficult installations. But back in 1996 a good computer game was the height of interactive entertainment. That was the last Christmas where I really had that old childlike sense of excitement. How could I not? After fantasizing about playing all those computer games for years, I got them all literally overnight. A Christmas where you get to play King’s Quest VI and Tie Fighter for the first time on the same day is a Christmas indeed.

Christmas Gift Oddities Part 3: Crystal Falls (1986)

Sometimes when we revisit the past we discover odd things about ourselves. Until I started writing about Christmas and trying to remember what I got each year, this little embarrassment had completely faded from my memory. But I might as well get it out now: When I was very little, I loved She-Ra. I liked He-Man too, but the show had been off the air for some time; meanwhile She-Ra the Princess of Power was still churning out all new episodes for my enjoyment. Even at age four, I thought She-Ra was pretty hot, and saw no reason why I shouldn’t be a huge fan. For my fifth Christmas, I sincerely wanted the She-Ra Crystal Falls playset. Instead of freaking out and sending me to football camp, my parents went to the opposite extreme: They actually bought me the thing.
I don’t remember much about it, but judging from the commercials and box art, it was even less masculine than I recall. Apparently one of the accessories was a towel rack. He-Man came with swords and shields, She-Ra came with a towel rack. But I had fun with it. I loved (and still love) assembling giant plastic toys, and since this one had a pump action, three story waterfall it was especially complicated to put together. Once it was assembled, I suppose I used it to give the She-Ra figures baths, though I’d like to think I had the villains attack it at least once. In my defense, I also got the Fright Zone that Christmas, a much more masculine He-Man playset, and I ended up playing with that at least as much as Crystal Falls. My family didn’t seem to mind that I was playing with a pink clamshell girly toy, but suspiciously enough Crystal Falls is the one Mattel He-Man/She-Ra toy I remember that didn’t survive to collect dust in my parent’s giant basement back east.

I make no apologies or excuses. I played with this, owned She-Ra dolls, watched She-Ra, and own The Best of She-Ra on DVD. I have to hand it to my four year old self: I didn’t have a thought about what I should or shouldn’t be doing, or whether it would be weird to own what was effectively a bath for dolls, or what anyone else would think of it. I was as proud of my Princess of Power Crystal Falls playset as I was of the Fright Zone or any other gift I got that year. Maybe it was because I didn’t have a shred of shame playing with something so frilly that my parents never worried about me: confidence has a way of spreading like that.

At age four, I couldn’t even conceive of being embarrassed of something that genuinely interested me, and I turned out just fine (as fine as any of us turn out.) Today, especially in the process of trying to be a professional writer, I put an awful lot of weight on what people might think of me and my work. Instead of being embarrassed that I wanted Crystal Falls at age four, my four year old self should probably be embarrassed of me. I could learn a lot from a little boy who proudly asked Santa for a “refreshing water wonderland for She-Ra and her friends.”

Gift: Too Much Batman Stuff (1989)

When I say I was obsessed with Batman after the Tim Burton movie came out, I’m not messing around. Look no further than Christmas of 1989 for evidence. In every picture, every crude VHS home movie, I’m smiling like a moron with some new plastic Batman accessory. I haven’t been able to find a single picture where I’m opening a present that isn’t Batman related. There were Batman posters, Batman cups, a Batman TV tray, Batman comic books, Batman clothes, a Batman calendar, Batman action figures, Batman band aids, and of course, piece de resistance, my very own copy of Batman on VHS. And that’s just what I can remember.

I can’t possibly write about all the Batman miscellanea that came my way that year. How much can you say about a Batman TV tray? However, a few highlights stand out. First and foremost, my grandparents gave me an entire box full of Batman stuff, complete with black and yellow tissue paper lining (This was duplicated many many years later when my sister gave me the Batman DVD). Inside, along with the Batman belt and Batman band aids and other assorted Batman merchandise was the Batman VHS tape. As far as I can remember this was the first VHS tape I owned myself (though I did own some He-Man cartoons and Return to Oz on Beta.) That was it for Christmas for me. I raced downstairs and did nothing but watch Batman over and over again the rest of the day. I was finally dragged out of the basement several hours later to eat dinner with the family, but I could have easily watched the movie for a few more weeks, at minimum.

Once I’d been pulled away from the movie, I was free to examine my other Batman stuff. Among the most interesting was a comic book on tape called The Untold Legend of the Batman. I don’t know if these still exist in any form, but when I was a kid I had many books that came with an accompanying cassette tape of actors reading the dialogue. By age seven I could read just fine, thank you, but I still enjoyed listening to the tape as I looked at the pictures in the comic books. The tapes had reasonable acting by my seven year old standards, and I think I’ll preserve that illusion by not listening to them again. It’s possible the dude doing the voice of the Joker for a kid’s book on tape brought just as much to the role as Heath Ledger, right? Sure it is.
The story was actually pretty good. It dealt with Batman’s origins, the origins of the villains, and had a kicker of a psychological plot twist. When a mysterious villain penetrates Batman’s inner sanctum and begins destroying mementos of Batman’s past, Batman goes on a mad quest through Gotham to try to figure out who has it in for him. His quest takes him back to the Batcave, where (spoiler alert) he discovers that he has suffered a complete mental breakdown, and it turns out that the person trying to get rid of him was (whoa!) Bruce Wayne, who had splintered off into an alternate personality. When you’re seven years old, that’s some pretty deep stuff, and I use to relish bringing it up to my friends who thought Batman "boring." Losers. A lot of the origin stories and plot elements have been retconned in the Crisis on Infinite Earths series and Year One, but The Untold Legend of the Batman will always stand as my real introduction to the world of comic book Batman, and the story that made me realize Batman went much deeper than the movie.

Less impressive was my Toy Biz Batman action figure. Batman action figures are notorious for their lackluster quality, but this guy actually had some impressive features. Or at least one impressive feature: He had a spring loaded pulley inside him, so you could hook his belt onto various household objects. Let him go, and he would slide up the rope, just like when he used the grappling hook in the movie! Great! So sure, it was a fun action figure, and a Batman Christmas wouldn’t be complete without a Batman figure.
One problem. Every time you used Batman’s “Bat-Rope” the pulley wound itself up just a little bit tighter. This wasn’t a problem at first, but after a few months of play the rope started to get a little tight. Then, finally, I pulled the belt one too many times. The internal gears snapped, and Batman exploded. When you’re a child, the total explosion of Batman is a pretty traumatic experience. Arms and legs and pieces of torso were all over my bedroom floor—it took days for me to find the head so it could be given a proper burial in the trashcan with the rest of Batman’s remains. A few months later I upgraded to a non-exploding Kenner Batman figure, which I believe exists somewhere to this day. But you never really get over the shock of Batman exploding in your hands. It’s hard to respect him after that.

So that was the Batman Christmas. And while it's never a bad thing to get Batman toys for Christmas, a little variety never hurt anyone.

(Unrelated: Today is the wedding day of a good friend, so I wanted to take this widely read and popular blog as a spot to say "Congratulations!")

Gift: Nintendo Entertainment System (1990)

This one is obvious. What kid didn’t dream of waking up on Christmas morning and finding a brand new Nintendo under the tree? Only kids who already had Nintendos, and by 1990 there were a lot of them. I was a little late to the Nintendo party. I knew a lot of people who already had one (or had the similar, lamer alternative, the Sega Master System), and I had played it casually for a long time at different people’s houses. But among my close friends, I was the only one to own a genuine NES and (very soon) a large library of games. In fact, it’s a little surprising when I look back now how quickly my bundle of Nintendo related crap accumulated. I only had it for about 18 months before I moved on to Sega Genesis, but in that short time I accumulated a disproportionate amount of games and fun.

The Nintendo was one of the very last presents I opened that Christmas. Christmas of 1990 was the Christmas of MC Hammer and the Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons, and I was fortunate enough to add a brand new Nintendo to that embarrassment of riches. It came with a note saying I had to share it with my dad, but other than the original Super Mario Brothers my dad has been unable to figure out a single video game, so I’m not sure what the purpose of the note was. Early on, my parents would play Mario in the other room after I went to bed, and I still have good memories of listening to them argue about the best way to get past King Koopa (as we called him in those days). Sometimes my dad would even come home from work excited because he had learned some new secret from a co-worker.
That phase passed quickly, however, and for the most part I had the Nintendo all to myself. Initially I spent all of my time on the three games I got that Christmas: Mario and Duck Hunt, of course, along with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Fester’s Quest. Both of the latter games have more than earned their reputation as some of the worst games on Nintendo, even though the Ninja Turtles were so popular that everyone had that stupid game. Standards of video game quality weren’t quite up to their modern standards yet, and I made do the best I could. I enjoyed Mario, but it never quite clicked for me the way it did with a lot of people; it wasn’t until I got Mario 3 a few months later that I really plunged into a Mario game. I also, to my later humiliation, loved the Zelda cartoon series, so much so that I wanted to make it into my very first live action movie, and so a snow day rental of Zelda 2 (not the original) became one of my earliest Nintendo highlights. I was always, and perhaps foolishly, interested in games with established characters and plots, hence the ownership of the terrible Ninja Turtles game.

Somehow, despite the terrible games, I became a big Nintendo fan, and, even more stunningly, my house became a Mecca for other 3rd graders seeking a chance to enjoy time with the sacred gray box. In those days we had a fourth bedroom upstairs that was almost exclusively reserved for playing Nintendo, and it became our club house. Far removed from the rest of the house, it was a place where the kids could learn and study the craft of Nintendo relatively free from adult interference. Shortly I added some new games to the repertoire—Gremlins 2 (yay!), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Good One, and of course Super Mario Brothers 3. The Nintendo age had truly begun.
It’s funny—there was nothing more important to me that Christmas than getting a Nintendo, and I have dozens of great, unforgettable memories associated with that thing, but when I think of that Christmas it’s the lesser presents I remember more. Like The Simpsons Sing the Blues, Gremlins 2, my Ninja Turtles Tiger handheld game (remember those?) and my MC Hammer tape. 1990 was more about all the crazy cartoon fads that were exploding in the elementary school pop-culture scene than any big gift. The more I think about it, the more I think that maybe Nintendo might not have become the phenomenon it was were it not so closely linked to all those exploding fads. There were Simpsons games, Ninja Turtles, games for just about every movie and property to come along—most of those games were terrible, but I’m sure they helped sell Nintendos as much as Mario did.

I’ve written more about 1990 than any other Christmas, probably because there were so many popular characters and TV shows swirling around back then. Only in a year as vibrant with pop culture kiddy confection could something as wondrous as a Nintendo be only one among many memorable gifts. What an awesome time to be 8 years old.

Gift: The Simpsons Sing The Blues (1990)

Believe it or not, today is twenty years to the day that the Simpsons Christmas Special first aired way back in 1989. Though the show remains popular, by Fox standards, it has never again reached the insane level of merchandise saturation it hit in that very first year. Nothing captures the way the Simpsons exploded into popular culture in 1990 more than The Simpsons Sing the Blues, a full length album of different Simpsons family members performing old blues and jazz standards. The Simpsons characters (with the possible exception of Lisa) have no connection whatsoever to blues music—odds are these songs were cheap to license, or else some blues fan on the staff was just dying to record an album. I have no inside knowledge on how this thing came about. It doesn’t matter. Knowing why it was created would only take away the magic. All that matters is that the album sold, going platinum in the US and making it to #3 on the Billboard charts. I got it on tape along with a glut of other Simpsons merchandise back in 1990, and I listened to it at least as much as I would one day listen to The White Album. Maybe even more.
The main selling point was “Do the Bartman,” a rap/rock/new jack swing song ghost written by Michael Jackson, a huge hit on the playground in 3rd grade. Bart Simpson was the coolest kid on the planet back then—the show centered around him, and he was marketed to death. If you were a fan of the Simpsons during that first huge rush of popularity the song is sure to hit you in face with a powerful slap of nostalgia. If not, it must seem a very sad relic indeed.

My favorite song, however, was and still is one of the few other Simpsons-original tracks on the album, “Look at All Those Idiots,” sung by Mr. Burns and Smithers. Unlike the rest of the album, which mostly consisted of the Simpsons voice actors singing real-world songs that I had never heard of, “Look at All Those Idiots” had a real story based around real Simpsons characters, and was, wonder of wonders, funny. Okay, so maybe it’s not side splittingly hilarious now, but if you’re in 3rd grade it’s top notch stuff. Mr. Burns and Smithers were probably the first Simpsons ancillary characters to break out of the pack—they were definitely the first ones I was aware of, and it was great fun listening to Mr. Burns complain about the incompetence of his inferiors to a groovy late 80s dance beat. It’s the one song on the album that shows the clever, intelligent direction the show was headed.

As for the rest of the songs, they were happy to cash in on the show’s status as a fad. Do we really need to hear Homer and Marge singing a duet of “I Love to See You Smile” or Lisa Simpson doing a cover of “God Bless the Child”? Apparently I did, because I listened to the album nonstop from Christmas Day until at least March. And it had some stiff competition: I also got Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em that Christmas. Come to think of it, I listened to that tape all the time, too. Damn, that was a good Christmas. It’s amazing how many things you can be passionately interested in when you’re eight years old, and somehow there’s time for them all.

So like many of childhood’s delights, The Simpsons Sing the Blues is a pretty sorry experience without nostalgia backing it up. It’s hard to explain in words why I had so much fun with it, and listening to it sure isn’t going to get the message across. It’s just one of those weird things that perfectly captures a specific set of memories—there’s something of the Spirit of 1990 alive in The Simpsons Sing the Blues. Or maybe it just captures that in 1990 there were millions of kids just like me who would buy absolutely anything with Bart Simpson’s face pasted on it, even a mediocre blues album. As happy as I was in 1990, I bet Matt Groening and The Simpsons producers were even happier.

Gift: The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)

There’s been so much already written about this game that I almost don’t want to get into it, but since I spent an entire Christmas break playing it, I can’t ignore it. To my shock and horror many of the people writing about and remembering Ocarina of Time these days were just children when the game came out eleven years ago. It’s hard for this seasoned video game nerd to believe that there are adults out there now whose first experience with Zelda was Ocarina of Time. I was no kid when it came out. I was sixteen, almost seventeen, with a host of problems I considered very adult, and yet the game still found its way to being one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time—one of the last games that was ever quite that much fun.

You might call Christmas of 1998 my first bad Christmas. I’m not sure what made me so unhappy that day. By that point Christmas had lost a lot of its luster, and I think I would have much rather been asleep on Christmas morning than downstairs opening presents. As a kid I’d forced my parents out of bed at 6 a.m. to open presents; by 1998 they had to practically drag me out of bed at 11:30. Despite all the problems I thought I had as a teenager, life was actually relatively simple: Bed good, not-bed bad.

So I wasn’t overflowing with Christmas cheer that year. I believe I spent the day on the sofa with my hands across my chest, grudgingly opening every present as it was handed to me without so much as a nod to the rest of the family. I don’t remember desperately wanting Zelda that year, at least not enough to justify my teenage surliness, but every time I opened a box that wasn’t Zelda I got angrier and angrier. Throughout my life I was always a very well behaved, jolly child who was happy with any gift as long as I was with friends and family—I guess all my childlike selfishness finally came out that Christmas after years of hibernation. For what seemed like hours I got nothing but socks upon socks upon socks, and I got moodier and moodier and moodier. Finally, only one present was left, from my 13 year old sister. I had no hopes for it, but this story wouldn't make much sense unless it turned out to be Zelda, which of course it did.
I wish I could say my mood didn’t suddenly elevate when I saw the familiar gold box. I wish I could say that my brooding teenager vibe came from something other than desire for a Nintendo game, but that would just be dishonest. The moment I got the game, I was on cloud nine. So maybe I was still a kid.

In my defense, it’s an incredible game. It probably seems dated now, but at the time it was the most expansive adventure I had ever seen on a console—it sure blew away anything else on the Nintendo 64. For the first time Hyrule felt like a real world, with real 3D towns and cities and characters and monsters. Every area had its own unique inhabitants, from the Gorons on Death Mountain to the Gerudo Thieves in the desert. Older Zelda games had been nothing more than flat 2D maps, and while the earlier games were great, Ocarina left them all in the dust. For the first time you could jump on a horse and run across a seamless world firing arrows and jumping fences. With few exceptions, console games before this had been confined to levels, stages, and areas. Coming from those games to Ocarina of Time was like discovering the world was round.
This game took everything that was great about older Zelda games and perfected it while adding a host of new stuff to the mix. The whole time travel gimmick was one of the game’s big selling points—it actually takes place in two different Hyrules, seven years apart. By traveling back and forth through time you can alter events in the different eras, and discovering what effect your actions can have is one of the game’s many highlights. It’s not used as often as it could have been, but it works. Mini-games also abound, from target practice to fishing to horseback riding; if anything, there’s too much to do.
Since there’s a musical instrument in the title (though I’m sure this game was the first time 99% of the audience heard of an ocarina, including me. Funny pronunciations were rampant) you’d expect music to play a huge role in the game, and you’d be right. Ocarina of Time has some of the most memorable themes from any game I’ve ever played, and it doesn’t even included the traditional Zelda theme! You have to actually play different songs on your ocarina during the game, so they worm their way into your brain by necessity. I haven’t played the game in many years, but I still catch myself humming “Zelda’s Lullaby” (actually from A Link to the Past) or “Saria’s Song” from time to time, not to mention the great incidental and location specific music. Later on, when I watched others play the game, I noticed that they simply just jammed on the buttons when playing the songs, like they were inputting a secret code, without any effort to match the tempo. If you play the game like that, you’ve never even played it. Making music is part of the fun.
One of my best friends also got the game that Christmas, and the thought that he might get to the end before me was just unbearable. When he first called me to talk about it a few days after Christmas, we were both at the same spot. That would not stand. From then on, I devoted myself entirely to playing Zelda: Up until 4am every night, up again at 9am to play some more. By New Year’s Eve I’d beaten the game and unlocked every conceivable item and area. When school started up again and I talked to my friend, I discovered he hadn’t had the chance to play the game for a while and was still in the 3rd dungeon. I suppose I overdid it.

I think I played through the game another four or five times that year, but like everything you do more than once it got less interesting each time. But that one playthrough alone gave me more enjoyment than hundreds of other games combined. I probably say this about every game I praise here, but when a game’s that good you don’t remember playing a game, you remember being there. Few games have given me the same sense of place as Ocarina of Time. The game has been out for eleven years now, and in all that time I’ve only met one person who had anything bad to say about it. It’s one of those rare games (or movies, or books) that gets every single thing right.
With a game that good, maybe my whiny emo-kid behavior was justified, right? Maybe all the emo-kids you see out there today just need a Nintendo 64 and Ocarina of Time to chase the blues away. It sure doesn’t hurt.

Christmas Gift Oddities Part 2: Fireball Island (1987)

NOTE: The video says this commercial is from 1992, but Fireball Island is most definitely an 80s relic.

Fireball Island is the one toy I can remember that was way, way more awesome than the commercial. Compared to the actual experience of playing the game, this commercial is a thirty-second power nap. Compared to Fireball Island, even Nintendo was boring. Playing Fireball Island is like buying a magic remote control that sucks you into your television during Raiders of the Lost Ark and then combines Raiders with King Kong and The Lord of the Rings trilogy and makes you run through all the most exciting action sequences for a thousand lifetimes before you’re finally dropped back in your 1980s living room Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe style with only the haziest of memories of the thrills you have just witnessed. No. Just looking at the Fireball Island box is like that. Actually playing the game is beyond all description.
And that’s good, because I don’t remember how to play. I only played it five or six times: It took forever to set up, and I lost most of the pieces right after Christmas. From what I can reconstruct from increasingly patchy memories and a little Googling, you played as a generic Indiana Jones type who had to travel across a hazardous jungle landscape (the board seemed huge when I was five) steal a giant jewel from a Tiki god of some sort, and escape the island before you were destroyed by fireballs. The fireballs were represented by red marbles, which were invariably the first things I lost. No worries, there were always plenty of marbles to be found, but being fatally scalded by a glittery turquoise marble somehow doesn’t have the same impact.

Like in Risk, your careful planning could be undone by the simple roll of a marble, which sent your plastic character hurtling from a plastic bridge and into the “time out” zone, where they waited a few turns until they could play again. Almost every space was a danger zone, and you were never totally safe. Of course, rather than adhere to the rules of the game and frustrate yourself with your own failings as an Indiana Jones knock-off, there were hours of entertainment to be had simply rolling around the marbles and knocking the plastic figures off the board. It’s much more appealing watching a would-be adventurer destroyed when you have no stake in the outcome of their wretched endeavor.

Today video games have advanced to such a degree that a 21st century kid might find something like Fireball Island a little quaint. But that kid is wrong. There was a reason the game was at the top of my Kindergarten Christmas list. Fireball Island is a test of endurance, friendship, and even faith set against a backdrop of tropical volcanic adventure. The kid who can succeed at Fireball Island can succeed at anything. If you play only one gimmicky 80s board game with your family this holiday season, make it Fireball Island.

Gift: Sega Game Gear (1992) and Sega 32X (1994)

Sega, Sega, Sega. What happened, Sega? You could have had it all.

In 1992, Sega was poised to rule the video game industry for all time. According to their commercials, they were way cooler than Nintendo, and games like Sonic the Hedgehog 2 backed up the ads. Little did we Sega acolytes know that at the height of her power Sega was already falling victim to that fatal flaw that would lead to her destruction. But it soon became obvious to all but the most die-hard of Sega supporters: Everything Sega made that wasn’t the Genesis sucked, and sucked badly.
How naïve I was! I was overjoyed when I received the Sega Game Gear for Christmas in 1992. Some of my friends already had one, and there was no doubt it blew the Game Boy away in every conceivable area—it was bigger, it was black (which meant it was cool), it had more buttons, you could turn it into a portable TV by purchasing a simple add-on, and it was in color. Color, people. That was huge. While my Nintendo-loving friends were forced to huddle around their green-hued Game Boy, I was able to play 8-bit Game Gear games in full and glorious color.

Yet it was somehow wrong. There were some fun games for Game Gear (the Sonic games chief among them) and it initially seemed like a sound investment, but I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that for all its superiority the Game Gear was missing something. As each new game ended up being worse than the last, it slowly dawned on me that technical superiority doesn’t mean a damn if you can produce the games to back it up. While Nintendo was releasing gems like Link’s Awakening for Game Boy, Game Gear owners had to deal with gaming miscarriages like Quest for the Shaven Yak starring Ren and Stimpy and Chakan: The Forever Man, along with a host of mediocre ports of much better Sega Genesis games. I bought a new game here and there, but my enjoyment of Game Gear didn’t last much beyond that Christmas.

But I still loved my Genesis, and my faith in Sega was not shaken. That would take an even more disastrous financial blunder, a decision so insulting, so terrible, and so misguided that it remains hated and despised by even those who once called themselves loyal Sega aficionados: The dreaded Sega CD/32X double whammy that sent the company into a (deserved) free-fall from which it never really recovered.

In an effort to prolong the Genesis' life against the technically superior (yes, I can admit that now) Super Nintendo, Sega released two add-ons designed to make the Genesis more powerful. The first, the Sega CD, hooked up to the bottom of the Genesis and let Sega fans play "CD quality" games, which meant crappy interactive movies with grainy, terrible video and non-existent gameplay. Naturally, I desperately wanted one.

The $300 Sega CD was too expensive for me, but so pure was my loyalty to Sega that when the 32X was announced at the relatively cheap price of 150 dollars, I begged my parents for a chance to “upgrade” my Sega Genesis to a 32-bit powerhouse. Let’s see those Nintendo kids talk bad about Sega now, right? It even had the first ever Star Wars game for a Sega console: Star Wars Arcade, which promised to accurately recreate the space battles from the movies in 32-bit detail. How could I lose?
By getting a 32X, that’s how. Unlike the CD, which hooked up to the bottom of the Genesis in a somewhat aesthetically pleasing manner, the 32X plugged into the cartridge slot and sat atop the Genesis like some mushroom shaped tumor. It even came with a set of metal clamps to surgically hold open the Sega Genesis slot so it could be forced inside--that's incredibly disturbing, and I wish I was making it up.

Not only was it ugly and difficult to get attached to the Genesis, but the new Star Wars game was awful. Sure, I had a lot of fun playing it for a few days around Christmas—the sound was way better than what the Genesis could normally do (though still nowhere near as good as the SNES, which, incidentally, cost less than the 32X!) and the graphics were impressive (from time to time), but that was about it. That was my big “Star Wars” Christmas, and I got plenty of enjoyable Star Wars stuff, including the movies on VHS, but the 32X will always cast a dark shadow over the whole day. 200 dollars of my parents’ money was lost forever on a crappy Star Wars game that got old after about a week. They were so mad at me that they refused to buy me another video game system from that day on.
I never got another game for the 32X, and it was quickly tossed aside in favor of the only good Sega add-on—The Sega Channel, which let you play 30 full games a month for less than the price of a Netflix subscription. It was brilliant, ahead of its time, and probably saved me hundreds of dollars on game purchases. But it was too little, too late, and Sega could never recover from the disaster that was the 32X. Better minds than mine have already filled the internet with diatribe after diatribe on the system’s failings, so I don’t need to go into detail about what an unforgivable hunk of junk it was. Suffice to say that it was an unforgivable hunk of junk.

So why is such a miserable piece of electronic afterbirth on my list of my favorite Christmas presents? As a warning, a cautionary tale to all those youngsters out there who, whether from brand loyalty or easy susceptibility to in your face advertising, might be thinking of buying a suspicious product. Even companies you trust, even companies who have provided you with hours of quality entertainment, can sell you down the river without a second’s hesitation. It’s also a lesson on the capriciousness of fate. One minute your company can be on top of the world with Sonic the Hedgehog, the next minute you’ve got a warehouse full of unsold Star Wars games; Star Wars games where a full half of the game’s expansive eight levels consist of flying around in empty space trying to shoot a certain number of TIE Fighters. It would have been boring if it wasn’t so infuriating.
I learned a valuable lesson that Christmas: Sometimes things you believe in suck. It’s a lesson that only grows more relevant as time goes by.

Why Sega? Why?

Christmas Gift Oddities Part I

Sometimes you’ll get presents so interesting or bizarre that they defy easy categorization. These next gifts are things I very much enjoyed at the time (and in some cases still do), but they stand out to me as being unique, embarrassing, or just insane. Basically, it’s an excuse to write about more than ten Christmas presents without having to come up with some new numbering scheme. Enjoy!

1. Nickelodeon Gak (1992)
Surprisingly there’s already been a lot of internet literature composed on this particular topic—a simple Google search will reveal just how widespread love of Gak is among 90s nostalgia fiends. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. The stuff was useless goo that made a farting sound when you squeezed it. Other than that, I’m not sure what its purpose was. Today it seems, dare I say it, cheap.

But try telling that to my 5th grade self. My group was really into three things back then: Goosebumps books, Narnia books, and Nickelodeon Gak. And no matter what their other merits, books can’t fart (though the later Goosebumps books tried their best). So when it came time for my friends and me to exchange Christmas gifts, Gak was the only way to go. I must have gotten at least six separate cans (for lack of a better word) of the stuff that year, and given just as many as gifts.

Oh, the fun we had with our Gak! It had a million uses! You could look at it inside the can, take it out and look at it, put it on a table, hold it in your hands and, the coup de grace, squeeze it to make farting sounds. Mattel had finally found a way to combine children’s love of farting with their love of goo, and the profits must have been enormous. It was like combining a whoopee cushion with snot.

Sadly my love affair with Gak did not last beyond that Christmas. Like any goo worth its salt, Gak becomes dry, brittle, and useless if left outside of its container. Much of my supply met such an end, the rest was simply abandoned. Other Nickelodeon oozes came and went in the years to come: Floam, Gooze, Smud—but it was never the same. Gak was one of those once in a lifetime moments, the kind you can only look back on years later with a kind of winded awe and remark, “Wow. I was there, man. I was there.”

2. Bust of the Emperor Caesar Augustus Modeled After the Statue at Prima Porta (2005)
That’s right, I’m the type of person that keeps a bust of a Roman emperor on their coffee table. Not only was Augustus one of the most badass leaders in history, but when you have a piece of Roman statuary in your living room you know you’re on the right track in life.

Augustus was an unknown teenage nephew of Julius Caesar who through cunning and luck defeated all of his rivals and united the Roman Republic under his sole leadership by the time he was 32, beginning 200 years of peace and prosperity and becoming Rome’s first emperor. My statue, on the other hand, was made in Italy in the 1890s as part of a contemporary craze in Roman decoration, bought by some rich couple on a tour, and sold to another rich couple.

It then spent fifty years or so gathering dust in the basement of one of the old houses in my hometown. When the owners died, it was sold to an antique shop, discovered by my father who thought (correctly) that it was the coolest thing in the world, and placed under our Christmas tree. It would soon become what it was always meant to be—a display head for comical hats, like the kind worn by snowboarders in the mid 90s.

I can honestly say that I never expected to get a bust of a Roman emperor for Christmas, but now that I have, I can’t imagine what life would be like without it.