Merry Christmas!
So what did the rest of you kids get…?
Still have my Shootin’ Shell cap gun. It’s down in one of the storage bins in the basement, along with a couple of the spring loaded brass cases. Alas I lost all the little plastic bullets long ago, and they don’t make the stick-on caps anymore. And that gun is in no way collector’s grade. I played with my toys and it shows on the ones I kept for memories. The cylinder on the little cap gun (it’s about half the size of a real single action Colt) barely turns anymore.
I still have two of my two boyhood rifles. One is a boy’s sized Winchester lever action replica that took the old cap rolls and had a trigger catch on the lever you could flip out so that every time you worked the lever action the gun fired. Somewhat like Chuck Conner’s was tricked in The Rifleman. The other is a Daisy 660, which wasn’t a BB gun, (I might shoot my eye out) but made a loud pop whenever you pulled the trigger via a strong spring loaded mechanism inside the gun. You cocked the spring via the lever action, but the spring in that thing is so darn strong that to this day I cannot work the lever holding the gun in my arms. A kid had to put the gun muzzle down on the ground and push the lever forward with all his weight to get it cocked. Which was probably how I discovered dirt clods made entirely satisfactory projectiles.
That was a different world. A kid could arm himself to the teeth back then and nobody gave it a second thought. Wish I still had my Man From U.N.C.L.E. gun….
…and my James Bond Attache Case…
That thing had tons of nifty finger candy. The code book had an invisible ink pen. The wallet with the fake money and passport came with little business cards…Bond’s cover was he worked for Universal Import/Export…that had 007 printed on them in a yellow ink that you couldn’t see when they were tucked in the wallet (note the translucent red plastic card holder). Not sure what that was supposed to accomplish, but it was fun. The case itself took the standard roll caps. That’s because it was booby trapped. If you opened it with the wrong combination a cap would bang. It was an open question among us kids whether that was cooler then the Secret Sam attache case, which could shoot plastic bullets and had a real camera concealed inside you could snap pictures of people with surreptitiously. Or as surreptitiously as a nine year old kid walking around with an attache case could be.
In retrospect, you have to wonder about selling kids James Bond toys considering that your typical kid couldn’t get in to see the Bond movies back then because of the scant (by today’s standards) nudity. Being on television, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. couldn’t do that. But I guess you could sell kids James Bond guns so long as you didn’t sell them the sex that usually went along with the guns in the movies.
And then there were these little nightmares for today’s school administrators. Behold…the original Transformers…
Dig it… A transistor radio that became a rifle when you pressed a little button by the handle. There was also a camera that became a pistol and a jack knife that became a pistol…
They all took the standard cap rolls I think. And to make matters worse, the jack knife actually had a little plastic blade on it two you could flick out. Looking back on it you have to wonder what the adults were thinking watching the neighborhood kids run around blasting each other, playing dead for a while, then getting back up and blasting each other some more. But in those days it probably wasn’t the sight of kids playing with guns so much as the civil defense siren silhouetted in the sky behind us that would have worried them. We had one of those right in back of our garden apartment complex and you could see it from just about everywhere we played. Leading us through our duck and cover exercises probably disturbed the grown-ups a lot more then our playing with cap guns.
December 25th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Oh man….I remember drooling over the JC Penny’s and Sears catalogs, wanting one, or two, of everything….and still only getting socks for X-Mass.
But this year, the coolest present I got was one I got for myself:
A new phone. It’s an LG VU. Pretty cool, but an “iPhone Killer” it is NOT. Contrary to the hype.
I should probably hold off on reviewing it until I’ve actually had it for a week and get to know it better, but so far, I am really just not impressed. Even though it is light-years better and more functional then my old “vintage” cell phone.
A couple of the major things I wanted in a cell phone was the ability to surf the web. This phone does that (For an extra $15 bucks a month) but contrary to their hype, it is NOT “true html” or “Full content” web surfing. It is WAP content. In other words: It sucks and they outright lied about that.
Another thing I wanted was a video and still digital camera. The phone has that, but guess what? They SUCK! Of course at 2 megapixels you arnt going to get Garrett-Quality photos, but it should STILL be much better then even the snap-shot digital cameras of 5 years ago. You have to hold the camera absolutly still to get a picture that isn’t blurry. And who the hell uses a camera phone in such a situation? People use camera phones in quick and simple situations, usually while bouncing around in a car, or a crowd, or just messing around (Trying to get a quick snap of that cute guys butt walking by so you don’t have to stare)
The video camera is a joke! Very bad resolution, even at 320X240 it SHOULD be a lot clearer, and less herky-jerky and pixilated. Now granted no one is going to film “Apocalypse Now” with a camera. but really, this could have been MUCH better!
Another of my requirements was to be able to upload, or send pics and videos to friends, or youtube or wherever. This phone does that, but with this resolution and (lack of) quality, that is almost embarrassing!
The iPhone has nothing to worry about.
I did without the GPS function, mostly because the subscription service for that was rediculous ($30 bucks a month? no way!) AND because I THOUGHT I would be able to just look at google maps and see about as much as I needed to see (Aside from the fact that my laptop has a really neat-o gps dongle and app) But when the internet “medianet” content is just glorified WAP, THAT funtion is useless.
The touch-screen is cool, but it takes a while to get used to it. There is no “Squeeze” function like the iPhone where you can make the page zoom in and out. The phone WILL do that, via a different control (+ and -) ‘buttons’ but all you get is bigger fonts. Whoopie.
The contacts and phone book are more detailed then on my old phone, but getting to them require at least 8 pushes of buttons. (But I can probably customize my icons to reduce that to 6 pushes)
It has a QWERTY keyboard you can bring up on the touch screen, as well as a regular phone type keypad on the touch screen. Thats kind of neat, BUT I’m thinking that as soon as I need to use it in broad daylight it will give me a headache.
So, even though it IS a huge step up from my own phone, it is STILL a disappointment. I am considering sending it back and getting something else. Something that will take the kid of pics I see all of the other kids taking that are AT LEAST “Myspace quality”.
The up side is that I was entitled to an upgrade, and this phone only cost me $50 bucks.
AND, since my younger brother has one of those rip-off pre-paid phone, and is constantly paying $20 bucks for a new phone cards only to have 3 minutes left within a week, I decided to go onto a “Family plan” which costs $10 a month to add that line. He can give me the $10 bucks to put towards my bill rather then 20 bucks to get ripped off on minutes. I’m not a phone hog, so I ALWAYS have plenty of minutes rolling over and eventually getting lost.
SO, with adding that I got a Slate for him, FREE because of the “add a line’ deal. Its a pretty neat phone with a QWERTY keyboard. He’s not a phone hog or a major texter (Texan?) so its WAY more phone then he needs.
Oh….I thought I wasnt going to write a review of my new phone….but basically, the iPhone is very very safe as far as a coveted phone goes.