Classmates dot com I guess will continue inflicting yearbook photos on me. It’s cool.
My own high school annuals were lost in a theft of a storage locker in Moorpark many years ago. I got some things back though, which was nice.
Probably having a website and being highly findable on the web made it possible for me to get things back. On March 6, 2013 while traveling to Virginia I got an email reading this:
You don’t know me and I don’t know you , but I believe I found some of your personal belongings on the side of a road outside of Mojave Ca. There are some DVDs, and a lot of degrees, certs for Respiratory Therapy. There was also something for LeahPeah. This is what caught my eye. All this stuff has been lying on the side of the road for the last week or so and I stopped to look at it and I believe it might be yours.
I didn’t really believe it, but of course the fact that he mentioned specifically my degrees and certificates for respiratory therapy stuck out as highly specific and made me and Leah queasy.
Indeed, after some correspondence he sent photos, including this one:
…which certainly proved that he was not lying or trying to scam me. I met up with this nice thoughtful person a week later at a Starbucks in Lancaster California.
Anyway, not found by the side of the road were my high school yearbooks.
I am a packrat, both physical and digital, and this was a blow.
Anyway, what was I talking about?
Oh, I was meandering through my mind.
I had a great birthday yesterday: low key and did the same stuff I do on the daily. Applied for some jobs, improved my websites, went to the beach.
gRegor rewatched Space Camp and mentioned that there’s a robot in it, named Jinx.
This is a fact I was not aware of.
I just added Jinx to my list of “seeking” robots on my spreadsheet of robots.
Looking at eBay I don’t see anything in the way of merchandise related to a toy of Jinx.
Other robots without official toys: Sam the Robot (the Super Automatic Machine) from Sesame Street, Dot Matrix from Spaceballs; the mechs from Robot Jox; Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters’ Heartbeeps characters. For some there are custom made figures or 3-D printed toys but that’s really not the spirit of my particular collection.
I remain fascinated by robots. Culturally and in every way. They can be pet, partner, slave, and oppressor. Or indeed, the same fictional robot can end up all 4.
So thank you gRegor for the mention. I will add it to the pile of things I would like to watch. I’ve not seen the movie.
And this morning as I wait for the surf to come up a bit more I’ll share my current robot collection guidelines. You can have your own rules, these are mine:
- No robot toys over 12 inches high (or wider than 12 inches)
- Robots can’t cost me over $100 (shipping and handling excluded in special circumstances)
- Avoid duplicating robots
- Avoid too many of the same franchise (I could only collect Transformers or Star Wars toys and have just as sizable a collection)
- “Jaeger” (piloted robots) are ok but the more a robot is a powered suit or piloted the less robotic I consider it
- No cyborgs (most common suggestions which don’t interest me: RoboCop, Krang, the Borg)
Have a great day y’all!
