Wine Pong

Here are some ping pong balls hanging up in the liquor section spotted at a local grocery store in San Diego, August 2010. The most common usage for ping pong balls other than for a table game back in 1957 is for playing Beer Pong, a fun, stupid and sometimes ill-advised game that promotes over-imbibing of beer. Now, the store itself isn't directly promoting drinking games as it is an outside vendor who hangs up the racks of various impulse buy items. It is more than likely that the store is unaware the balls are in the liquor department.

These packs are not hanging up over the beer (yet) but they are in the general alcohol section. I have no doubt the store would not hesitate to move the balls to the toy section if brought to their attention.

Be First Back To Your Cave

This is an Operation: Awesome Christmas update!

I am a difficult person to buy presents for. If it isn't the newest Gerber multi-plier my wife has no idea what to get me for special occasions. So some of the time we agree upon a budget and I buy myself something nice. This year for Christmas we did just that and I really scored.

After more than a few unsuccessful years trying to find a vintage Land of the Lost board game for my own I finally managed to snag a good specimen. I had searched for the LotL game from the first series in an on-again, off-again fashion for a few years now. Professional collector resources were ridiculously expensive and the grifting nature of the sellers of most auction sites made my attempts to buy one exercises in frustration. Bids at a more than fair price were routinely lost at the last possible second as Seller ABC, under the guise of sock-puppet Buyer ACB, purchased the item from themselves to prevent it from being sold at less than what they wanted monetarily.

Discouraging, but I knew that interest in the 2009 Land of the Lost movie would see a greater proportion of LotL-related merchandise for sale than were previously available. While the studio predictably did not market a line of toys there were a few promotional and licensed memorabilia items available. One internet pal has sent me on several occasions promotional gear from the film such as a shirt, compass and hat. That was cool and was very welcome.

It was over the course of the last several weeks I managed to successfully purchase two examples of vintage Land of the Lost merchandise. My experiences with the sellers were positive and not merely because I won the sales but because they acted like professionals running a business, something that is sorely missing from much online retail.

Here are the two recent acquisitions to my collection of Land of the Lost memorabilia. Click the photos to make them Dino-sized.

Safari Shooter
The first game I purchased was the Land of the Lost Safari Shooter pinball game from 1975 (though I suspect this is a recently-made toy claiming to be vintage). It is in excellent condition and if I ever go insane I'll take it out of the wrapper. The backboard image for the pinball machine is pretty sweet and I'd love to take it apart just to scan it. If I ever find one for real cheap that is a mess I will. More than likely it will go in a shadowbox and get hung on the wall.


Land of the Lost game
The second item is the big prize and is the favorite of the two. It is the 1975 Land of the Lost board game by Milton Bradley. It is relatively rare to find one of these games in acceptable condition and this one is in really good shape. Here are photos of the box cover, inside cover, rules with adjacent spinner and the game board.

This is the best Christmas ever.

Note: I'm not usually one for watermarking my images but I put a bit of time and effort into acquiring this awesome vintage game. I did take pains to avoid placing the LTMS logo over the image itself because I like to share. If someone is going to gank these pics and use them without attribution or go so far as to slap a 'Mecha-Droid Ten' logo on it and act like they own it then they are going to have to spend a few minutes working for it.

The Puzzle of the Crazy Kitchen

I can only find two items wrong in this puzzle: 1) Betty is wearing shoes and 2) Betty is, oddly, not pregnant.

How many mistakes can you find?

From Picture news #3 (March 1949).