The vinyl resurgence shows no sign of slowing, so here's a great budget turntable for your newly thrifted LPs.
Every once in a while we like to hand the magnifying glass and the sleuth-work over to our readers. This time it's not one of my usual thrift store mysteries - for me this is as close to a genuine family heirloom as I get.
My mother bought this hanging lamp in a Danish furniture store in the late 60's. She had just immigrated to the U.S., fell in love with the lamp, and bought it despite not really being able to afford it. As a new citizen of this country there were a lot of new stresses for her, so having at least one nice thing waiting for her at home was a comfort.
The shade is made of slender bent wood and the light glows a warm orange right through the wooden sides. The photos will tell you that the shade is a terribly fragile thing, and it wasn't helped by the bashing that it got when it was first installed (not by my father, thank you very much...).
It's still holding together, and I've inherited the tradition of effecting frequent repairs on the thing. I've used weights, a bubble level, hot glue... but I've still got a long way to go to seamlessly repair this featherweight wooden lamp. If only it would at least hang straight. Then the brainstorm – maybe I could find another one out there?
My mother got this some 40 years ago, so I don't know what the likelihood that this might still be available. Have any of you seen one of these before? Any idea of who might have made this or what the style is called? Someone I know thought that these are still being made in Denmark today... what do you readers out there think?
Related:
1950's Westinghouse portable TV mystery
Giant wooden gear mystery
Kyle's flea market mystery box
A few pieces have been modified with Sharpie, and in one case a white helmet was X-acto knifed into looking like God's hair. You've got to admire the cleverness in play when quantizing the epic stories of the Bible into this smaller plastic scale. One of my favorite scenes is the great flood depicted with a mass of blue bricks, with only the Lego people's heads afloat.
There have been detractors to the project, while others have praised Smith's interpretive efforts. In addition to his website, his work has been published as a series of picture books. Could faith-based Lego playsets be far behind? Thy Downloadable Scrolls of Sacred Instructions?
The Cine-Kodak Eight featured a wind-up spring motor and a simple parallel viewfinder built into the handle on top of the case. Everything was completely manual -- you set the exposure by hand and fancy zoom lenses were still decades away. None of that mattered, because aspiring filmmakers suddenly had an affordable and compact camera to shoot home movies. It remained on the market until 1947.
That means that just about every other US resident's hips were ringed by a hula hoop of their very own. However there's an even more amazing thing to consider in this "American Dream" success story.
One of my favorite movies takes its inspiration from the hula hoop. It's a Cohen Brothers film called "Hudsucker Proxy", and while it's far from any real facts surrounding the actual invention of what they called the "Extruded Plastic Dingus", it's the kind of story that you wish happens along the way to developing a classic toy.
DMR-E700BD from Panasonic.
In 1986, I couldn't convince my parents to get a VCR. They didn't understand what it was for (we had only gotten color TV the year before), so I saved up my money for a year and bought my own. 
I asked Ron how the site came to be. He explained, "I have been always interested in robots and had to put them away
to make a living. Now that I am retired the passion has re-emerged. The
robot 
The school's software selection was limited. After we'd conquered the primer that explained brave new concepts like "off switch", one of our mainstay programs was "MasterType". Setting out to teach typing skills under the guise of an invasion from space, we actually enjoyed learning how to type. Alien monsters crept in from the four corners of the screen, converging on our base in the center. Each alien had a name tag of sorts, and by typing the word you'd unleash a missile in its direction.
Just in case you think that this genre of type-em-up shooter disappeared with MasterType, the Sega Dreamcast had a very similar game in the early 2000's called "Typing of the Dead", The game uses the same graphics as gory zombie shootfest "House of the Dead", but in place of a gun you use the Dreamcast keyboard to type out strange non sequitr phrases appearing on screen. The result of your good typing makes a bloody mess of the undead - just like the original game.
Besides some of the classic film restorations, the other category I'm interested in is "horror host". Retro Thing readers probably know that I'm a longtime fan of Svengoolie here in Chicago. Any year would be a good year to tip one's hat to the work of Sven and his team, but what made 2007 the return of the classic Universal monster movies back to the Svengoolie airwaves. Inspired by the standard-bearers of scary flicks, Sven's parody songs and comedy bits have all come together to become some of Sven's best shows ever.
In this case, you're looking at an actual artifact from my childhood. I have tender memories of playing Seeschlacht with my father.
He brought it home from a German business trip, and it was one of the few games he liked to play with me.
For being so minimalistic, Seeschlacht has a lot of fiddly pieces that it's hard to believe I didn't lose. In secret, you plug your colored pegs into your gameboard, then pop on the perforated grey cover. Exchange boards with your opponent, and take turns plunging the probe into the little holes. If a salvo hits empty water, you mark the hole with a light blue tile. A palpable hit on a ship will turn up one of four colors on the probe, offering an additional clue to the type of ship you're after.
As a kid, I was pretty much an oddball (not much has changed), so I guess it's no surprise that I would have grown up playing this version of Battleship that was very unusual in the US. I've played different versions since then, but have always returned to Seeschlacht. I like all the myriad little bits, and that it's cheater proof - once your ships are in place, they're sealed to their fate inside that blue plastic box. 
Max Headroom took more than a few design cues from another favorite of mine; the film Brazil, and to some extent Blade Runner. it was amazing to see this all pulled off on a typical TV budget. It's rare to see a series that's so hip to what's going on, but their constant jabs at the machinations of network TV may have hit a little too close to home. The series was canceled after only 13 episodes (an unbroadcast 14th was first shown only a few years ago). Perhaps Max took one too many bites at the hand that fed him?
The dramatic series was re-run a few years ago on SciFi Channel & Bravo, and you can catch episodes for free on 
Those little blue guys - three apples high and living in bloated mushrooms - turn 50 this year. This may well surprise the many people who's first contact with the shirtless shrunken ones was via the 80's cartoon series.
The figures were in a variety of poses and occupations, in some ways predicting the "no Smurf left behind" level of employment that we saw in the cartoon later.
