Name: Blaine McPherson
Occupation: Student.
Interests: Finding himself (hint: he’s somewhere between Oslo and Istanbul). Finding cheap beverages. Finding a girl, preferably in Spain. No longer having to pretend to be Canadian.
Monthly Archives: January 2006
Mochi-Pounding
I was honestly a bit disappointed that the New Year’s LEGO creations by Japanese builders didn’t include any mochi-pounding scenes. A really fun New Year’s tradition I remember is to make hand-made mochi (rice cakes). You put a special type of sticky rice in a wooden pestle and literally pound it with a giant wooden mallet. It’s pretty awesome.
Thankfully, mumu’s wife has built a cute little mochi-pounding scene, complete with the mochi-pounding rabbit from the Moon*:
*Where westerners see a face in the Moon, Japanese people see a rabbit pounding mochi.
Japanese Proverb Vignettes “Na” through “Ho”
As regular readers of Pan-Pacific Bricks and VignetteBricks already know, Izzo has been posting LEGO vignettes based on Japanese proverbs. So far, Izzo has posted 30 vignettes on his Web site and in two Brickshelf galleries. I’ve translated the first twenty, and am genuinely looking forward to the next thirty. How do I know there are going to be thirty more? Izzo is posting the proverb vignettes in hiragana order, and there are approximately fifty hiragana characters.
So let’s get started with the next ten, shall we? :-)
Japanese: A bee to a crying face.
English: Misfortunes never come alone. / When it rains, it pours.
Japanese/English: He who runs after two hares will catch neither.
Japanese: Millet with wet hands.
English:Like taking candy from a baby. / Easy money.
Japanese: Wearing a cat.
English: A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Japanese/English: There’s luck in leftovers. (“Luck” sounds the same as “clothing,” so there’s a pun in this one as well.)
Japanese: Dumplings rather than flowers.
English: Function before form. / Better fill a man’s belly than his eye.
Japanese: Beauty and luck seldom go together.
English: The fairest flowers soonest fade.
Japanese/English: Candle in the wind. (To have one’s life hang by a thread.)
Japanese/English: He that shoots oft, at last shall hit the mark.
Japanese: If you’re in love, travelling a thousand miles seems like only one mile.
English: Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
My Norse Minifigs Featured on Adorablog
Catching up on my cuteness fix, I clicked over to Adorablog from Cute Overload and found my Norse gods and goddesses featured in a post earlier this month, along with some great minifigs by fellow LEGO blogger minifig. Here’s the link to the Adorablog post:
http://www.adorablog.org/2006/01/everything_is_b.html
Very cool. It would seem that no matter how fierce you try to make your divine minifigs, little LEGO deities are always just plain adorable.
Mickey Tooth
Known aliases: Mickey Tooth, aka Mickey Tums, aka Michael Fitzpatrick, aka Fitzroy Michaels, etc.
Occupation: Gangster.
Interests: Smuggling kittens.
Jasbir Singh
Name: Jasbir Singh
Occupation: Rock star!
Interests: Filling stadiums. Being a positive role model. Lasagna. The music.
Pet peeve: Music journalists and critics who label him the “the Sikh Matisyahu.”
Wiki, wiki everywhere!
I blogged previously about BrickWiki, the community-developed LEGO encyclopedia. If you know something about LEGO, or you’re just a good editor or writer, consider contributing to BrickWiki. Here’s the Web address:
http://brickwiki.zapto.org/index.php/Main_Page
One of BrickWiki’s guidelines is that you don’t create content promoting yourself or your own Web site. Given that the best person to describe a LEGO site is its administrator, this guideline (a generally good idea) prevents BrickWiki from having a comprehensive link list of LEGO-related Web sites.
That’s where Wiki-Brick-Links comes in. Started by Klas Schöldström, whose Duplo blog I highlighted previously, Wiki-Brick-Links has the potential to be a more comprehensive link collection than BrickWiki’s list of (major) sites. Here’s the Web address for Wiki-Brick-Links:
http://wiki-brick-links.wikispaces.com/
(A link to W-B-L also appears under “LEGO Resources” in the navigation bar on the right.)
Hoffman and Tanzarian
Names: Dirk Hoffman and Greg Tanzarian
Occupation: Vice cops (circa 1976).
Interests: Kickin’ a__ and takin’ names. Fast cars. Loose change. Slow walks on the beach. Hard drinks. Soft hands. Blowin’ s___ up.
Typical day: Wake up at noon. Bust an international heroin-smuggling ring. Pay off an informant with confiscated drug money. Interrogate a couple of hippies. Cruise around in the Chevelle. Bust a local kitten-smuggling ring. Hit the discotheque.
The Crew of the Betty’s Kiss
Names and Ranks: S/Sgt. Bob Berg, Engineer; Sgt. James McCooey, Gunner; Capt. Tom Coomer, Pilot; Lt. Tim Stout, Navigator/Bombardier; and Lt. Eddy Coursier, Co-Pilot.
Interests: Defending freedom and getting back on the ground.
History: Served together in Italy with the US Army Air Forces in 1944-45. Multiple citations. Disappeared somewhere over Switzerland on their 35th mission. Reappeared over Wangerberg, Liechtenstein exactly 60 years later.
The Explorers Club
Names: Reginald Fortescue, Miles Cavendish-Dehavilland, Nigel Pugthorne, and Clive Smith-Smythe-Smith
Occupations: Member of Parliament, Sargeant Major, Viscount, and president of a national bank.
Interests: Uncharted Asia (which they pronounce Ayyyzeea), darkest Africa (with a rolled R), and the wild tepuis of Venezuela. Oh, and cashews, lots and lots of cashews. They have them in large bowls at the club-house in Nigel’s backyard. Mmmm…cashews….
Aztec gods as LEGO minifigs
With minifigs based on Greek and Norse deities out of the way, I hopped across the Atlantic and started working on Aztec gods and goddesses:
Left to right: Tlaloc, Quetzalcoatl, Xipe-Totec, Mayahuel, Mictlantecuhtli, and Huitzilopochtli
Check out the full gallery in my Mythological Minifigs photoset on Flickr.
Batman Minifigs and BatBrick.com
As a professed purist (though I’m sometimes tempted to make just one little tweak), I’m always excited when The LEGO Company announces a new batch of minifigs. I’ve withheld judgement on the new Batman line, but more detailed images are beginning to trickle out of the minifigs and the sets. Brickshelf user KimT seems to be the primary source for these pictures lately.
Posted a while ago, here’s a scan from the magazine Toyfare:
(Check out rendered versions of some of these figs as well.)
I’m not nearly as impressed with Batman himself as I am with some of the other minifigs. Perhaps I’ve begun to think of minifigs from a reusability perspective. At any rate, I think Alfred and Penguin’s tuxedo and the Joker’s purple suit are fantastic, and Croc is certainly interesting. Politically speaking, I’m a bleeding-heart liberal pacifist, so I’m conflicted about the new weapons (Tommy gun and modern-looking pistol). That said, they are kind of cool…
Finally, every LEGO theme needs its fan-site, and the Batman theme is no different. I’ve added BatBrick.com to the list of community sites in the navigation area on the right.