LEGO is certainly in the news these days. A week ago I blogged a story on CNET (English link this time), there have been stories in The New York Times, and now there’s an interesting photo feature in Business Week about how LEGO bricks are manufactured.
(Via pretty much everywhere at this point, but Dan Sabath gets the credit for posting it to the SEALUG e-mail list before I saw it anywhere else.)
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Bruce was one of the first LEGO bloggers, when he created VignetteBricks over a year ago. Now he’s back with a brand-new blog, MicroBricks, a blog highlighting the best LEGO Microscale creations out there. Congrats on the new blog, Bruce!
CNET Japan has a brief story (in Japanese) on how LEGO gets from the factory to our homes (via I Love Cute LEGO). The story’s not especially enlightening, but I thought this picture was pretty cool:
Obviously, the picture’s pretty old (Wolfpack is a theme from the early to mid-1990’s), but I hadn’t seen this before.
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Allan Bedford over at his Unofficial LEGO Builder’s Guide Blog reports that Time magazine has named LEGO one of the best inventions from Europe in the last sixty years.
Well, duh. :-)
Link (not on Time.com, where I can’t find it).
A few days old, but amusing (well, more like disturbing) enough to be worth the wait? Let’s hope so:
Largo Police are looking for a little girl who pulled a knife on a Wal-Mart clerk as she tried to steal two boxes of Lego toy blocks…. Police say the little girl then opened her jacket and displayed a combo carving knife with a forked point and a 10″ blade, saying she was armed for protection.
(Full story, first posted by Anthony Sava on Classic-Castle Forums.)
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In honor of Moko’s 18th birthday recently, I thought I’d feature a few of his latest creations. (Okay, so I would’ve posted them anyway, and they’ve already been Snoikled.)
I love the arms coming out of the new wheel well pieces on this “space mecha”, and the pink makes a surprisingly cool accent color (link):
I can’t find Moko’s blog post for this next mecha, so it might not be new, but it’s new to me and dang is it cool (another great find, Dez!):
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The Associated Press is reporting that retailers may face shortages of LEGO during the upcoming holiday shopping season.
“Many of our most popular products are sold out,” Lego spokeswoman Charlotte Simonsen said. “As part of efforts to restructure the company and focus on our core business, we had to make some cuts and the company has not had time to readjust its production.”
While having strong demand for your product might be a good thing, the article continues:
Boersen, Denmark’s leading financial newspaper, estimated that Lego could lose 750 million kroner ($127 million) because of lost Christmas sales.
EDIT (11/1/06): News of LEGO shortages were apparently greatly exaggerated, as Steve Witt has posted on his blog:
The media reports of a LEGO shortage this holiday season stem from an interview given in Denmark with regard to a supply issue in Scandinavia, but remarks were misconstrued to represent a global issue. We are not experiencing a shortage of LEGO sets in the U.S. or Canada this holiday season. All of our key retailers are well stocked with what we believe will be the most popular LEGO sets, and have indicated they too are satisfied with their stock. It’s always best to get out early to be sure you get what you’re hoping to find.
Kinda sucks if you live in Scandinavia (sorry Linus!), but for those of us here in the States, this is great news!
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So how do you deal with dirty LEGO? German appliance maker Bosch has a solution — a special cycle in their new “LEGO Edition” dishwasher that gently cleans your plastic toys at 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit).
No, I’m not joking:
Link via Engadget, with thanks to Ben Ellerman for posting this on Classic-Castle.com.
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The LEGO Company wants to know from the adult LEGO collector community what car they should make as a set. Once again via the furiously typing fingers of LEGO Ambassador Nelson Yrizarry, the Brothers Brick has received the following message from LEGO:
The LEGO Design team is considering making a kind of collector’s car, and would like to hear from the AFOL community which car would like to be seen as an official LEGO set. The only restrictions are:- The car should be for display, which means with only few functions.
– The car should get a body build with System bricks.
– The car should be very iconic/well know in Europe and US.
– The car should be from the past 30 years.Please suggest the Make and Model of the car you would like to see as a new LEGO set!
Nelson will collate responses you leave here on TBB and pass them along to LEGO. How cool is that? Thanks Nelson!
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Editor Joe Meno has announced the release of BrickJournal issue 5. Click the image to download the “BIG” issue (10.9 MB):
Of particular note for long-time TBB readers are articles and photo essays by Mark Stafford, MisaQa, and Malle Hawking, among many others.
On a related note, LEGO Shop@Home will be donating 1% of all purchases to BrickJournal (up to $10,000) between now and December 31st — which of course includes Christmas shopping — if you start your shopping from the following page:
http://shop.lego.com/landingpages/brickjournal/
So, how does one pick up sponsorship from LEGO? Hmmm…
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Eurobricks reports that Amazon Germany has posted more pictures of the January-June 2007 LEGO sets. Check out the Ferrari, Technic, and Exo-Force sets in this post, and the Aqua Raiders, Star Wars, City, and Creator sets in this thread.
Here’s my favorite new Aqua Raiders set, the as-yet-unnamed 7776:
A shipwreck?! Unbelievably cool.
And check out the set Jamie Berard designed, 4953 Fast Flyers:
Finally, LEGO is releasing two official mosaic-building sets with some cute designs, 6162 and 6163:
For those of you who want to see all the 2007 set pictures from Amazon.de in one place, Brickshelfer HJR has them all in a set of conveniently organized galleries.
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Straight from the typing fingers of newly minted LEGO Ambassador Nelson Yrizarry:
Yes – It’s official. Space will be returning.That’s all I can say.
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