Listen, Santa

Christmas is almost upon us, and thanks to my son’s ever-expanding list of things he’s hoping will magically appear under the tree, free from the constraints of money, availability, or time, I’ve decided to make my own list of dream LEGO themes. Once the holidays are here and gifts are unwrapped, I know I’m going to be assisting in the construction of quite a few sets (thanks grandparents and Santa!) and my fingers will be sore until after New Year’s.

1.      Star Trek, first Classic, then TNG. Why hasn’t this licensing agreement happened yet? I want a rocky planet set complete with a green Gorn and a cute mommy Horta. Not so thrilled with the idea of a bridge, but I’d go for sick bay and engineering in a heartbeat. The mini figures would be so fun. Kirk would have several heads to cover all his facial expressions and imagine all the different forehead designs for Klingons over the years.

2.      Jurassic Park. Please! LEGO did the dinosaur hunters sets, but I want Muldoon and Ian Malcom mini figures. The park control room would be fun to build and there could be breakaway walls and windows for the velociraptor attacks. Cool functions, as my son says. Sadly, LEGO would have to include packets of fake blood for realism and that might upset the kids.

3.      The Walking Dead. Herschel’s farm, Dale’s camper, the prison, all would be fantastic constructs. Imagine a whole herd of walker mini figures, some missing their tiny little hands. Gruesome but fun. The special, limited edition set would feature Daryl, his crossbow, motorcycle, and his brother Merle with a modified slicer arm. Again, gruesome, but fun.

4.      Ice age. No, not the movies, but caves, fires, smilodons, wooly mammoths, and all sorts of cool stone tool accessories for fur clad figures. They could even create a frosty clear blue brick by the thousands to have a glacier set.

5.      A cruise ship. My son and I have discussed this one extensively. Pool deck, buffet, cabins, casino, engine room, bridge, elevators, all could be standalone sets eventually assembled into a whole ship.

While we’re at it, I think it would be incredibly fun to have some themed mystery figure series. For those of you unfamiliar, Lego puts out different groupings of individual mini figures in tiny bags. When you buy it, you have no idea what’s inside, which is part of the fun. I think it would be great to have a Star Wars series, classic 80’s television characters (Mr. T! Buck Rogers! Magnum P.I.!), or literary heroes.

I have a feeling I won’t be seeing any of these on the shelves in the future, but I can dream.

Trek and T*ts

So I had a Star Trek and mammogram kind of day. Here's the picture to prove it. In the early a.m. went to have my annual mammogram. Go get yours if you are due! And that's all I'm going to say about it.
And in an unexpected turn of events, I actually got to go out to lunch with my husband and go see a grown-up movie afterward. We so very rarely get to do this since he works and we have a child which means kid friendly entertainments ninety-nine percent of the time.
We went to Wurst und Bier, http://wurstundbiercolumbus.com/ and ate a lot of German meats and each had a beer. Neither one of us could remember the last time we'd both gotten to have an alcoholic beverage AT THE SAME TIME. We could do this because a) our son was not with us, and b) we could walk over to the movie theatre after we ate and drank. And oh my goodness the meat and beer were delicious. We waddled over to the movie theatre and lowered our bloated bodies into the plush seats of the UltraScreen for a matinee of Star Trek Into Darkness. OH MY.
What can I say about this movie? It grabbed you and just kept tossing you from one scene to the next. Bruce Greenwood! Peter Weller! Klingons! Tribbles! KHAN!!!!
I enjoyed the movie very much, but had trouble catching my breath about halfway through because of the unrelenting action sequences, explosions, crashes, assaults, and general mayhem. It did throw in a lot of material from past Treks (radiation in the warp core, hello! and KHAN!!!) but I was very entertained and that's all I expect from my summer fun films.
Simon Pegg was lovely as usual. And I'm finally getting the Benedict Cumberbatch crushes. I guess it just took him playing a despotic, genetically engineered superman to catch my eye.

P.S. I want all the leather jackets everyone wears in the film. Right now. Even though it's eighty degrees and sunny.