Daniel85

Op shops. This morning. Old junk. Here.

Board games and Richie Rich. It’s as if Milton Bradley had a list of my fifty guiltiest pleasures, chose #7 and #33 on that list, and then combined them. You’d think the fact that this game came out in 1982 (three years before I was born) would make this idea less plausible, but it doesn’t.

I don’t quite understand the box art. Are Richie, Gloria, and Freckles stealing those jewels, or what? It’s bad enough that ‘The Poor Little Rich Boy’ has to go slum it with the kids from Skid Row, but now he’s dragging them into his little cry-for-help games? Daddy Warbucks may be able to pull strings when you  get caught, Richie, but Freckles is going away for a long time. And they looove freckled redheads in the State Penitentiary.

We all love making fun of yesterday’s impressions of today and tomorrow, don’t we? The shiny pictures on the cover enticed me to flip through this book, and when I saw an illustration of a man sitting on a psychoanalyst’s couch talking to a computer with the caption ‘One day, computers will be able to respond to your verbal commands’, I knew I had to own it.

‘Covers history, gear needed, professional play’ - from what I saw in my quick flick through, it also covers exercise, diet, and all manner of other things. I think it’s not so much a guide to table tennis as it is a manifesto for a new way of living. I’ll be sure to review it at length when time permits.

And I didn’t know Uncle Jesse from Full House was a ping-pong champ! A man of many talents.

Awww yeah. Trolls rock. But you know that.

For a brief period in 1991, my class went through TROLL FEVER. Trolls on desks, trolls on pencils, trolls on… parade? I remember being absolutely amazed that my mum not only knew what trolls were, but she also had them as a kid. She might as well have told me she got the Technodrome for her tenth birthday. The troll phenomenon is kinda like the yo-yo phenomenon, with each generation falling prey to the madness. It’s just wunna doze tings.

I always preferred these little trolls to the medium and big (teddy bear sized) ones. I guess it’s because the smaller they are, the more you can do with them play-wise. A bath is an ocean, and so on. It’s also nice to reduce their hideous features to a negligible size.

I didn’t want anything to do with those larger trolls, because it would have led to problems with the suspension of disbelief if I tried to incorporate them into my little troll world. I guess I could have taken the easy way out and allowed that they’d been enlarged by some enchantment, but that never occurred to me. And that’s a damn shame, when you consider the possibilities for a King Kong-sized troll running amok in Trolltown.

Anyway, that little guy pictured above is now my mascot for Christmas 2006. I’m going to carry him in my pocket all December, show him the Christmas lights down the street, give him a nibble of the chocolate from my advent calendar each night, build him a little house in the Christmas tree… NO I’M NOT. I SWEAR.