Sometimes, when the obligations and responsibilities of adulthood are inescapable, I enjoy enhancing said obligations with an array of podcasts. At work they are a great distraction from the clock, and at the gym thy drown out the top 40 pap.  A favorite that I invite into my ear-sock

Last June, I wrote about how I’d found a new hobby in mutilating action figures in my basement. I’ve spent the months since diving deeper into this questionable behavior, hacking apart old toys and reassembling them into new mutations. I’ve been surprised to find tha

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles didn’t really appear on my radar until the early 1990s. I was cursorily aware of the color-coded terrapin ninjas as they rose to ubiquity throughout the late 1980s, but as I was becoming a teenager myself, my focus was shifting away from Saturday

Like most kids of my generation, I was a devout follower of the teachings of Jim Henson. As it is was for most, it started with Sesame Street and shifted to The Muppet Show when I became old enough to recognize Sesame Street for what it really was: school dressed up in plush, feathers

Halloween came in a box when I was growing up. Or at least, most of my Halloween costumes did. The moment the first leaf rusted on the branch, I’d beg my parents to take me to K-Mart, Bradlees, or Zayre so I could pick though the stacks of boxed Halloween costumes. This was very impor

October is here and so begins the month-long celebration of the spooky and macabre as we count the days until Halloween. Unfortunately this also means that in a mere 32 days, before the fake cobwebs have been cleared away, we will be clobbered with the treacle noise that is Christmas

It’s no secret that I’m fond of revisiting my past. Recently, this temporal wanderlust was prompted by my taste buds. A sudden craving for one particular childhood foodstuff lured me to an aisle of my local grocery store that I don’t normally frequent these days. I narrowe

If you grew up ensnared in the hypnotic glow of 1980s television, you probably remember Max Headroom, the “computer generated” TV personality from the near future. The charismatic icon with the glitchy stammer was a ubiquitous presence in the mid to late 80s, mostly due to

A 12″ tall Parker Stevenson action figure lived in my toy box when I was young. To be fair, it was less of an action figure than it was a doll, and felt to me like it might prefer the company of Barbie and Ken over the citizens of Eternia. He came from the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew