Archive for March, 2008

Surf or Die

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

I really need to start my collection of surfing documentaries. Collecting them, that is.

And what is the Number One Surfing Movie of All Time?

That’ll be The Endless Summer, my friend.

Aloha!

Go, Baby

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

We had an extremely good CD coupon at work (27-30 March), so I bought several CDs I’ve had my eye on for a long time, plus a newer one I recently decided I couldn’t live without:

  • The Buddy Holly Collection
  • The Definitive Art Tatum
  • Ella Fitzgerald’s Lullabies of Birdland
  • Sia’s Some People Have Real Problems

The question now is which one to listen to whilst I receive the early morning shipment at work tomorrow. Hm…

That’ll be Buddy Holly and the Crickets, ma’am.

The Cosmic Liquidator

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

At the end of the Futuristic Small Arms of Film and Television list, there is a short list of toy science fiction weapons that have no direct connection to any film, television show, or literary source. One of these, which I had labelled “Liquidator [by ?]“, was the original continuous stream water gun, predating the first Super Soaker by a decade. I owned one of these. I saw the television commercial (back when I was a lad capable of being influenced by advertising), and my mother, an ardent lover of science fiction, fantasy, and swashbuckling adventure of any kind, bought me one. I guess it was about 1978. It was, indeed, the emperor of all squirt guns, and I played with it rather too often and hard, for eventually some mechanism involving the pump or the loss of the hose forced me to use the gun as a toy gun rather than a functioning water weapon, so to speak.

I decided to do a Google search to see if I could find the name of the manufacturer, and lo and behold, I stumbled upon this site, wherein I learned that its full name (as I suspected it might be, but was unsure) was the Cosmic Liquidator, and that it was manufactured by Sun Products Corporation. The site has a full review and extensive photographs of what had been one of my favorite toys when I was growing up.

I think I may still have my old Cosmic Liquidator somewhere at my parents’ house or my grandmother’s house, but it’s probably in a very sorry state.

Suddenly I feel the urge to get into a squirt gun fight. Or should that be squirt gunfight?