I recently helped my mom prepare for a yard sale by going to her house and sifting through my childhood toys so that she could label and group them more accurately. As an only child in a middle-class family, I had a fairly substantial collection growing up: G. I. Joe, Transformers, and, to a lesser extent, Voltron, Thundercats, Silverhawks, Wheeled Warriors, Visionaries, M.A.S.K., Micro Machines, and more. My cache of Masters of the Universe figures was particularly impressive, especially considering I had barely achieved sentience by the time MOTU reached the height of its popularity.
The lack of attachment I had to these items surprised me a little. My only brief hesitation in letting my mom sell them was the idea that we could get much more money for them by going the eBay route, especially for some of the Star Wars toys. After weighing the amount of work involved in conducting online auctions versus the relatively-modest payoff, I decided that the “juice” wasn’t worth the “squeeze.”
In honor of our impending Halloween weekend* and the zombie Moammar Gaddafis and slutty-fill-in-the-blanks who come with it, I thought it only fitting to scrutinize arguably the greatest sort-of-Halloween-themed song of all time.
As I sat around on Sunday staring at a RedZone “
My general preference is to avoid 
Television is more than a wondrous 
The final three discs of the Star Wars blu-ray set consist entirely of extras. Disc seven includes extras from Episodes I-III, disc eight covers the original trilogy, and disc nine has “documentaries and spoofs” spanning the entire series.
With the finale of the fourth season of the amazing Breaking Bad now history, Chicago improviser and comedy actor 
My Father, the (Fake) Doctor
The Newsweek cover is especially fantastic. The bleak picture painted in today’s media environment when one watches the news or reads a periodical steeped in world affairs is sometimes apparent. However, for all the alleged hysteria of cable news outlets and sensational publications, we at least don’t routinely use imagery like planet Earth as a bomb with a lit fuse! Living under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation is one thing, but ramming the message “YOU’RE ALL ABOUT TO DIE!” down the public’s throat in such a way doesn’t seem constructive. I guess provocative Newsweek covers are nothing new.
Curious about the significance of the magazines, I asked my mom to explain why we had them.
Neither of the people pictured in this advertisement were doctors or even medical students in real life. Apparently (according to my mom), it was illegal at the time for actual medical professionals to appear in advertising of any kind.
Hence, this policy created the need for miscellaneous folks like my dad to serve as fake students to drive home a selling point about the relationship between seasoning doctors and researching medical breakthroughs.
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*Note again that Robins ordered this ad in 1961, before a significant portion of the population decided that pharma companies were, like, evil, man.
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