That's cool Golddragon71 ... I did not know that there was a Muhammad Ali Action Figure like that. Very Cool Indeed.

So I was really dreading my birthday this year. My wife having just left me a few months back, I was feeling pretty alone and, on a symbolic level, knew I wasn't going to get much in the way of presents as a result. So I splurged on myself a little and made sure that someone was making a big deal about me:




Had to have it




I've been salivating over the TFC Uranos, a third party Transformers Superion combiner, for ages now, but I was never going to scrape together $500+ to own it, so this is a cheap knock off selling for $60 (shipping included) instead. It came in the mail yesterday. Combined mode looks amazing (1.5' tall!), and the plane modes look even more amazing (except for the leader, whose limbs essentially just tuck under the belly of the plane), but the robot modes are unimpressive, and there's nothing all that memorable about the transformations, which borrow heavily from the original G1 Transformer. The Knock off is made of a disappointingly cheap material (two parts broke off the first and only time I dared to transform it), but it at least gave me an opportunity to see what I'm missing out on with these expensive new third party transformers hitting the markets. Really good, but I couldn't have spent more than $100 on a high quality version of this. The cheap version is a little too cheap, but I still like it a lot.

I have one more knock off coming that I'll post pics of when it finally arrives from China. It's This guy (though I got him for a fraction of that price).


That was supposed to be it. About $150 to make myself feel a little less insignificant on my big day. Then my mom's life fell apart and she spun into a deep depression she's still struggling to get out of. I became her primary support while also trying to deal with my own failed marriage and the tough times my kids were experiencing as a result. To top it all off, my mom was too upset to host the birthday party she insisted on throwing me, so I ended up doing all the prep, hosting, and cleaning afterwards instead, and she forgot to get me any presents.

It's worth noting that my mom is my only family. My mom, my wife, and my daughters are the most important people in my world, and none of them were able to be my support for my big day. So I decided I owed myself another big present.

THIS came today:



...and it's completely rocking my world. It amazes me that folks are spending hundreds of dollars to get vintage comic spinner racks on ebay when I grabbed this for $80 plus shipping on Amazon. It's new, sleek looking, and is large enough to hold magazine-sized comics while also snugly fitting traditional floppies. I'm still trying to decide what custom sign to make for the top.


So a belated Happy Birthday to me.

Made a rough draft of the sign for my spinner rack today:

Digging the rack also...I may cave and go that route but until then, I am holding out for a retro one.

I've added it to my Amazon wishlist for now. Once we get the house reset after windows and electrical upgrade and I finish moving the upstairs down and my comic rooms up, I will likely order one for the new set up, but it would be just one more thing to move and work around until then.

-M