Tederick Tumbles

This deserves a second look:

This was Bex’s Christmas present to me. (I got her a book or something.) She made this herself. This is a crocheted Jack Sparrow, and it takes me completely aback. I posted a photo of this a couple of days after Christmas, in the dead zone where all of social media was either asleep or drunk. Now I’m posting it again. I’ll post it again and again, until I’m satisfied that Bex has received enough “HOLY FUCK”s for her work.

Bex has a particular mission, come Christmastime, and it’s to fill my house with as much pirate-related stuff as she can. A few years back, she got me a rug and a rum jug; she also got me a glass tea mug with “why is the Earl Grey gone?” written on the side in pirate writing. Then there’s my big pirate bowl, which I use to eat Kraft Dinner. If it were up to Bex, the Jack Rackham would fly from every surface in my house.

In this regard, Becca J. Wood (the “J” stands for “JONES”) is doing a better job than I am, myself, of keeping me on mission. As you probably know, 2011 was not the best year of my life, being scattershot with disasters both epic and trite, the tritest of which was certainly that they actually made another Pirates of the Caribbean movie - and it sucked so, so, so hard. No big deal to you, but means a bit to me (kind of like how most of you felt when The Phantom Menace came out), and like I said, that negligible disaster was surely the tritest of the lot, in a year that was run through with fire and apoplexy. I had a hard enough time in 2011 that I didn’t much want to write about it or think about it when the year ended, and have furthermore spent the first weeks of 2012 wandering around in an over-stressed, work-heavy funk, enemies getting stronger and friends getting fewer, back spasming like a short-circuiting Christmas tree. Bex plays Gibbs to my Jack, though, and reminds me to keep to the code.

Details:

Jaunty trickster smile

Cosplayer-approved dangler detailing

No bone? No problem. Shishkabob-skewer in the hair.

Over on the other side of the collectible universe there’s the Hot Toys MMS line, about which I am moderately obsessed. I got back into toy collecting, as an adult, roundabout the January of 1996 or thereabouts if I’m not mistaken, which was about when they started the Star Wars action figures up again, in anticipation of special editions and prequels and all that. There were around 110 Star Wars figures in my youth, and that was plenty of a universe; now there are - depending on your math - nearly two thousand. (This goes to explaining why the Star Wars prequels are the way they are, an understanding I cottoned to while watching the second season of The Clone Wars. Telling a story’s one thing; establishing a long-term marketing platform is an entirely different sort of engineering.)

Well anyways. If Star Wars figures got me back into collecting toys, Hot Toys are pretty much all I collect nowadays, at the one-or-two-a-year rate I mentioned yesterday. This restraint is getting increasingly tough as they gobble up licenses and turn out work that legitimately blows my mind (LOOK - AT THIS FUCKING - BATMAN), but it keeps me focused. And now here’s Jack.

Hot Toys is running a special “DX” line on top of their regular line, even-higher-price-pointed items made with even greater care, materials, and attention to detail. Opening him up was like opening my first iPod - the packaging alone was better than the totality of most competing products in the marketplace. And then I got to the boots.

They’re suede.

Piratey demeanor, compass that leads to the heart’s desire, etc. Rolling eyeballs (on the toy, and likely, in the audience).

“Dainty” hand gestures.

Gizmos and doodads galore. The sword is metal. Fight against Thor’s metal hammer forthcoming.

Why the childish glee at these things, right now in the middle of January, after a rough year, and after a dark several weeks? For the childishness, itself; and the need for more childishness, generally.