JoshB's blog

Man, 2009 is starting off with a Bang! First we get an awesome new President, one Mr. Barak Obama (who is a bit of a geek), and also we have a great new batch of toys coming up soon on cdx, including the Beagle Mospeada, TWO Macross Fronteir Valks, the new Yamato Destroid, and even the Respect for Volt in Box.

We're also very excited for Toy Fair this year, although all indications point to a much scaled back event. Still, we get to go to NYC for a few days. If you want to get together with us, let us know! We'll be hitting the usual haunts - chinatown, Toy Tokyo, Image Anime and more...

Anime.CollectionDX.com is doing well, but the extra workload is killing us right now. We primarily need help with news. If you are interested in being part of the CDX family, let me know. We can't pay, but there are perks!

Thanks!

Josh

I made this book, "All About Joshua Bernard" in October of 1977.

Of course, I've left out a bunch of pages so as not to bore you.

I was six years old in 1979.

My favorite pet was a parakeet named Jack, and my favorite toy was something called the Sho-Gun Warriors.

I also liked to play Hotwheels with Andrea.

My Favorite TV shows in 1979 were Buck Rogers and Devlin

Apparently at the time I looked like a Roswell alien who wore a black t-shirt with dragsters on them.

So I'm sitting here at a friends house, leeching off of their internet connection. We're three days into our power outage at CDX HQ. We had an ice storm Thursday night that knocked out power to a good portion of New England. Over 300,000 homes in Massachusetts were without power. It's Sunday now, and they are now telling us that we may not have power back until Tuesday.

We've been keeping warm, we still have power, but we have no heat. We have a fireplace that has been keeping us warm, and we should have enough wood to last us the duration.

It's amazing how much we rely on technology. I went into laptop withdrawl while at the house, so we ended up folding a lot of laundry. Our cel phones worked, but thats about it. We went scrounging at local stores for batteries and candles...

We were really unprepared. Looking forward we may invest in a generator to keep the heat and lights on. Where we are in town is not exactly on the list of priority places to restore power.

Please bear with us if the site goes down, or news and content isnt updated much this week..

I love Plaid Stallions. It's such a fantastic blog, each day is a trip back into my childhood. Today they had a great sale ad from JC Penney.. from 1978. This takes me back to a happier time...

Image via Plaid Stallions

How old were you in '78? I was FIVE.

So I just got back from seeing Twilight. In case you live in a cage, Twilight is the new book sensation. It's what Harry Potter fans are now reading now that their hormones have kicked in. I've heard the books are pretty good (comparatively speaking) and to me anything that gets kids reading is a great idea.

But I have to tell you, the movie sucks balls.

Spoilers within.....

You know, sometimes we lose sight of what the true purpose of toys are, and how some companies are really in touch with that.

I just read this article on CNN:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/11/20/autism.fire.hotwheels/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

"(CNN) -- After the fire, all that was left of Jonathan Reyes' massive Hot Wheels collection was a piece of metal that once was part of a toy car.
Jonathan Reyes shows off his new Hot Wheels cars sent by Mattel after they heard his own toys were lost in a fire.

But on Wednesday, the arrival of two cardboard boxes at his grandparents' house sent 7-year-old Jonathan flying to the door, said his mother, Jan Reyes.

Mattel, the company that makes Hot Wheels, sent racetracks, play sets, stickers, folders, T-shirts, hats and hundreds of toy cars.

"He was speechless," Reyes said. "He didn't say anything. He just smiled. He opened it up. It was like Christmas. All of us were bawling, crying. He was so happy."

Saw this on BoingBoing

"From Hell

It's hard to think of an office-based comedy more different from The Office than this. Graham Linehan's absurdist sitcom feels nearer in spirit to The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin: off in a mad world of its own, yet uncomfortably familiar, even at its maddest. The IT Crowd even used to have its own "CJ"-type figure in Denholm Reynholm, the overbearing boss of Reynholm Industries played by Chris Morris. Although Reynholm jumped out of a high window in the last series, his playboy son Douglas (Matt Berry) shows every sign of carrying on the family name (plundering the pension fund, putting flakes of gold in the drinking water, etc) and more or less takes over tonight's very funny opening episode. That leaves our IT-department trio of geeky Moss, lazy Roy and uptight Jen slightly overshadowed. But the sweet scene where Moss and Roy try some role-play to help Moss deal with park bullies just about makes up for it. "

Every year some group you never heard of comes out with a top 10 list of dangerous toys. Usually that list is filled with products you never heard of, and never would buy anyway. I thought that some of the reasons these were bad toys were not quite accurate so I took a stab at them.

Not a huge Naruto fan, but I thought this was kind of neat. It appears the new Naruto Anime will air in the US just days after its Japanese release.

"VIZ Media will begin streaming NARUTO Shippuden - just days after it's release in Japan....FOR FREE on the Ultimate Destination For Anything NARUTO - The Official NARUTO website ----- www.Naruto.com !

(A new English-subtitled episode will be added every Thursday thereafter)"

So instead of going to TV, they are going straight to net with almost instantly subtitled episodes. How cool is that? If only more anime came to the states like that.

I'm not too into model building, but check out this hybrid model shop / studio that opened March 27th, 2008 at Tressa Yokohama, Japan.

I’m back from Vacation, did you miss me?

Special thanks to Atom, Sanjeev, Nekrodave and Eva_Unit_4A for keeping the site up and running for the week.

The family and I were vacationing down on the cape, and it seems no matter where I go for vacation, I always seem to be able to sniff out the toys.

First off I met up with Tom V (host of the second chogokin summit in ‘99) to pick up some Jumbo Machinders I had bought from him (a third version Raideen and first version Dragun). It was a cool, but brief meeting. Thanks Tom!

We found ourselves lost in the woods along 6a when we found this cool book store called the Parnassus Book Service. Taking shelter from the rain, the family and I explored this great used book store were we found some treasures. No toys here, but I found a mint copy of a Pop-Up book from Disney’s Black Hole!

I'm experimenting with ad placements with the google adsense ads.. Ads may move around a bit. If you find something really annoying, let us know.