A Boy’s Toys: Friday Five

This week’s Friday Five is from Rob Stones over at About Pip. About whom I should say, he has posted several wonderful comments on my site. My lack of response is not a lack of appreciation. I usually decide to think over his comments, and what do you know, the thinking segues into drinking or band practice and eventually I’ve forgotten to post my thoughts. Argh!

Anyway, without further ado, Rob’s question:

It’s soon xmas. Very very soon. What are you going to buy for your partner, your kids, your parents, grandparents – takes deep breath – ????
I’ve been thinking about what to get the Pip for christmas. She’ll be just shy of eleven months, she won’t have a clue what’s going on, just that it’s busy, smells of food and involves lots of paper.
Mmmm…Paper.
We’ve bought her many a toy the last year or so. Lamaze toys, things that squeek, things that roll, things that peep, things that dangle and rattle, things that chime, books, that sing, teddy bears, rag dolls, the list is long.
The Pips favourite toys? The top off a tub of ice cream. The cord at the bottom of her coat. The coasters with pictures of Regency England on them, and it’s not the Regency settings that attract her. If it can be used like a hammer or placed on her head in some way then she’s in to it.
But nothing is better than paper.
So here’s my pre-christmas shopping rush Friday Five.

Which five ‘toys’ at any time of your life have meant the most to you and why?

  1. I think I wrote about this somewhere on my blog… yes, on my Vice Timeline. Please refer to Question 2, When did you first steal something?, for the full story on the theft of a cheap blue plastic cereal-box-derived Bagheera the Panther toy. T’was the object of both great joy and great guilt, for reasons obvious in the story…
  2. A huge stuffed giraffe that my mother made for me, sewn out of a ton of little crocheted circles. I carried that thing with me everywhere I went in the house. I wonder what happened to it. I loved it because my Mommy made it and it was a giraffe and giraffes are coooooool.
  3. The family’s first computer, a DOS machine that was bought around 1986 or 1987. So many times I typed dir/w. Craziness. I pirated hundreds of 5&1/4″ diskettes at my uncle’s place in Montreal one visit just after we bought it. I think my dad has all those diskettes sitting in the basement near his new computer. I just loved it instinctually, not because I knew someday these things would be able to do a hell of more, but beacause it was this thing that let me play loderunner for free instead of playing aome other video game for quarters.
  4. My digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix 4300. I love it because I can share pics with anyone at any time, very easily, but also because it lets me experiment. A few hundred bad pictures cost me not even a penny to snap, and amidst those, there are always a few interesting ones (which often become banners here on eclexys).
  5. My Digitech Vocal 300 Multi Effects Processor. It’s a cool gadget which, when used in combination with my sax clip mic, allows me to make my horns sound like all kinds of crazy instruments, as well as turn on loops, echoes, transpositions (I love using two-octaves-down transposition, for example). View this bad boy’s picture and details on a random site. It’s heavy but makes playing sax in a loud rock band that much easier. I love the musical freedom that comes with it.

Runners up include: the first pair of breasts I was allowed to play with (not technically a toy, but they meant a lot and I played with them a lot); my first saxophone; my laptop; my Sony NetMD player; and a Tonka truck I used to bring to the sandbox, hoping some boy would try steal it so I could grab it and bash him over the head with it vengefully, but, I felt, fully within my rights. Oh, and of course my baby sister, for bending arms and testing the limits of a baby’s tolerance for slashed water, funny faces, and weird sounds.

And today’s big toy? My new Yamaha flute. More in the next post.

A list of fellow Friday Fivers is available in the dropdown menu in the right sidebar. Visit them all!

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