By Popular Demand

A couple more pictures of the Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer mall display. Enjoy!

Photos by Ken Mitchroney, at the Eastridge Mall.

Happy Holidays!

Best wishes to you and yours for a happy holiday season!
From Jeff, Anita, Figaro & Piccolo

Most Men Are Not Islands

ANANOVA: House is an island
Developers have turned a house into an island in China after the owner refused to move out.
The villa now stands alone in a 30ft deep man-made pit in Chongqing city, reports Jinbao Daily.
The Chongqing Zhengsheng Real Estate Company wants to turn the area into a £40m 'Broadway' square, including apartments and a shopping mall.
But the owner of the villa says he won't move out unless the company pays his price - the equivalent of £1.3 million.
"The villa owner refuses to move, so the real-estate developer has had to dig out all around it to force him to," says a saleswoman at Weilian Real Estate Sales Company.

"He wants 20 million yuan, or he'll stay till the end of the world."

Making Lemonade

Unfortunately, there wasn't a toy show in San Mateo yesterday (the conflicting calandars was an ominous sign). My friend Roger tried to warn me, but Anita and I had already left, only to discover a car show there instead. Now I like spiffy, cool-looking old cars, but I was in a toy-hunting mood - and a car show just wasn't gonna cut it. It was a sunny day, so we decided to throw some good $3.20 a gallon after bad, and check out the Great Mall in Milpitas.

The Great Mall is located in a converted Ford manufacturing plant, so it's HUGE. In truth, there's only three or four toy spots there - a sad-looking KB Toys, a Spencer's Gifts, a Hot Topic and a Disney outlet store - but there's so few good brick-and-mortar toy stores outside of San Francisco these days, that I thought I might find a surprise or two.

I didn't find anything - it's a little too early for the summer toy releases. The latest new mainstream-toy thing is that series 1 of the 300 figures is out. I'm not all that interested in the film or the toys, so not much of a find for me. Series 2 of the Hanna-Barbera figures are out too, but no one has that many of them, and I like to look through them to check the paint jobs (somethings that's become increasingly erratic with McFarlane recently).

We did, however, find a full set of the 50th Anniversary Disneyland plates at the Disney outlet store - something that Anita had wanted on one of our last visits to the park. This store had a great deal - the plates originally went for $30 each, and we were able to buy all six plates for under $90.00! So Anita was psyched, and we didn't burn all that petroleum in vain. I picked up a shirt for Danielle's imminent baby girl, and Anita found a book she'd wanted to read at the Borders outlet store for $3.00 or so.

I wasn't at all satisifed toy-wise, so we stopped by the dreaded Wal-Mart a little further up the 880 on the way home. I found some Chub City figures, and picked up one I liked (I had most of the others that I wanted at this point). Then it was back home for dinner and a nap after all the walking around. There's another toy show in San Jose in a couple of weeks - hopefully, it'll actually be there this time!