Faster Cars and Smellier Air

This year, I outfitted my Festivus Pole with an ornaments rig.

If you didn’t watch TV in the Nineties and don’t read the Style Section, Festivus was created by American Philanthropist and Inventor, Frank Costanza, as a less commercialized alternative to more familiar and incompletely-secularized winter holidays.

As a convert from one of those holidays, I had a lot of cool ornaments lying around, but no tree to put them on. Would it be against the rules to put them on the Festivus Pole? According to Costanza:

instead, there’s a pole. It requires no decoration. I find tinsel distracting. [emphasis mine]

So decoration wasn’t required, but it wasn’t forbidden, either - as long as I avoided the “distraction” of tinsel.

The next problem was how to hang ornament hooks on a thin, Aluminum cylinder.

Many Festivus observers favor heavy, solid poles. My own is a light, segmented, telescopic pole from Home Depot. These are typically attached to specially-made clippers, cybernetic claws, etc. Because the top segment collapses into the bottom one, my pole is not uniformly cylindrical, which enabled me to suspend a chicken wire sinusoid from the joint.

This design, inspired by the work of George Hakkio, has three attractive features:

1. the appropriately inexpensive, even shabby aspect of the chicken wire
2. gobs of usable surface area
3. the entire rig can pivot to be viewed at any angle

Here are the results.

Note my great-grandmother Mary Kathryn Moir’s hand-made angels, kitten, sled, boots, clowns and elephant, as well as the traditional California Sea Otter (from Shani’s trip to Sea Otter Shirts in Monterey) at the rig zenith.

The base is a display box the folks at Home Depot let me have. The pole’s bottom fits snuggly into a (hidden) slot.

After covering the top with a sock to protect my ceiling, I extended the pole out and locked it at a length ever so slightly higher than my living room. Then, I wedged it in vertically.

Happy Festivus, everyone!

My brother and sister-in-law were nice enough to indulge my train fixation with a LEGO “My Own” locomotive for my birthday.

This is a pretty good LEGO set.

It was fun to put together. It features two distinct, non-trivial configurations.

It includes stickers.

And best if all, it’s operable. There are swivelling wheel trucks with spinning wheels. It’s a little disappointing that no reciprocating pistons drive those wheels. But unlike LEGO’s rigid frame 1903 Wright Flyer, this simplification doesn’t seriously compromise the historical accuracy of the model (like the particle beam cannon that I constructed out of the extra pieces does, to give another example.)

One complaint: the box the track came in clearly depicts my happy, LEGO-sized train-conducting counterpart. However! Opening the box did not reveal him. Danish toy-making friends: please include a conductor in future track boxes, or failing that a disclaimer starburst.

All aboard!