You don't have to buy a frame

[austin_dern]

One of the hobby shops moved from its old spot on Orchard Road, and today was my first chance to seek out its new location in a sightly different part of Orchard Road. It isn't far, but was in the opposite direction than I'd thought. The new spot's in the shopping adjunct to a hotel, and is a bit intimidating to me because the street level stores, open to the outside, are filled with jewelry and souvenir trinket and clothing stores, all stuff that gets barkers who go out talking to passers-by. The attention of a store clerk makes me want to flee, and barkers are supercharged in their effect on me.

They didn't have what I really want, Polar Lights or Bandai Star Trek models or real space history models (besides Hasegawa 1/200 scale Space Shuttles), but I picked up a nice four-inch Corgi metal toy Concorde. It's modelled to the Concorde operated by British Airways and Singapore Airlines together, with Singapore Airlines markings on the left. I also bought a can of compressed air for airbrushing; the clerk pointed out it's cheaper in the long run to buy a compressor, but so far I'm running about thirty dollars a year on canned air, making the economics of a compressor hard to explain, and she agreed.

In front of the cash register, on the floor, I noticed a box of hand puppets, S$10 each. Most on the top level were rabbits. The clerk recommended I dig in and find something interesting, and -- at my cautious examination -- said it was all right to throw them around. Cleaning up a semi-regular customer's mess of animal puppets is more interesting than ordinary counter duty, after all. I found a raccoon, and took it home, my first puppet purchase. It's rather small and a bit stiff, but I can see the fun of puppetry anyway. I'll have to try putting it up against the puppet dinosaurs from Land of the Lost sometime.

Trivia: At his trial for killing President James Garfield, Charles Guiteau said, ``The doctors did that. I simply shot at him.'' Source: Jerseyana, Marc Mappen.

Currently Reading: Measuring the Universe: The Historical Quest to Quantify Space, Kitty Ferguson.