Two men with handguns shot and killed each other at a crowded Toys "R" Us in Palm Desert, Calif., on Black Friday, officials said. Witnesses said the confrontation happened after the women with them got into a violent brawl. A police official said the fight was not over a toy.
The victims were identified as Alejandro Moreno, 39, of Desert Hot Springs, and Juan Meza, 28, of Cathedral City. No one else was hurt.
Palm Desert is a resort town about 120 miles east of Los Angeles. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- airsoft guns
Sorry, folks, been on a HUGE freelance design project and have neglected my blogs this week.
Toy giant MATTEL's been around for 63 years. Headquartered in El Segundo, CA, you may know some of their minor product lines...Barbie. Scrabble. Matchbox cars. And let's not forget the never-wrong Magic 8 Ball. Fortune Magazine and the Los Angeles Business Journal named Mattel a "Best Place To Work" in 2008.
Since its inception, Mattel has been in acquisition mode, scooping up smaller companies like Fisher-Price. And General Aniline and Film, known more commonly by its acronym, GAF. As in View-Master. I owned one in the early 70s...the closest thing I had to Internet search. I recall one disk in particular, the 7 Wonders Of The World...it had a miniature vinyl audio disk attached to it, providing appropriate narration for each slide. Here's a commercial from 1971, starring Jodie Foster and Henry Fonda:
And I STILL have my Mattel Electronics hand-held two-player video football game, fully operational. One 9-volt battery and I'm good to go. Who needs PlayStation. Millions of units sold. I use those same thumb reflexes for texting now.
Hot item this holiday season: Disney's High School Musical action figures! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Powerwing™, from Razor®. Looks like fun. Doesn't even come close to my childhood Big Wheel, but at $129.99, the price is right for this "drifting cast scooter" that'll get you out of the house and fulfill your daily cardio quotient. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shop for Video Games at ToysRus.com
OK, I promise every post won't be a flashback, but here's a gem from way-back-when that is STILL available today! Yippee!
Wacky Stickers (aka Wacky Packs or Packages) gave me endless hours of giggles as a pre-teen. Bought them by the truckload at Tom's Market across from Putnam Avenue Elementary; a bunch of spoofed-consumer-product adhesive cards (and a stale-tasting powdery stick of gum which I always tossed) in a wax wrapper. Along with watching Darrin Stephens on Bewitched, Wackies definitely guided my career path into advertising and design...that Norm Saunders artwork remains unsurpassed. Always wondered how they got away with such spot-on parodies...and if they ever got sued/injunctioned.
Wackies have had a sporadic publishing history. Produced by Topps (the baseball card peeps), the original series ran from 1967-1979, followed by reruns into the mid-80s. 1985 and 1991 saw some new cards, and then another series began in 2004. But nothing beats the originals. I had most of them, until I got the brilliant idea to wallpaper my buddy Jimbo's treehouse with my entire collection (which I'm rebuilding from scratch, starting now)...
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Two men with handguns shot and killed each other at a crowded Toys "R" Us in Palm Desert, Calif., on Black Friday, officials said. Witnesses said the confrontation happened after the women with them got into a violent brawl. A police official said the fight was not over a toy.
