They're not toys, dammit!

I've been reading up on a fascinating dinosaur called the Therizinosaurus lately. While it's known from just a few bones, including ridiculously oversized claws, some educated guesses have been made about its overall appearance based on the body plans of related dinosaurs. Safari Ltd. has a nice-looking model of it, though the sculpt actually seems to be based on more closely resemble this image of a Nothronychus.

Speaking of dinosaur toys models, I recently became antsy wondering when (or if) the Safari Prehistoric Sea Life Toob might come out. So I e-mailed their customer service department with a query. Four days later I received a response which read, in part:

The item is still in production and will not be available for distribution to store retailers until the middle of March.

Please see below some suggested retailers:

You may visit the following online retail sites:
http://www.safariltd.com/ (press the green button and it will direct you to Shopatron for retail purchases)
http://www.thebigzoo.com/
http://www.healthstonehobbies.com/ (Hmmmm, this looks like a bad link...I wonder if she meant http://www.healthstones.com/ ?)
http://www.store4knowledge.com/

Also the following large retailers carry our products:
Michaels Arts & Crafts
AC Moore
Learning Express
HobbyTown USA

Thank you for your interest in Safari’s products.

...which I though was pretty nice of them.

While we're on the subject of educational...stuff, the Everhart Museum in Scranton is currently exhibiting The Art of the Brick: Sculptures by Nathan Sawaya, featuring sculptures made out of Legos. I hope to get up there with my nephews, who are both big fans of Legos. They may find the rest of the museum pretty interesting, too.

And speaking of art, I recently had a memory bubble up of a blog post someone wrote a few years ago about cigarette vending machines being repurposed as vending machines for tiny works of art. While I found the website for the project - Art-o-mat®, "vending art and culture since 1997" - in less than a minute, I wasn't able to actually identify the original blog post. It was from perhaps five or six years ago, maybe longer, so the blog where I originally read this may no longer exist. I'll keep checking on the blogs of old blog-friends to see who might have posted this way back when.