With Halloween less than one week away, it’s about time to start thinking about candy. Or, given the obesity epidemic in America, thinking about it a little more than usual. I’m partial to Whoppers and Peanut Butter Cups, though I usually abstain for the simple reason of not wanting to die. Like any sensible human under the age of 75, I was never quite so fond of the notorious Halloween ‘small plastic baggie full of pennies’, nor the leftover candy canes from the previous Christmas. One year, I was unfortunate enough to find a foreign candy called ‘Krot’ in my bag of treats, which I carried around as a hilarious curiosity until I showed it to my friend George, who promptly devoured it while my back was turned. To this, I loudly proclaimed, ‘Oh George, you ate my krot!’, which had everyone questioning our relationship for the remainder of the school year.

When you’re giving out candy to the invasive little door-knocking monsters, or ‘children’ as some people might address them, here’s two super-heroic options for you to consider.

First, for about 1.50 each, these Marvel Heroes minifigure packages come with 5 gumballs each, or ‘Infinity Gems‘, as I like to call them because I spend a lot of time alone. Blind-packaged, there’s a wide array of heroes to collect, all done in the horribly-obnoxious-but-eventually-endearing Big Head style. I started buying these because I wanted to find a Big Headed Galactus, since nothing seemed more amusing than a teensy, disproportionate galaxy-devouring ultra villain. Because of case ratios, I ended up getting about 5 Galacti and giving them to friends, in addition to 5 other highly undesirable characters. I mean, does Mystique really qualify for anyone’s top 25 favorite bad guys? I’d honestly prefer Arnim Zola to her, and that guy’s a total dweeb. He’s got a bellyface. I haven’t found these anywhere but the candy aisle of Wal-Mart, buried deep within the action figures and bicycles. With minifigures like The Thing and The Hulk still out there, I’m probably going to be blindly buying these things into oblivion. They’re not the pinnacle of sculpting and good craftsmanship, but they’re cute.

If you think that I sampled the gumball confections, you’re sadly mistaken. I’m in it for the hot hero action, folks. Candy is for kids. Lining up tiny superheroes around your computer and pretending you’re a giant is adult business.

Also buried within the Wal-Mart candy aisle are the Edibles, self-described ‘candy action heroes’ that you assemble, play with, and eat, assuming that you had the foresight to not play with them on a hairy rug or in a sandbox. These are basically small block figures molded out of candy, and there are four different characters to discover. There’s Spider-Man, in delightful “slingin’ strawberry” flavor, followed by The Thing in “rock’n orange”, “banana-x” Wolverine and “smashing sour apple” Hulk. All of this makes perfect sense, because when I look at a banana, I IMMEDIATELY think ‘I bet that’s what Wolverine tastes like. Bananas, cigars and chest hair.’

As you can guess, the properties of candy do not hold up as well to the elements as plastics might, and the figures are subject to decay and deformation both before and after opening. They’re not really for display, clearly, so we’re back into the more ephemeral aspects of collecting. If you’re very serious about holding onto these beyond their shelf life, I’d advise that you eat them. In that way, they’ll always be a part of you. Like it or not. The designs are runny and the molds are horribly inconsistent, so that arms and legs won’t even attach to Spider-Man’s lumpy, malformed pegs. In short, it’s a wonderful disaster, which is much more than those little door-beggars are worth in their store-bought Power Rangers costumes. The Power Rangers were never cool, even when they were so uncool that they were almost cool, and no matter how hard you squinted, Amy Jo Johnson wasn’t really hot enough to justify not changing the channel.

In the interest of accurate reportage, I actually ventured to open up the Spider-Man package, which instantly emitted a terrifying odor and partially blinded me. Not only was the hard candy cemented into the triple-sealed package with sugary, sticky tendrils, but I was fairly certain that if I touched it directly, it would bond with me like an alien symbiote and wreak all kinds of havoc. I also made every effort to avert my gaze from its eyes. So, basically, completely kid-friendly. I think I’m going to go pray now.

So, as Halloween approaches, think of the superheroes…. slowly, sweetly shortening the life expectancy of small, costumed children. Think of it as a treat that’s horribly tricky.

I like pottery, particularly vases, and I’ve already touched on well-known pottery makers Roseville and Gonder, so I thought I’d talk about the probably the best known of them all, McCoy.

The Nelson McCoy Sanitary Stoneware Company was founded in 1910 by Nelson McCoy and his father, J.W. McCoy, in Roseville, Ohio. This part of Ohio was known for the quality of its clay and many of the top pottery makers in the country were located in the area. In the 1930s the company hired Sydney Cope, who as Lead Designer introduced the style of products for which McCoy would become best known. The company continued to create pottery designs throughout most of the 20th century. In 1967 the McCoy family sold the company, and after changing hands two more times the McCoy Pottery company closed its doors.

Learn more about McCoy Pottery at http://www.mccoypottery.com , where you’ll find helpful information including forums, a more detailed history of the company, a store and a gallery of the different McCoy markings that can be found on the pottery.

This site operated by an avid McCoy collector has more interesting info about McCoy Pottery as well as a great photo gallery showing tons of the company’s unique styles. The site also has photos of reproductions and fakes to look out for - there’s a lot of them out there!

The website of The McCoy Pottery Collectors Society is fun to browse and has great tips and articles to help McCoy collectors educate themselves. http://www.mccoypotterycollectorssociety.org

Perhaps the one area in which you are least likely to feel “like a museum” or a curator is that, at least in the beginning, you may not have defined your collection. Museums have a plan which includes the definition of their collection, generally before their first purchase is made. In part they do this for funding as they have to answer to a board of directors, benefactor, or other funding source — often they do before they get or expand a location.

You might not think so, but in many ways you and your private museum have many luxuries that ‘real museums’ don’t have. Some of the larger museums may ‘win’ in the bigger budget department, but you don’t have the same accountability — unless it’s to get the spouse to agree to that floor-to-ceiling shelving unit for those Smurfs. You may attend an auction with the intentions of acquiring a specific piece and it the price goes too high, you are still allowed to spend your alloted amount at the auction on something else. This may not be so for a museum which has been given (granted) funds for one specific item. You may have to ask or include your spouse in decisions regarding purchases, but this is relatively little compared to grant proposals and accounting for every penny in your budget.

However, you can learn from museum curators.

One of the first things curators do is to define the purpose of the collection.

What is it they are trying to preserve?

Why is this important? To whom?

What is scope of the collection?

Is there a specific time period, artist, movement etc which has a natural contained set of parameters, or must they create a somewhat artificial yet natural cut-off point?

They not only ask themselves these questions, but they answer them. This becomes their Mission Statement, outlining the philosophy of the collection as well as identifying specific pieces which are ‘must haves’, and the objectives of the museum. (The Smithsonian website has an excellent section on this.)

Thinking in terms of what your collection means, its scope etc. is challenging. It often requires that we put into words what we do not consciously think about. For most of us, our collections weren’t planned. It started with just one impulsive Smurf purchase, and before you knew it you found yourself buying new shelving just to house them all. But answer the questions; this is where the really intersting stuff lies.

Why do you collect these things? What does it represent? Is there a central piece? What does each piece mean, and what does it mean as a collection, a whole?

At first, some of these questions may seem silly. How can you seriously discuss preserving the integrity of Smurfs, circa 1980? Or write down ‘why Smurfs are important to me’ in 100 words or less?

But once you start to answer these questions, you are on your way to a definition. With definition comes purpose. Now you can begin to articulate what you are looking for to form, organize and complete your collection.

I’m a huge fan of new ways to video game. There’s only so much you can do with a simple handheld directional controller and a box, even with that e’er so seductive N64 Rumble Pack. So, I’ve thrilled to the Dance Dance Revolution gamepad, I’ve beat the hell out of the Donkey Konga bongos, I’ve rocked out in the middle of a crowded Best Buy with a Guitar Hero guitar strapped around my neck, and I’ve dragged my Nintendo DS stylus to touch-screen victory. I even played the ‘virtual reality’ Xavix bowling game until I was sore! Subsequently, I was excited to play Mattel’s new Hyperscan Gamer system, which seems to be a collector’s dream come true. Seems. Just like lions might seem like an awesome form of transportation, until they start eating your knees and you realize that cars are pretty great too. Or unicycles. Anything without teeth and a digestive system.

If you watch as many cartoons as I do, you’ve seen the (embarrassingly bad) commercials for the Hyperscan Gamer. Using the CD-based Hyperscan device, which has a unique RFID scanner built into it, a couple of simple controllers and a series of gamecards, the Hyperscan Gamer promised to be the next frontier in awesome-ocity, as well as rocking-out-ery. It involves collectible game cards, and fantasy violence - what more does a young lad need? After a few test runs with the console, I regret to report that while the console is theoretically stunning, the reality of the system is significantly less than awesome.

The basic idea is this : you scan your character card (available in ten dollar booster packs, sold separately) over the console’s RFID scanner when prompted to summon your fighter. If you don’t have your desired character’s card, you’re outta luck and you can’t use them in battle. You also have the opportunity to scan a couple of corresponding power cards to add to your character’s abilities, presuming that your chosen booster pack contains cards that match up to your character, and given the 100+ cards that make up the X-Men game alone, that seems statistically difficult. You can scan in a non-corresponding card to enhance your character, but I don’t think that the effects are as great. Once you’re all scanned in, you battle your opponent’s scanned in cards using one of the basic controllers, Mortal Kombat style, but without the exploding eyeballs and spines getting ripped out. At the end of the battle, and here’s where it has the potential to get even neater, your character earns experience. You can scan this experience back into your RFID card for that character, who will retain this info indefinitely and empower him for future battles, on your system or on others.

Sounds really cool, right?

The Hyperscan console is a lightweight little device that contains some modicum of CD-ROM processing power, but not much. For seventy dollars, you can’t expect a digital colossus, so the load times between screens are really long, and the fighters themselves are probably closer to Super Nintendo quality than Playstation quality. They’re not fully-rendered 3D characters - instead, they’re cheaply rendered 3D representations of X-Men (think ReBoot), crudely reduced to animated 2D sprites. Press a button and your sprite will perform the action assigned to that button, and that’s it. This kind of thing worked beautifully for SNES classic games like Killer Instinct, but Killer Instinct had great play control to back it up. There’s a painful delay between the time one presses a button on their controller and the limited animation on the screen responds. There’s not even a guarantee that if your character visually connects to your on-screen enemy, the game will realize that damage should be dealt. There was no noticeable difference between the character’s actual fighting ability before and after the battles were waged either, even while their numerical statistics climbed. And also, the console might actually kill you in your sleep. I don’t know - I re-boxed mine after 20 minutes of wanting to punch real-world things. May it remain trapped there for eternity.

If the game just went in a more cartoony Marvel Vs. Capcom direction (which also used sprite-type animation, on the Dreamcast System), it could have been visually stunning enough to at least be fun to watch, but it’s like watching a mega-low-budget Saturday morning cartoon that still thinks it’s cool to use 3D animation instead of quality anything else. Check out the official website’s videos of the fighting action. That’ll explain it all.

The console certainly isn’t positioned to be at war with the upcoming Wii and PS3 gaming systems, though I venture that some unsuspecting mothers looking to save a few bucks come holidaytime will pick this up, and that saddens me. A few other games are planned for the system thus far, and they might be completely stellar and validate the cost of the system, though I don’t think it would be able to process anything more complex than Super Mario Brothers efficiently. Regardless of the unfortunate X-Men debut, the very premise of this system is worth keeping an eye on. It’s not the first system to use scannable trading cards (the GameBoy Advance eReader beat them to that by many years), but the re-writable cards have great potential. I think I’ll stick to Mario Kart for now.

My parents were given a beautiful old crystal chandelier as a wedding gift, and it has hung in all seven of the homes they’ve had since they married. Some would have thought that magnificent chandelier would have looked out of place in their humble cape cod-style starter home, but my mother made it work.

There has been a renewed interest in chandeliers over the past decade or so, brought about in part by the “Shabby Chic” style made popular by Rachel Ashwell. Ornate, romantic chandeliers play an important part in Shabby Chic decor and serve as a focal point for these pretty rooms. Some are so taken with the look of chandeliers that they collect them to use in entryways, dining rooms and even bedrooms.

Chandeliers were used as far back as medieval days to light large rooms in churches and castles. Early chandeliers were simple affairs made of wood with candles mounted on spikes on the arms. Over time chandeliers became fashioned out of metal and then crystal, popular for the

Most vintage chandeliers will need to be rewired by a lighting professional since the original wiring can become worn and frayed over time, which can pose a danger of short circuits leading to fire. It’s also a good idea to bring an old chandelier to a restoration specialist who can take the chandelier apart, clean each piece and reassemble it. Chandeliers are often heavy, so before mounting a chandelier to the ceiling it’s important to find out whether a ceiling is structurally sound enough to carry the weight of the chandelier or if it will need to be reinforced.

Read more about shabby chic style

Read about a few famous chandelier makers