[I began talking with Jef on Wednesday. Click here to read part one!]

CD : I see that you’ve have an affection for the Technic sets along with the basic LEGO. What’s your excuse? Is there a preference, or are they all awesome?

jeffwith1f : It’s all part of the same system. That’s perhaps the most remarkable thing about LEGO. A piece of LEGO from the 60’s will click onto a piece of LEGO made today, which will even snap onto a DUPLO block, or can be integrated with Technic, or MindStorms, or Bionicle or even the weird, vaguely Connex-like Znap stuff from a couple years back. It’s all part of an integrated system of elements, all of which work together interchangeably. It is truly an awesome feat of engeneering that standards set with basic bricks back in the late 40’s have been able to be held both constant, yet continually expanded to the play system we have available today with LEGO.

CD : Have you used the LEGO Digital Designer?

jeffwith1f : Never used any of the digital designer stuff, I had no real interest in MindStorms, I am even wary of the kits that have electric motors and battery boxes (although I do have many). I am a purist for the hands on, all plastic experience, and despise toys that require batteries to be enjoyed, so I avoid them where possible. I think the best LEGO can be enjoyed by any child, without access to a computer, and will keep running on imagination power, long after a battery powered toy would be waiting for a refill.

CD : The ‘no battery’ thing is a great philosophy, and one that’s being adapted by a lot of small, new companies all around - but I have to say that the Digital Designer is a great way to play if you’re low on bricks! Seeing as how these ARE expensive items, what’s the most you’ve spent on a set?

jeffwith1f : Recently I picked up the Millennium Falcon Ultimate Collectors Set, it ran me something like $750 after taxes. Ouch. It also took 6 months from order to arrival time. It took me 38 hours to put together (I did time lapse photography) and it currently sits on my desk at work, where I get a lot ot strange looks from people, but it’s great geek bait.

CD : Are you a completist, or do you just pursue the things you like?

jeffwith1f : A bit of both. I obviously can’t purchase everything that LEGO makes, but I do try to keep complete collections within my interests. I try to get most, if not all, of the Technic line available at any given time, and until 2 years ago, I had complete Star Wars lines, as well as the first three sets of Harry Potter Lego. I also tend to buy anything that is aviation related that LEGO makes, as model airplanes are another hobby and I appreciate the cross-over.

CD : Do you have a ‘holy grail’ set that you’d like to find? What’s been your greatest find while hunting for LEGO?

jeffwith1f : I’d really really like to find the Technic Seaplane # 8855. I see them from time to time, but for some reason I never feel like I have the [money] to get it at the time.

CD : Has your collection of LEGO brought you anywhere interesting? Met anyone?

jeffwith1f : It’s pretty much been a labour of love in isolation as an adult, although I do bring some of the things I make to work and decorate my office space with them, which usually elicits some conversation. I did get to be on Television though. I answered a Craigslist ad looking for collectors of LEGO that my wife forwarded to me. As it turns out, a locally produced television show called “Collectors Showdown” on the Treasure HD channel, available on Bell ExpressVu, was looking for a pair of LEGO fans to pit against each other in a test of skills and knowledge. I seemed to fit the bill. I ended up going head to head against a mother of two who was, believe it or not, a larger fan of LEGO than me, and while I held my own, she handily beat me at both the test of skills and the test of knowledge. She was awesome, and it was nice to be able to talk LEGO to someone that didn’t glaze over as I started to ramble on about kits from the catalogue a decade ago. Even the staff at the LEGO store were not really able to keep up with me on that front - they know current items, not so much items offered in the mid 90’s. It was a good day out, I had no problem losing to my worthy opponent fair and square. As an added bonus, the television show is on a channel that no one I know sees, so I’m fairly certain I dodged a bullet there.

CD : Are you a member of the Brickmaster Club? I found it to be very rewarding.

jeffwith1f : Nope. LEGO fan in a vaccum. I seem to recall signing up for some LEGO community site shortly after the show because my opponent belonged, but honestly I never go.

CD : LEGO aren’t your only collection. What else do you collect?

jeffwith1f : My other primary collections are Guitars - I have 23 at the moment - and Diecast airplanes… almost too many to count.

I seem to go through phases that last about 3-4 months where one particular one is grabbing my attention most, and I take some of my discretionary income (of which I am fortunate to have some…I am not rich though) and pick up some items in my current sphere of interest. I have been on a guitar kick for the last while though. I recently came into a very rare Gibson Moderne, that I had been looking for for at least 14 years (I nearly fell over when I saw one in the store, it was the first one I had seen that wasn’t a picture), I had to sell a couple of other instruments in order to afford it as it was quite dear, and I currently have a very odd Gibson Reverse Explorer on order arriving in the fall, which should give me time to save up for it.

CD : With your love of LEGO, planes, and Lego planes, is there any interest in constructing a LEGO guitar? I’ve seen some interesting mods!

jeffwith1f : I did start to build a LEGO flying V, but found that I did not have enough wing elements to make up the body and get the angles quite right. I did not want to butcher too many kits to do it, so that’s a project that’s on hold for the time being, but it has crossed my mind that If I have crossed my love of LEGO and aircraft, why not LEGO and guitars? One day….

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After talking to Jef, it confirmed my suspicions that some of us, if trapped on an isolated island in the middle of the sea and limited to three items (real or imagined), would want to bring along food, or water, or a boat. LEGO Maniacs, provided with an infinite supply of LEGO, would have a great time building shelter, devising Technic fishing rods to catch fish autonomously, and organizing a vast water collection system, all out of LEGO.

I’ve already started the sketches, just in case.

It was through online social networking that I encountered Jef, a 34 year old software quality assurance manager from Toronto. Though I hadn’t been slumming around the Lego networks for too long before feeling like a total amateur. They were all using shorthand for brick assembly techniques, like the wholly unappealing acronym SNOT - which is grossly inappropriate when talking about how to stick two things together anyhow. I was out of the loop. What I DID understand were pictures of stuff, and I was drawn to a picture of Jef, standing in front of an array of amazing Legos. ‘Piles of things’ is a language that appeals to me.

So, we had a conversation. I was curious about the motivations of other Leogmaniacs, and if they were so diffrent from my own. I was recently asked what three things I’d bring with me to a deserted island. Was I so unusual to say ‘an infinite supply of Legos’?

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CD : First off, I came across your profile on Facebook in a LEGO group, because I’ve been disproportionately in love with Legos lately. I saw an image of you with shelves upon shelves of Legos, and I was
impressed. In short, what’s up with that?

jeffwith1f : Well…I was big into LEGO as a child, and spent many an hour building spaceships, robots, vehicles, towers and other contraptions, and then tossing them down the stairs. Of course, as I hit my early teenage years, LEGO took a back seat to other things (read: mostly girls & carousing with friends), but then, one Christmas in my early twenties my late grandmother gave me a small kit of LEGO as a stocking stuffer, remembering how much I enjoyed it.

I didn’t think much about it until a couple of days later when at home enjoying the winter break, I cracked out the kit and put it together (it was a small airplane). At this point in my life I had spent a couple of years building scale model airplanes, and I marvelled at the quality of the plastic moulding and how everything went together. Simply remarkable. It was intensely enjoyable, and took me right back to all the aspects that I enjoyed about it as a child. First I built the model from the kit, enjoyed it, and a day or so later I took it apart and built my own customized creation from the same pieces (a different plane). Part of me thought, “this is great, I wish I had more, but LEGO is so expensive” (it always seemed out of reach of my ability to save my allowance money a a child), but it then dawned on me that now I was an adult, and had a job (and no real expenses at the time besides some cheap rent), and that I lived just down the street from a Toys R Us - so I wandered up the street, picked out a Technic Motorcycle (the super street sensation kit I believe), and I once again became a confirmed LEGOManiac. From then on I started to look for and pick up kits that interested me. As well as periodically work on my own projects.

CD : I notice you’re saying ‘LEGO’ instead of ‘Legos’. Am I using the plural completely incorrectly?

jeffwith1f: For starters, I believe LEGO should always appear in all caps (it’s the brandname after all). It is somewhat less clear whether LEGO alone implies plurality, as I have seen both used. Personally, I’ve always referred to a pile of LEGO simply as LEGO, much as a bowl of cereal is “Cereal” not cereals, or a bucket of popcorn is “popcorn”, not popcorns. For all I know there are camps of embittered people that debate this like Trekkies and Trekkers.

CD : Now, when you ‘collect’ LEGO, do you leave them in their boxes, or build them, or buy two copies of each? What’s your strategy towards play vs. pay?

jeffwith1f : I pretty much play with all of them. I only have one kit that I would not open, and that’s a set of basic red bricks from 1973 that I found while in Spain a couple of years ago. There’s no real point to open it, and I’m chuffed to have a kit from the year I was born, that’s still unopened. Inevitably over the years people have gifted me kits that I already have, and unless I need the parts, I will also leave them sealed, but 95% of my kits have been opened, built, played with, but when done, I return the pieces of the kit to the box, and close it back up and store it. Every now and then I embark on a creation of my own that requires me to borrow pieces from kits, and if it’s just one or two, I will leave a note in the box so I can find the pieces later if I need to, and when a larger amount of pillaging is done, the kit kind of gets sacrificed for the project. When possible building my own creations I attempt to use my loose bin of LEGO from when I was younger so that I can leave the kits I have bought as an adult intact…

I do realized as a collector that not being able to offer the kit as “Sealed Mint in Box” does affect it’s current resale value, but I have no plans on parting with any of this for many decades, and I am hoping that when I am 60 and wanting to retire and/or cull off the collection that being able to offer up most of these kits simply as “intact and in original packaging” will be uncommon enough to retain a good chunk of the value. I think toys that aren’t played with are kind of sad anyways, so it would be wrong not to enjoy the toy for what it is. I do work hard to ensure they remain intact though.

CD : The ‘leaving a note’ system is probably a lot wiser than my own ‘I’ll figure it out later with the instruction manual and throw everything into a giant tub’ methods.

So, what’s one of your favorite home-made creations?

jeffwith1f : My favourite own creation (or MOC as they seem to be called) is “the Hand”. I was watching a show on robotics and they were discussing how difficult it has been to simulate muscles. I was thinking that the Technic pneumatic pistons would emulate a muscle in LEGO form, and in my hubris, I thought that if I could design a working human-like hand, then surely I could build anything. I spent a month of weekends working out the design, but ended up with something that seems to impress pretty much everyone that sees it. They are even more impressed when they find out that it moves as well. It’s got a pretty good grip actually.

CD : What’s your favorite LEGO-made creation?

jeffwith1f : I think my favourite LEGO kit so far is probably the Technic Front End Loader kit # 8459 (which was also re-released a couple of years later under a different number I believe, certainly different packaging), it is a challenging build and an awesome model in a decent scale. That’s a tough call though as most LEGO kits are well designed and contain excellent design elements that you appreciate even more than you think once you get it together.

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Come back on Saturday for the rest of my talk with Jef, fellow LEGOmaniac, and proof that I’m not alone in this LEGOmadness.

Lately, I’ve been reaching back into my younger years and reclaiming some of the basic building blocks that led me towards being a generally creative person. Of course, this literally refers to reclaiming actual wooden building blocks, but also such wonders as the Etch-A-Sketch (I went out and bought a new one), the Galt Toys Tack-On Picture Board, and the most wonderful of all building toys, the Lego.

None of the Legos that I had as a kid are still around, but we had a TON. They were inherited from a family of 6 uncles and aunts, before the era when Legos started getting fancy hinges and blocks that weren’t strictly squares (and an occasional slanted roof tile), so we were pretty fundamental in our constructions. We lost the use of the Legos for a long period when one of our brighter uncles decided to adopt a pet mouse and build playthings for it out of out Lego supply. Later, the mouse found a new home, and we got our Legos back - complete with mousy evidence wedged in their crevices and gnawed off of the corners. I think that we lost a bit of interest in them when snapping two pieces together also required prying mouse droppings out from the connections. The Lego supply found its way out of the house and to some undisclosed location - but they were getting pretty ragged anyhow, as indestructible as they are.

Sure, Legos were neat, but my only interaction with them for the past decade or so came in the form of a few small Star Wars Lego sets that I’ve lost to the recesses of the closet, and a little customized Lego that I painted up of my girlfriend. It wasn’t until I saw this original Iron Man custom Lego creation that I realized again the potential of the building blocks.

As someone who looks at everything in the world around me as things that I can scavenge for parts that I can use in art projects, I was hilariously blind to Legos, which already came completely ready to assemble into whatever the heck I felt like. In a quest for spare parts, I pretty much missed the neon, flashing, screaming ‘SPARE PARTS’ sign over the ol’ Lego depot.

Lego did a great job in building up their own nerd cred by expanding their line brick by brick, introducing the technical & programmable Mindstorms sets, and even venturing into action figure territory with their Bionicle line. They publish a free monthly magazine, and they have a subscribable Lego ‘Brickmaster’ Collectors Club that’ll send you six exclusive sets, one every 2 months, for a price of 40 bucks. A Lego set that you can’t get anywhere else pretty much spells AWESOME to me, and I’m a new subscriber. Anything that adds bricks to a limitless collection is fine by me.

So, I’m a reborn Legoholic, and this year, the Times Square Toys ‘R’ Us is calling my name during ToyFair. Upstairs, they have a fill-your-own-bag of Legos section, with a vast selection of Legos spread all around you like a rainbow of throat-destroying candy. Did you know that you can also buy Legos by the Brick in Lego’s online shop? You name the shape, and they’ll bag it up and ship it to you. To make this function even more amazing than it already is, they’ve created a Digital Designer program, totally free to use, which allows you to design a fully 3D Lego model of your choice using a huge variety of bricks in a huge variety of colors… and then you can click on a button and have the parts sent to you. Of course, you’re charged for each individual brick, but you can make whatever the heck you want, test it on a screen, and then have the fun of building it in person without going through the hassle of picking through a dozen Lego sets to scavenge for appropriate pieces.

I needed to kinda cleanse my soul after a rough weekend, and in the process of also cleaning my room, I found a few old Lego sets I picked up for various reasons & never assembled. Until very recently, I’ve had a purist approach to Legos. You build what’s on the box, and you keep the parts from different sets far apart. In the interest of creation and expansion, I’ve abandoned this attitude, realizing that if I keep the instruction manuals from all of these sets, I’ll be golden if I ever want to build them again. Sure, I might have to dig a little more, but the blueprints are the most important part. And if I want to remain a little bit OCD about it, I can store all of the pieces for any given set in a single Ziploc bag, which can then go into the collective tub of Legos.

I dug out my Batman vs. Catwoman set, which I purchased because it had a Lego Batman in it for my Batman collection, and I also dug out my Mutant Squid, which I purchased because it’s a mutant squid. One doesn’t need any more reason than that. And then I went on eBay and sought out huge mixed lots of pieces, and within an hour, I had over 2000 pieces from various auctions ordered and paid for, from basic blocks to aircraft parts to other odds and ends. If I wanted 100 yellow Lego flowers, there’s an auction for that. eBay is rich with very specific parts auctions for very fair prices. In fact, the individual pieces seem to sell even better than the big sets, and the minifigures are worth their weight in gold, with a single tiny Chewbacca going for almost ten bucks at times.

Waiting for the mail was never a strength of mine, and I went out and bought an $11 ‘Lego Creator’ set, which is Lego’s line of ‘moderately complex’ models that avoid using any super-specialized pieces. Of course, if the box has a picture of a spider on it, I’m the guy who builds a devil robot wielding a mace instead. And that’s just the beginning. The transience of Lego designs, the need to take something apart to make something new, has almost been made painless by the advent of being able to digitally chronicle them, and even digitally duplicate them (and save the schematics) in Lego Digital Designer.

Sure, Lego has all kinds of collectible Skeleton Warriors and Dragons and Exo-Squad and Bionicle and Knights, but they’re all just bricks. In this way, there’s not a single Lego set that doesn’t have an appeal.

Which just made collecting a lot more expensive.

By way of concluding coverage of the pleasantly chaotic Toy Fair, I think that’s it’s really important to mention some of the stuff that people generally don’t get to see. There are three enormous floors worth of toys and games and ideas in the Javits Center alone. That’s without even taking the free shuttlebus to the Toy District, which has two towers interconnected by a bridge and each floor full of showrooms and offices, all dedicated to the pursuit of innocent pleasure. Far too much flies under the media radar, some of it exciting and innovative, and some of it hopeless and bound to crash and burn and give off highly toxic fumes. I’ll let you decide which is which in this small gallery.

By way of ‘collectability’, Spin Master has two different Marvel Comics items planned for this year. The first of these is a series of super-tiny comic books that can only be read with a magnifying glass, to be packaged in groups of seven, which reprint both recent and classic Marvel comics. Reprinting comics in teensy form isn’t a NEW idea, and DC Direct did it exceptionally well when they packed in mini-comics in their ‘First Appearances’ line of action figures, but these… seriously tiny. Eye-strain tiny. ‘Secret cabal with the optometrists of the world’ tiny. And presumably, one can also play games with these tiny comics, like a trading card game.

The second innovative collectible idea from them is individually packaged Marvel chess pieces, representing a wide array of superheroes and bad guys in 3D, mini form. I remarked that I was surprised to see Red Skull among the characters, given the fact that he has serious Nazi leanings and most companies shy away from using him, but Captain America DOES need someone’s butt to kick. These chess pieces will be sold at your local toy store for around 2 bucks. It may take a lot to fill up a chess board, but when you’re done, it really looks like a lot of double-nerd fun. They’re more like miniature statues than actual, delineated chess pieces, but they’re an interesting concept.

LEGO will be expanding their Star Wars line of products to include more mini-figures (arguably the best part of collecting LEGOs) and scenarios. I practically squealed with delight when I noticed that they’d finally made a Boba Fett in a little LEGO Sarlacc Pit. You know, the sand-hole-with-teeth that he fell into on Tattooine? Like a total goober? THAT pit, in blocky LEGO form. LEGO will also be rolling out the first in a Batman themed set of products, ranging from ten dollar vehicles to high priced playsets like the Batcave. Mini-figures will include Batman, Robin, Catwoman, Penguin, the Joker and Killer Croc, among others. There are no plans to release these separately, but if you get those late night Batman Mini Figure pangs like I do, you can always look up Art Asylum’s C3 line of construction kits, which include mini-figures of many DC characters at a cheap price. Be warned that many of these C3 sets had missing and malformed piece issues which can no longer be resolved with the company, as the line has been discontinued. You can’t beat Lego anyhow, and if you tried, you’d probably totally cut up your hands on their damned sharp corners. It can just about kill you if you step on a LEGO in the dark - I care not to fathom what one could do should you engage it in fisticuffs.

Also, be sure to check out the LEGO Factory, where you can custom design ANYTHING you want online and have them ship it to you. It’s amazing beyond words.

My number one favorite Toy of the Year [non-mainstream category] is by far Product Enterprise’s prototype ‘Space Vixens of Galaxy Vega’ line. Call it a love of retro-space-chicness (or ‘chickness’), or call it a simple appreciation of women in all of their spacebound forms, but Captain Peggy Rider took my breath away. She’s but the first 12” figure in a line of many that are planned, and while Product Enterprise (a European company who has previously focused on sci-fi vehicle reproductions) is searching for wide distribution on these, I’ll be dreaming of what could come next. If the final product is anything like the prototype, this will be one of the rare instances that an original intellectual toy property completely takes the market by storm. Keep an eye out for this - I predict great things.

Mimobot presents a completely useful functionality to the world of collectible mini-figures. Not only are these little guys very indie-art stylish, but you can pop open their heads and store a considerable amount of data on them via a USB port! Some people might call them flash drives. I call them ingenious. The ‘urban vinyl / designer toy’ market is burning up right now, merging pop surrealist artistry with toy culture, and now with computer culture and functionality. These start at about 60 bucks and work their way up in price as data storage increases. And it’s a lot more fun to store your term paper on a ninja.

One of the more literally rewarding items we found is ‘Perplexcity’, and by ‘rewarding’ I mean ‘solve a series of puzzles and get $200,000 in real cash money’ rewarding. Worldwide puzzle games with actual buried treasure are nothing new, but Perplexcity adds a new spin on the genre of real-live adventure by incorporating it into a trading card game. Collect packs of cards, solve the increasingly difficult puzzles on each card, trade them with other puzzle solvers and tally your points online to unlock deeper and deeper clues. Eventually, these clues will lead you to finding ‘the Cube’ somewhere in the actual world. I’ve played games like this before, and they’re HIGHLY addictive. Subcultures are formed around them, and the earlier you get in on them, the better off you fare in the game. Similarly, the wider your unmoving butt grows as you seek out each progressive clue. The second wave of cards is coming out now, and many of the players have almost 7000 points, so you’d better hurry.

I found myself wishing that I’d had a few more days just to take in the sites, see more costumed characters, pick up another sack full of free goodies and samples, but the highly inclement weather and fatigue and a lack of traveling companion prevented me from visiting the event on a second day. We sampled milkshakes and played drums and suffered through barely-English presentations of completely bizarre board games that promoted unhealthy lifestyles. Last year, I got in trouble for my lambasting of certain items by name, so I’ll avoid those strings of diplomatic eMails this year by being polite. Poke around through the photo gallery and see what we saw.

There’s dreams and aspirations packed into the halls of the Javits Center during Toy Fair. Sometimes, you recognize dreams from last year and you’re pleased that the dreams are still alive, no matter how crazy. Some dreams you never see again, and some blossom into incredible things. And some dreams are spandex-clad girls who giant metal helmets with Jimmy Durante noses on them, and you sigh and wander to the next booth.

I can’t wait to do it again next year.