...but it is.
I was taking my rubbish down to the bins outside my flat, and happened to bump into one of the Managing Agents - the one who visited my flat a few months back to check on my damp patches (that is, the ones on my ceilings, you dirty, dirty people) - standing in the stairwell with a dictating machine. She was surveying the entrance way for the redecoration they're intending to do at some point, inwardly (and soon outwardly) bemoaning the textured paint that had been used on virtually every surface. We got chatting about the state of the roof (apparently they'd had a visit from Health & Safety, who'd done a spot-check on the kebab place downstairs, and found too many signs of leakage), first impressions of the building ("like a prison"... but then, her first visit was during winter, when it was cold and dark), and the usefulness of insurance. Then the weird thing happened.
Although I really don't know why I think it's weird.
She recognised my t-shirt - the 'evil fluffy bitey thing', from Genki Gear.
I guess, partly, it's because I have a fairly large collection of weird and wonderful t-shirts, 'EFBT' being but one of many from Genki alone, and yet no-one in the past has said "Oh, I recognise that t-shirt... it's from Genki!" Once, and only once, a colleague recognised a Penny Arcade t-shirt (although not worn by me that day) and, other than that, my t-shirts drew very few comments (to my face, at least), and generally not much more than a bemused look or a brief chuckle.
So when a grey-suited Managing Agent recognised one of my cool t-shirts from a very cool English company, it felt like I'd stepped into an alternate dimension where perhaps, just perhaps, I wasn't quite such an outsider...
Many moons ago, I blogged a letter to Hasbro UK in which I wondered why their release schedule and level of publicity for TransFormers movie toys were such unmitigated shite. It's interesting to see that, four years and two movies later, nothing much has changed (except that the toys are smaller and they have even more ridiculous gimmicks). I popped over the Friern Barnet Smyths at the end of last week, and was disappointed to find that their shelves were basically still stocked with Wave 1 items. Plenty of Voyager Megatron, Optimus and Ironhide, loads of Deluxes that were released 2 months ago, and very little else. They did have the all-new Leader Class Ironhide, which I gratefully snatched up, but with the movie still doing so well in cinemas worldwide (latest figures put it at making just over a billion dollars, and it still hasn't been released in Japan!), I can't understand why the toys are taking so long to hit the shelves.
The USA is up to Wave 4, at least, but it looks as though they may be stuck there for a while, as all the new stuff on show at the San Diego Comic Con was labelled as being due to hit the streets between October and December, with one or two slated for 2012 release. If Hasbro UK is looking for a more balanced release schedule, one can only applaud their logic... yet with so much to come, I can't understand why any of it is being delayed. Are they hoping to ensure that their next quarter's results will be as good as this one?
In other news, I decided to watch The Lovely Bones last night... Strange film. I'm not entirely happy with an ending that lets a murderer escape justice, even if he does end up dead in a ditch himself, and I'm almost tempted to pick up the novel, to see how such rich visuals could be expressed in words. There have been a couple of other movies I watched recently, but I'm damned if I can remember what they were at the moment...
Oh well. Plenty of other things to be getting on with, besides blogging here...
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