Too Many Hobbies

Fuji's homework assignment for this week is to show off your other non-sport related hobbies. Asking me this to do this is kinda like asking Shawn Kemp to show off all his children. Over the past 40 years I've managed to get interested in a whole lot of things. A lot were sports related, especially gaming so I'll skip the video and board games and magazines and fantasy sports and et cetera and keep it to just the stuff that impacted my life that had nothing to do with sports. I literally have 15 minutes to write this up after scanning and photoing all this stuff today so I'm just gonna jump to it and pray that the formatting doesn't break again. 

I pretty much learned to read from Peanuts Fawcett Paperbacks. I've accumulated a bookshelf full in my travels. This one here is one I had when I was a wee lad. It was chewed by my asshole dog who is probably responsible for my current racism toward canines. I also went through a period where I would circle my favorite letter in my books. This book was brought to you by the letter 'R'.

At some point I got my hands on my uncle's old Mad Magazines from the early '70s and started reading them too. I must admit that my political views were heavily influenced by Mad Magazine. Sadly, most of those magazines were lost in a Great Purge of my bedroom, but I still have this one that I picked up in the '80s. This is one of my all time favorite MAD covers. 

I was INSANE over Star Wars when I was about 8 or 9. I forced my parents to let me watch BattleStar Galactica because it kinda looked like Star Wars. My favorite cartoon for a while was G-Force because 7-Zark-7 looked a bit like R2D2. Again, many figures were lost, but I still have Han and a bounty hunter to go along with my new(er) Han and a bounty hunter. 

In 1983 I went berzerk over baseball cards. To try to steer me into something more sensible, my mother gave me her old coin collection. It worked for a few years, but by '86 I was lost to cardboard again. I still  really love old coins though. My cat was actually named after this coin here. 

Stamps. For a brief and crazy period I became obsessed with stamps. I am generally ashamed of and regret this wild behavior today. There is one quirky habit I still have today thanks to stamps. When I get a letter with an actual stamp on it, I instinctively rip off the stamp and save it. You know, because it's so valuable. Here's a stamp of a guava that looks vaguely filthy.

Here is a book cover that is genuinely filthy. This book cover is pretty par for the course for the '70s though. I love love loved to read as a kid and picked up all sorts of crazy sci-fi and horror stuff. I picked this one out to show off on this post not for the cover but because this is genuinely a really good dystopian type sci-fi novel that no one has probably ever heard of. It's about the future (natch) where people get their brains put in jars and then they work out all their problems while existing only as a brain and then they reach Enlightenment and their brain gets put into an actual person and they live out their days in a peaceful utopia but the everyone feels sorry for the first person who was ever jarbrained because he is still a fucking mess after all these years so they let him have a body anyway and HIJINKS ENSUE! Lotta great old crappy books out there if you look!

I also love space, especially the space shuttle. I snagged this shuttle mission token on one of my many trips to the Kennedy Center or the Space Museum in Huntsville. The combo of coins + space was too much to resist.

Comics! I love comics. Not the spandex superhero type though. I liked the House of Mystery type horror comics and space comics and funny comics when I was a kid. When I hit High School I picked up a ton of cheap independent comics at the local comic shop. Most were oddball stuff but I managed to pick up quite a lot of Fantagraphics comics cheap including Love and Rockets, Peter Bagge's Hate and this #1 Lloyd Llewellyn by Daniel Clowes. This may very well be the greatest comic book cover of all time. There is probably a 50-50 shot I break down and do a comics Tumbler in the next calendar year. 

Can't forget the music! Ever since I got an Eddy Grant and a Men At Work cassette tape at K-Mart in 1982 I've been in love with music. I have boxes of cassettes, piles of CDs, folders full of MP3s and a couple of crates of LPs. Here is the most ridiculous and offensive album I own: a Bootleg of the Beatles in Hamburg entitled The Beatles vs the Third Reich. According to the back the audience responses to the Beatles' songs include "Seig Heil" "Your Papers, Please" and my favorite, "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Penis". 

In the '90s, Magic: the Gathering hit and I eventually got caught up in all the CCG stuff thanks to Decipher's Star Wars game. This was probably the first CCG guide I ever got, mainly just for the free Star Wars cards. I now have a pile of them I have no idea what to do with. 

Fast forward to present day and now I like ponies. Lord knows what the hell my basement is going to look like if I live another 40 years....