Goodbye 2025!

Well, I'm ready to close the book on 2025.

At least my December went better than the one last year. Car is intact, nobody got hurt, I fought off the sniffles a few times, but I'm pretty much okay. I'm gonna miss this year. The number, that is. I like it when things are in multiples of five. After that, the math gets trickier.

Without further adieu, one last entry to close out the year:

I had the Grinch fries from McDonalds!

The special "Grinch Salt" was McDs attempt to get in on the pickle craze that took the fast food industry by storm this past year. The dust tasted pretty good, but once it got on your hands, it took forever to get it off.

Here's the box it came in.

And the socks that came with the meal. I got the blue ones! They came in four colors: blue, green, red, and yellow. At least I got one of the colors I wanted. I would've loved green, but blue goes with a lot of what I wear. And at least I didn't get the yellow ones.

And it snowed not once

But twice this month! 

We didn't have a white Christmas, but more of a white-adjacent Christmas. And thankfully neither time hit while I was at work and melted relatively quickly.

We also lost a few good people this month, like Rob Reiner and his wife.

Bob Burns, famous "monster kid", and "trainer" of Tracy the Gorilla from Filmation's Ghostbusters show.

Anthony Geary, who played Luke (of Luke & Laura) on General Hospital. But to me, he was Philo in UHF.

Betty Reid Soskin, the Country's Oldest Park Ranger

The woman who famously botched the restoration of that Jesus painting.

Jim Ward (Doug Dimmadome) 

and Jeff Garcia (Sheen from Jimmy Neutron) dying on the same day.

And what shocked me most of all, Adam The Woo.

I watched his videos all the time years ago, but sadly I hadn't kept track of him in a while. He just got back from Disneyland Paris and uploaded a video about his neighborhood the day before he passed, so this was a real sudden one.

I forgot if the Nickelodeon Studios video or the River Country one was the one I saw first, but I was hooked immediately.

He dared to go places where the rest of us wouldn't (or shouldn't) and ultimately got banned from the parks for it. Disney eventually lifted their ban, while Universal...did not. It's a trip reading that people watched him "when they were kids." Just speaks to how long Youtube's been around (turned 20 this year!), and how long Adam's been doing his thing. There's so many travel vloggers now, especially Disney ones. Frankly, they're all copying him, and I'd say a fair amount of them would say the same thing. Or at least admit to being inspired by him. He was just that good, and a unique voice has now left us.

I was hoping to meet him someday. But alas. No more daily uploads is what's getting to me most of all.

But on a different note: Christmas came just the same!

The tree! The ornaments were in a bit of a hodgepodge this year (it was mostly put up by the time I got home from work one day), but you gotta admit it's charming as hell. There really is nothing like a lit Christmas tree at bedtime on Christmas Eve.

Besides the requisite gift cards and new barbecue sauce from my favorite local place (seen in just about every other Christmas entry), my main gift this year were new portfolio books! Perfect for someone who goes to a lot of conventions. I recently started investing in 5x7 books too, since I've picked up a lot of smaller prints and art pieces over the years and the first book filled up as soon as I got it.

I'm 38 and have no immediate family left besides my parents. I don't ask for much anymore. Leftover Christmas money went to new work clothes and shoes. If anything, my dad was the one that made out like a bandit this year, getting lots of new shirts and a new pair of glasses.

My annual advent calendar of scratchers netted me thirteen bucks and a free Take Five ticket this year.

I did, however, get an Amazon gift card and immediately spent it on getting this Solus Prime figure. The Transformers sets that haven't been geared towards the little kids have had some pretty good releases, with the Age of The Primes line releasing figures of the Thirteen Primes for the first time. I already have Micronus Prime and Megatronus Prime, and I'm waiting on finding a good price on Alpha Trion (who for once finally got a figure that looks like how he did in the G1 Cartoon) before I bite the bullet on that one. My shelves are too full of Funko Pops or else I'd be investing more into these toys. 

Mattel's been finally playing nice and allowing Hot Wheels and MOTU collabs. These two were, uh, a bit pricier than I was expecting but I was NOT gonna let them slip through my fingers.

I've had Legends Z-A since it came out, but I bought the DLC on Christmas with the Nintendo gift card I was gifted. Naturally, it's dominating what spare time I have. Was $30 a bit too much for glorified time trials? Maybe, but it got me the shiny charm not fifteen minutes into playing it, and that's worth it in my book.

And I KNEW that there was a new Christmas Vacation themed chocolate bar this year, but it was never put on the shelf at my job for whatever reason. And I bet the reason wasn't good, so I didn't buy it.

For the best, really. I never got around to eating the one I got last year. There was no expiration date on it, but I wouldn't trust anything I hadn't opened from Last Christmas to begin with.

As for New Year's plans? For once, I actually got started on this blog entry early this time, because I am NOT spending another NYE trying to bang out an entry before the ball dropped.

And apparently they're gonna drop the ball twice this year, the second time to mark the 250th birthday of the USA. That totally doesn't sound like an omen at all.

Once again the Honeymooners marathon doesn't start til 12:30, but I at least have that to look forward to.

Until then, I'm gonna watch Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper get progressively drunker until the ball drops.

And I got New Years Sushi once again and got way stuffed. Not pictured: everything else I ate.

So what will 2026 bring? Well, hopefully something better. But the march of the passage of time is something I keep thinking about, and I don't like it.

If things go well, we'll be all back here ringing in 2027.

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Give Thanks, 2025

 I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. I did the same thing I usually did, watch the parade.

In a "striking while the iron is hot" way, the main event was K-Pop Demon Hunters. Wigs, balloons, fireworks, Ken Jeong as Bobby, all capped off with the singing voices of Huntr/x singing "Golden" in a prime spot in the parade, just before the Bluey balloon.

And again striking while the iron was hot, there was a Pop Mart float filled with, what else, Labubu.

Meanwhile it took 45 and 40 years, respectively for Pac-Man and Mario to get balloons. The latter is at least promoting the Super Mario Galaxy movie. I don't know how Bandai Namco got the scratch for Pac-Man, but there was a whole display for him in the Herald Square Macy's.

And Goldfish had the talk of the parade with this tiny float, life-sized for the little crackers.

And the Luffy balloon finally got a nice day to fly, since his last two appearances were ruined by high winds and rain.

And what was not on the bingo card but welcomed was a marching band tribute to Christmas Vacation.

All in all a pretty decent parade. Other highlights include Shaggy singing "It wasn't me" (appropriate for 11am on Thanksgiving morning), Busta Rhymes on the TMNT Float, Lil Jon on the Toys R Us Float, and Al Roker giving a golden ticket to se the Rockettes to a little girl...who already saw them the day before.

And just like last year, someone watching the parade recorded the whole thing.

Oh yeah, the week before I was in the city for Big Apple Con again and went to THAT Macy's all prepped for the parade.

Of course Santa doesn't arrive at that Macy's until after he shows up in the parade. Clever.

This year was the 99th parade, even though the parade's been going since 1924. They took two years off for World War II, otherwise there's been a parade every year, even 2020. Next year is number 100 and I bet there will be some great merch for it.

I mostly went to Big Apple Con this time for the very short window to finally meet Larry Lieber, Stan Lee's kid brother.

He's 94 and doesn't do many conventions. And the ones he does go to, he only goes for one day and for a few hours. He WAS at NYCC, but I missed him and I jumped at meeting hm this time.

He's a creator in his own right, co-creating Iron Man, Thor, and Ant-Man, and responsible for the Rawhide Kid comics, and the Spider-Man comic strip. He was there promoting his novel Chirps, about a parakeet that got superpowers.

It's not often these days to hear him speak at a panel, and he had some good stories to tell. Seeing Pinocchio at Radio City at a young age gave him his spark for creating.

I did find one of my ISOs for a good price, Spidey Super Stories #39. It's the first appearance of the Cosmic Cube (normies who only follow the MCU know it as the Tesseract or the Space Stone), but it's also the first appearance of something even better:

The Thanoscopter!

Now why does Thanos need his own helicopter, especially one with his own name on it? Who cares, really. It was all an excuse for him to lose the Cosmic Cube so it gets into the hands of a little boy.

Honestly, we wouldn't have even needed Endgame if Thanos was able to lose one of the damn macguffins this easily.

And here's one of the wilder books I found that day, but I didn't take it home because it was in poor shape and I didn't feel like paying twenty bucks for it.

Had the classic Charles Atlas ad on the back and everything, too.

I did some digging at what exactly SIR! magazine was, and...hoo boy. I stumbled upon the UK's version of Playboy. More for the risqué and bawdy articles, no one's really naked in these things. Unfortunately.

And the stores in this, especially that Tahiti one...well, let's just say they haven't aged well. I found an even wilder book behind it about war stories and that's even way more un-PC, even for this blog.

Before I digress even further, let's talk about the National Dog Show.

I'm starting to get good at picking the winners, this was like the third year in a row I guessed it right. I called that Soleil the Belgian Sheepdog was gonna win the moment in won for the herding group.

When you see the competition, it was fairly obvious. Baby Joe the Miniature Schnauzer was the only one I thought was gonna be close.

I mean, look at him. Now that's a dog right there.

And now here's the other highlights:

To quote Fred Willard from Best in Show: "and to think that in some countries these dogs are eaten."

And of course with Turkey Day comes the MST3K Turkey Day marathon. This year they added the Netflix episodes to the rotation, alternating a newer one with a classic. 

You know, with Twitch running a 24/7 MST3K channel, with the marathon running through the whole weekend now, it made this feel, I dunno, less special? But in any case, I was multitasking by watching it while watching TCM at the same time. In that pic was the classic Dr. Doolittle, but earlier in the day they showed something even more baffling:

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. It's the only movie Dr. Seuss made in his lifetime, and it goes without saying that it's super weird.

This movie is about a boy named Bart dreaming that his sadistic piano teacher Dr. Terwilliker (heh) will torture him and 499 little boys to play his giant piano to live out his weird musical fantasy.

The titular 5,000 fingers would play this monstrosity.

"Wouldn't it just sound crummy?" Well, this is a dream and the whole set was designed by Dr. Seuss, it's not meant to make any sense.

And of course it gets destroyed at the end. People had to physically build all of this, it was a miracle this movie got made in the first place.

It's probably best known for the roller skating twins that are conjoined by the beard.

Like I said, blame Dr. Seuss for all this.

You could say that I'm thankful for programmers for niche channels. Good to know that they're still out there.

But of course, I'm thankful for food.

Still just me and the parents, but it was a good meal.

And what else am I thankful for this year? The usual: my family, my health, the fact that I still have a job and a roof over my head. My friends, and of course, all of you, my readers. And hopefully I can keep doing this.

I'll see you all in December to close out 2025.

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