The Luckiest Boy in Puppetland.

AGAIN, I have had the great fortune to be able to collaborate with Jeff Matz and Lure Design to help create the upcoming campaign for the 2012 Florida Film Festival. I'm the luckiest boy in Puppetland.

Cheap crap and Christmas.

When I was a kid, I loved dime store toys. I could go into a dime store on Allowance Day and spend every penny on crap -- cheap seductive beautiful crap that, if lucky, would make it all the way home before I had a chance to destroy it. Devil's Fingernails, Sheriff's Badges, Rubber Spiders, Atomic Water Pistols, and Smoking Monkeys were my treasures.

The chief marketing tool for this cheap crap was the header -- a colorfully printed folded piece of cardboard stapled to the polyethylene bag that held the object of my desire. I think in some cases the headers were more expensive to produce than the toy it was selling. The headers hung from pegs specifically adjusted to be at my eye level. I'll never forget the power of those simple folded pieces of cardboard.

My Christmas card this year was an homage to all that stuff that made me happy when I was a kid.

By the way, if you want to be added onto next year's XMAS card list, email me your address and I'll add you. I might come up with something worth keeping.

Too much time on things that don't matter.

So, I've been introduced to Tumblr. It's about time, eh? Although, I'm not sure if it has any value beyond being just an enormous time vacuum. The exposure one might get as a creator is defeated by the anonymousness of the venue. It's like having an art gallery where nothing can be purchased and there are no placards indicating who did the art. Good for the viewer, I suppose, but not so much for the people who make the stuff. We'll see...

Any way, here's a picture I did while I was playing around with my little ghostie. I combined my three favorite things: little ghosty, clouds and car crashes. Maybe not car crashes.