Within the next week or so I should have a hobby-specific website up and running, news I expect some of you will greet like audience members during Oprah’s ‘favorite things’ episodes. Except your outpouring of emotion — the screaming and shaking and hysterical crying reminiscent of Muriel’s pre-breakfast rituals — won’t be because everyone’s getting a new car. It’s more that you’re sick to death of scrolling past nonsense about model houses or hand-painted miniature toilets again when there’s a whole wide world of Linda Lavin melodramas I’ve not yet reviewed.
The site will also cover Parkinsonian misadventures in painting (see: the permanent stain on the pants I’m currently wearing) and whether PD complicates building particular houses or LEGO sets. It won’t be as personal as this is and there probably won’t be much overlap between its readership and people who found me after searching for reviews of Goldie and Liza Together. But here we are for now, and look who washed ashore today: it’s possibly the partner of the elusive Captain Pete.
I say ‘possibly’ because a second model’s on the way that might make a better Basil.** After failing to identify suitable surrogates among the generic figures you can purchase in bulk for dioramas, I decided to scour free STL files — that’s a format for 3D printing — and order copies of my favorites. It’s an economical way of doing things: each figure only costs a few bucks to print. The one pictured above is so small (at 1:48 scale) that there’s not really anything to zoom in on; unpainted, it contains few details.
Finding Pete was easy but Basil’s more amorphous: he had a style all his own but donned social costumes as necessary to make his way through life. Of the hundreds of 3D male figures I’ve examined, only two have made the Basil shortlist so far (and I’ll show them side-by-side in 1:24 form once they’re both in my possession). A simultaneous search for figures to place in a film homage and mysterious TV project has been a spectacular failure. To animate my admittedly stupid I might commission renderings of the necessary characters.
During Crankenstein’s years of training, there was a fair amount of noxious resentment emanating from one of my sisters about whatever she imagined our lifestyle might become once the student loans were gone. I’m not sure what exotic luxuries she worried we might enjoy, but I doubt “Emailing photos of Mink Stole to a 3D artist to ask for an estimate” or “Searching high and low for a model 1959 Peugeot 403 Cabriolet to use in a Columbo diorama” were on the list.
* The ‘painting’ isn’t a painting. Those are brush-dabs to ditch excess paint, on a canvas from a dollar store three-pack instead of the usual paper towel.
** It’s doubtful that was his legal name, but he was a mess of class-conscious insecurities and youthful pretensions when he and Pete first met.