Baby, You Can Drive My Car

Since I’m short on time tonight, let’s resolve last week’s cliffhanger about the bubble-wrapped items that arrived in a box marked ‘fragile.’

Most of those bundles have been opened and as you can see, turning this into a not entirely horrible approximation of the potato truck from “Angels in Chains” will take quite an effort — and skills I don’t yet possess.

All the usual prep work will have to be done prior to assembly and painting, so that’ll keep me busy for a while. To assess my car-gluing and detailing abilities before embarking on anything that might screw up this custom print, I will — for the first time in 30 years — complete a cheap model car kit or two. They’ll probably end up in the trash bin, but practice makes perfect.

Before closing my laptop and turning in for the night, I’ll explain the predictably odd origins of the Tralizar Co. sign. You can trace it back to Felix, a prolific bestower of nicknames who was inspired by Iron Chef’s Masaharu Morimoto to create one of his all-time strangest for Molly, our family’s golden retriever. He called her ‘Moltralizarioto-san,’ sometimes shortened to a nonsensical ‘Moltrar,’ other times to ‘Tralizarioto-san.’

Sadly, we lost Molly around 20 years ago. When I wanted a production company sign to use in upcoming scale model vignettes, Tralizar was the first thing that sprung to mind. Which reminds me, I need to see if anyone makes 1:12 scale rubber chicken toys (it’ll be explained eventually) or if that should be added to poor Crankenstein’s list of things to sculpt out of polymer clay.

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