Sometimes, I Have No Clue

I was going to get so much done this weekend, then WHAM - hello, migraine. And not some crawl-in-the-basement-and-sleep-for-three-hours one, either. This sucker lingered.

On top of that, the Vita was sick, too, so at one point during my extended weekend I was outside, nauseous, shambling around in the rain, waiting for her to lose her lunch as well.

So, instead of getting caught up, I am now even further behind. No long, lovingly researched post for you!

Instead, here’s a picture of some oddity I picked up at Model Horse Congress back in 1985 or 1986:

I think he’s a cull, but I’m not entirely sure. (His condition is a little rougher than the photo lets on.) Breyer had stopped using the pinto mask on the Western Horse about 10 years earlier, and it would be a few more before they’d pull it out again for the Chestnut Pinto Just About Horses Special in 1990. So he might actually have been a test for … something else? I knew he wasn’t that old, because his color was not dissimilar to the acidic yellow palominos Breyer was cranking out at the time. 

The reins are obviously not original, but I can’t recall if the saddle was. I honestly can’t remember. That was when I was just starting to hit the flea markets pretty seriously, and Western Horses and Ponies were still fairly plentiful, if not in the best condition. Sometimes I’d buy something just to salvage the reins or saddle from it.

(People were a little less particular about the bodies they were willing to customize back then, too. Partly out of necessity, partly out of youthful exuberance.)

I’m also almost certain that the eyes and hooves were touched up later, too, but I never bothered to "fix" them because I couldn’t be 100 percent sure that they weren’t. Plus, I just couldn’t bear the thought of having an unfinished model standing on my shelves.

I’ve since gotten over that sentiment. This weird old boy's been grandfathered in, though. Sometimes it's best to leave some mysteries to be. 

More Housecleaning

Time for a little housecleaning.

I had to pitch a couple of bodies in the trash yesterday. I hate to throw out anything, but it wasn’t a total loss: I did learn a lot from my experimentations. That’s sort of the whole point of experimenting, right? You’re not going to learn anything if you don’t open yourself up to the possibility of failing.

My "October Surprise" has nothing to do with the Passage to the Pacific thing. Y’all realize I live in Michigan and, by the conventional standards of measure, am poor? And that I just laid out a fair bit of change to get my car repaired?

There’s a photo of the event horse "Like Thunder" on the Breyer web site now, and it’s quite nice. Unlike a lot of the kvetchers, though, I prefer the Rejoice mold to the Clock Saddlebred. It’s still not going to motivate me to buy a ticket at the last minute. I need more horses going out, not coming in.

Speaking of, I managed to avoid the charms of that pretty Bear at Tuesday Morning this week. Whew.

Looks like the Gloss Zenyatta Foals may be sold out; if so, they went a little quicker than I expected, but I also suspect some speculating going on. I already see it on the Mid-States Specials, which I find a little strange. I know Roxy’s popularity’s been on the rise - especially with the new mane she got at BreyerFest - but the Mid-States SRs have typically averaged around 3000 pieces, more than enough to go around.

My Harlequin (whom I have dubbed "Mista J") arrived a couple of days ago, and (being the contrarian, again) I am actually rather unimpressed with him:

His hooves aren’t black, and the spots are, frankly, a little weird and unrandom. The speckling in his gray areas is untypical of vintage gray appaloosas, and dang it, his face isn’t bald enough.

The eyewhites bug me, too, but that's already been discussed.

He’s not going anywhere, though. I am not one of those people who joins clubs just to skim off any "good stuff".  Because it’s all good - chocolate is still chocolate, regardless of whether it’s Hershey or Callebaut.

(Reeves persons who might be reading: my consultation offer still stands.)

As an art historian (I have a degree, really I do!) I’ve been keeping up with the story of the "Flea Market" Renoir, which now appears to have been stolen:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/flea-market-renoir-was-allegedly-stolen-from-baltimore-museum-of-art/2012/09/27/193d6162-08bd-11e2-a10c-fa5a255a9258_story.html

Here’s a quote from the story linked above that piqued my interest:

The Virginia woman, who wants to remain anonymous, bought the landscape in 2010 for $7 in a box with a doll and a plastic cow. She stashed the box for nearly two years before her mother suggested that the painting might be a real Renoir.

Did you see that - and think what I was thinking? Was that a Breyer Cow in that box?

Dang. How come I’ve never found lost Impressionist masters at the bottom of my flea market box lots?

I can just imagine what would have happened, though, if I had bought said box home with me. Mom would have appropriated the painting - both the picture, and the frame being very much to her taste. I would have insisted on taking it to the DIA or DuMouchelles for an appraisal, then the whole "OMG it might have been stolen" part would have come out, and then Mom would be all ticked off at me because I couldn’t let a sleeping dog lie…

Still would have been worth the trouble, though. Seven dollars for a Breyer Cow - even a beat up, body quality Holstein - is a good price.

Elvis on my Mind

I took a couple weeks off from flea marketing; my heart wasn’t into it, and the weather was simply not to my liking. But I did go yesterday. And golly, look at what I found!

In glorious black velvet! Is this not one of the most awesome things ever? It’ll look perfect next to my vinyl upholstered horse head with the hand-cut fringe. (Not for sale either, ladies, at least not yet.)

I also bought a couple of china figurines - a pretty Roselane Sea Gull, and a scary-looking Pekingese of German origin that looks vaguely like Ernest Borgnine. Because, duh.

I do regret not buying a vintage fuzzy gray mohair men’s hat; ‘twas only five bucks, and made by Detroit’s legendary Henry the Hatter, but for  reasons unknown, I left it behind. Maybe because I figured that a Vegas/Rat Pack-themed BreyerFest is a very dim possibility, at best.

(Great. Now I’m thinking how sweet a Vegas-themed BreyerFest could be. Showgirls, playing cards, slot machines, neon, lounge singers, a Don Rickles impersonator going around and insulting the anatomy and finishwork of BNAs…)

There were quite a few horse-shaped objects to be had, most of them reasonably priced, but I decided to leave them all behind. I have quite enough to sell as it is, thank you, and that Bluegrass Bandit/Bear I saw at Tuesday Morning last week was weighing heavily on my mind. I was looking at my schedule the day before and noticed that I’ll be working just down the road from that particular store this week.

Depending on how the week goes, he might just be coming home with me after all.

Shopping Roundup

I suppose all - or most - of you have found out about the latest Special Run surprise - this one being a Gloss version of Zenyatta’s foal, available on her web site. As of my posting this, there still do appear to be some left out of the 500-piece run:

http://www.zenyattashop.com/breyer-zenyatta-foal.html

Like Pavlov’s dogs, I salivated right on cue and bought one, too. Dark, chocolately bays have been my weakness of late - and in gloss? I was doomed.

Speaking of shopping…

While I love road trips (I’ll be taking one very soon!) I don’t take much joy in day-to-day driving. Getting stuck in traffic jams makes me wish that automotive engineers would stop trying to coax more horsepower out of smaller engines and just devote their time to finally inventing teleportation technology, dangnabit.

I had to do way too much driving for work this week; the only thing that made it bearable was that it gave me a chance to go to stores in areas I would not normally travel to. I like to multitask, so getting a little research done on the way to or from work? Excellent.

The first store I got to hit this week was the Tractor Supply, to check out their holiday selections. Like last year, it’s all Regular Runs, Holiday merchandise, and possibly a smattering of farm store stuff (those trailer sets cobbled together from factory leftovers.) I did really dig the Holiday Horse "Buena Noche", but I’ll save my natterings about him for sometime closer to the holidays.

And I finally managed to get a really good look at the Padre there: I still don’t have a Spirit mold in my collection, and all the other releases in that mold have prices outside of my comfort zone. However, his HUGE ZOMBIE EYES scared me away. Reminded me of that one Adventure Time episode. You know the one (or should):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZdtZIuVzmE

I don’t want a scary-looking horse staring at me while I sleep, either.

While I certainly haven’t been to every Walmart within driving distance of my house, I’ve now been to enough to conclude (for now) that they are only a figment of the Internet. Then again, I didn't see of the Mesteno Mustang SRs in these parts, either, so maybe it’s just a regional thing. (Which doesn’t make a lick of sense to me, since Breyers sell really well everywhere else around here.)

Then, just today, I swung by one of my "local" Tuesday Mornings to check out their latest offerings. Some of them received a small (and unadvertised) shipment of Breyer stock, mostly (but not entirely) discontinued Elvis Collection merchandise.

This store had a couple of Kongs and a couple of Bears; I took a modest fancy in one of the Bears, but I managed to escape without him following me home.

I will admit, it was a close call: my other two Bluegrass Bandits have nonrealistic finishes, and the pretty mahogany undertones they put into what would have been an otherwise nondescript matte black paint job were …intriguing.

Nope. Can’t do it. Gotta save the cash for the road trip. (Yes, it’s model horse-related. And yes, it’s something you’ll all hear about, when it all shakes out. No joke guys, it’s big.)

Monsters, Monsters from the Id!

(Caution: This post was composed while being very light-headed from an epic nosebleed. Which is nothing serious, BTW, just a consequence of a childhood’s worth of bad allergies. It’s not my blood pressure. No, really, my blood pressure is actually low.)

(Oh. Reader discretion is advised.) 

My first reaction to the newest Premier Club release, Brishen, was "Wow, that’s a lot of hair. It’s like Othello and Ethereal had a freaky love child."

(Yes, I know they’re both stallion molds, dearies. That’s what the "freaky" is for.)

I don’t dislike it, not at all, but like a lot of folks I am a bit bummed that it’s yet another Big Hairy Stallion. Nothing wrong with Big Hairy Stallions, per se, but sometimes it feels like the gender diversity of Breyer molds is about equal to that of your average Smurf village.

At one point during the latest epic "future of the hobby" thread on Blab a few weeks ago, the observation that our Sire/Dam lists back in the old days were pretty heavy on the Sires, not so much on the Dams.

Horse-obsessed teen and pre-teen girls bragging about the breeding prowess of the multitude of stallions under their stable’s banner? Boy, mental health professionals could have mined those old newletters for a half-dozen research papers, at least.

Thus giving context to my second reaction to Brishen: "About the only think missing from this package is a unicorn’s horn and a pack of cigarettes".

I mean, really. Brishen is like the hobby’s id, made manifest. You know, just like in the movie Forbidden Planet. And not as scary. But the Monster from the Id in the movie was animated by someone from Disney, and Kathleen Moody did work for Disney at one point. So, draw from that whatever you will.

(Okay, that was weird. Even for me.)

Judging from the commentary I’ve seen on the Breyer web site, he seems to be going over fairly well with the same kinds of kids that populated the pages of The Model Horse Shower’s Journal back in the day. Except that most of those kids today like their Big Hairy Stallions with unicorn horns.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that either, but, you know…

(Now going upstairs for a glass of orange juice and a good night’s sleep.)

Crash and Burn

Wonderful. The computer crashed before I had a chance to save the post I was working on for today. Awesome. All that lovely nuance and carefully crafted wordsmithing is now just a pile of unrecoverable bits floating somewhere on the hard drive.

I did make good on my promise to sleep most of my day off away. Aside from the manic work schedule, I think a contracted a bit of whatever unpleasantness was floating around at work. Nothing particularly nasty, it just made me even more tired than I should have had any right to be.

My car was also sick this week, and that was something a little extra sleep couldn’t cure. It’s definitely an incentive to generate a little extra revenue; as long as ol’ Sherman can last another 4 to 6 months, that should be enough time to cultivate a decently-sized down payment - after I’ve finished paying off the bill to keep him running in the first place.

All these model horse commitments I’ve made aren’t going to help, either: aside from Harlequin, there’s also a Lionheart and a Gus on the way, not to mention any Web Specials or other nonsense coming at us over the next few months. (Outside of the Pinto Fury/Prancer, nothing on this year's Discontinue List is begging to be brought home. Thank goodness.)

Like the Mid-States Specials, for instance: a Bay Roan Roxy named "Constellation", and a cute dun Classic Warmblood Mare named "Fawn". Fortunately, there are no Mid-States stores nearby to tempt me. I’m too cheap, and a bit too lazy, to order them online.

(No, seriously. Don’t even think about offering a pick-up or a trade. No room. No money. Not happening.)

There was a bit of a stink on Blab about the fact that a couple of pieces from this year’s Breyerfest auction were rather obviously tests of these two gals. My first reaction was a bit of pride: my intuition about the auction pieces being more "actual test pieces" rather than "factory customs" was right.

My second reaction was Do you people not know what the term "test color" means? It means that they’re testing a color, which also means that they are considering it for production. You shouldn’t be surprised if it does turn up a few months (or years) from now. That is their actual and original function. The fact that they can use them to generate money for charity is just a nice bonus. 

I’d think that finding out your auction piece was a Test Run for an actual production piece would be a huge plus: instead of being some fancy, but ultimately meaningless factory custom, you’d actually have a piece of Breyer History. Like this fella:

Yeah, he’s beat up, dinged up, and on an unfashionable mold, but I wouldn’t trade him for something newer or fancier. He’s quite obviously the test color for the #819 Dan Patch, on the Pacer mold. Why would I?

Harlequin

Well, at least I was somewhere in the ballpark: the fourth Vintage Club release is a Proud Arabian Stallion in Gloss Gray Appaloosa, named Harlequin.

Not exactly what I was expecting, but still cool. And it does look like they absolutely nailed the color this time, with darker gray (not black) legs, and black hooves. The smaller, finer spotting the earliest Gray Appaloosas were known for is also present, a nicely observed point. I don’t have either of the Old Molds (ha!) but I do have a Fighting Stallion of the same vintage with those same sort of spots:

Isn’t he neat? Most Gray Appaloosa Fighters have bigger, sparser and more random spotting patterns, so when of my roommates at an earlier BreyerFest pulled him out of her sales stash, I just had to snag him. He was a little bit pricey (back when) but I thought then - and still do - that he was worth the splurge.

(BTW, it was one of my better roommate years - even if we did break a chair and wasted a lot of toothpaste. And the gossip that year! Good times!)

You see a lot of variation on that release’s paint job, but the fine speckling is definitely on the scarcer side. It’s not something you even see in any of the earliest Breyer ephemera, either, including the 1961 insert pages.

They did get one little detail on Harlequin wrong, though: he has eyewhites, and most Gray Appaloosas back then didn’t. They do show up from time to time - I’ve seen a couple of the Appaloosa Mustangs sporting ‘em - but it’s very unusual, and the prices I’ve seen on those pieces tend to reflect that.

(You know, Reeves, you could solve most of this little issues if you just put me on retainer. A conference call once a month and a test color or two a year? That’d work for me.)

But man, what is it with all of the snarky, backhanded dumping on the Salt and Pepper sets that’s cropping up in the online commentary all of a sudden? The reaction to the set was mostly positive when it came out, aside from the silly argument over color, but now the grouchiness is starting to dominate. Weird.

Must be the change of seasons; everyone at work was on the cranky side, too, even the usually more even-tempered folks. (Me? Too tired to muster up rage about anything. I am so looking forward to my day off on Saturday!)