After we'd explored Palisades, we had about 4 hours to wander the Javitz floor before we had to meet SOTA, BanDai and Mattel in the toy buildings, and this year, Dan and I were determined to see as much or the random chaos as we possibly could. In pervious years, we'd wandered in a completely unmethodical, meandering path through the booths, zeroing in on anything with a superhero emblazoned upon it, often being disappointed when said item was some kind of mechanized and unnecessary lollipop holding device or kiddy chair, far too small for our large butts. This year, we zigzagged up and down the incredible multitude of aisles on one floor of the Javitz Center, where most of the more random action takes place.

In these four hours, we managed to cover about 75% of one of the smaller floors, walking straight past the booths upon booths of baby items, dolls and insubstantial trinkety things. Every so often, every 15 or 20 booths, something would be neat enough to catch our eye, and we'd explore.

If you've never been to ToyFair, let me explain the odd dynamic. Here are thousands of booths trying to promote their wares to you, but 95% of the visitors to the convention are distributors looking to stock their stores. The remaining five percent are the media, which is an outlet that the Fair is really not catered to. You'll introduce yourself as media to a booth and either the booth folks will be thrilled to interact with you and appreciate the potential press that you can grant them, or they'll be reluctant to waste their time on someone who won't be making them money directly. Sometimes, you'll be stuck halfway through a sales pitch involving wholesale prices and demographics and you'll have to stop the eager salesman or saleswoman and explain that you're really just there to see cool things to talk about in your webzine. This will either get a brighter smile, if the product is still relatively unknown, or a frown, if the product has any modicum of success.

Some salepeople are dressed like pirates, and some sleep their way through pretending to give a damn about you. One boisterous Russian man, who we'll get to later, challenged Dan to do 15 push-ups for 500 dollars, among about 5 other challenges that he randomly threw at us.

Overall, the experience is a very positive one, and you've never seen so many colors in your life. Thousands of brightly colored things amassing and converging into these strange myriads of colors never before created on this planet. I swear I saw the color florange.

The first booth that caught my eye was the Blobbiemorphers booth, since I have a certain soft spot for plush things, which will happen after you remain untouched by female hands for three years. I actually have a bed full of soft and bizarre dolls, I admit, because I'm a complete wuss, and I actually scored a date once by telling a girl that I slept with a plush Cthulhu. So, these, in their rainbow of colors and really genuinely cute forms, won me over. They're pretty similar in concept to those old Pokemon dolls in which one forced said creature's guts out through an open stomach cavity in a gory mess until, wait, no, it's a Pokeball! And maybe some candy! And now the Pokemon is magically inside it!

The show folks, being fresh and ready on this first official morning of the con, were kind enough to pose with their wares. The man on the left wore a t-shirt that declared that he was a 'Violet Sorcerer' or something such. This was based on the Blobbie Personality Test, presumably available on the website linked above, though I was unable to find it. I'd probably end up as an Indigo Artisan, who is sometimes a bit insecure but loves being creative and has supreme mastery over all living species of robot. I made that last part up. I admit to being very hesitant to wear a shirt that declared me to be a Violet Sorcerer though, lest I attract a certain demographic of Pink Explorers, if you know what I mean.

Look at them! They're adorable as all get out! GET OUT! I have an interest in the angelfish. The nautical theme would run crazy-rampant throughout the fair, me being instantly magnetized to ANYTHING with a subaquaeous octuped on it, as ridiculous as the item might be. How did squid replace superheroes in the course of a singular year? How did I lose an inch of my hairline? I think that the answer, my friends, lies in the same dark place.

The doll section of the fair is vast and encompasses a large chunk of the rows. Here's what most of it looks like, except multiplied by three million, nd maybe divided by 1/2. The math whizzes among you have already said, '... but that makes it more!'. Damned creepin' straight, man, and as aware of toys and subculture as I like to think I am, I just can't relate to large figures of elderly women.

Next, oh next. We came upon a small booth promoting the wonders of the nose flute, complete with a video demonstration by a guy named Dave who looked way too much like my ex-girlfriend's dad who ran away to Thailand to live with a prostitute.

After a bit of practice and a free nose flute for both of us, Dan and I were well on our way to becoming experts. Could a Nose Flute get me some action? Could a Nose Flute get me the exact opposite of action? Did I really want to continue gouging the sensitive meats of my nose to find out? The process involved an initially confusing combination of blowing outwards through the nose which NOT letting air escape from the mouth, while adjusting the open airspaces into musical notes, akin to whistling.

Further on in the musical instruments aisles were the Boomwhackers, which we've seen at past ToyFairs. Simply put, a series of color coded plastic tubes that emit different notes when boomwhacked. King Boomwhacker himself displayed non-functional, but very colorful, items for us.

Then, I went to pee. Trains, for some reason, either put me directly to sleep or cause me to really have to relieve myself. My excitement until this point had pretty well constricted any possible outlet, so I ventured fearlessly on. We happened to hit a bathroom at the end of an aisle, so I took advantage of it while Dan took a phone call regarding the possible sale of his scooter on his Dan Phone, which is like the Bat Phone, except it's not shaped like a bat, nor follows the sinewy contours of Dan's own lithe form.

When I got out, Dan was gently caressing a pole. Ferociously seizing every possible moment of my life, delayed by scooter-talk or not, I got a completely exclusive ANR photo op. You'll see this on no other toy site, I can almost maybe guarantee you.

[I peed in the vicinity of this sign]

Having sufficiently talked up his scooter to the potential buyer, and finding myself with an appreciable inner dryness, we trekked on, where I was yelled at for attempting to take a picture of a plush octopus. The denial of this photo would be a point of contention between the universe and I for the remainder of the Fair.

We came upon the first of many, many construction / building toys we'd see throughout the Fair. There was a very heavy push towards kids assembling things with unique parts with multiple uses and functions and colors and shapes and sizes. Maybe I'd just never noticed them before, but massive displays showcasing these construction toys in action en masse were everywhere, in every aisle, in nearly every category in the floor layout. Nine-foot tall bridges and 4-foot long sharks and stuff as such, all quickly responded to with my ubiquitous, "Yeah, but do you have any squid examples? Squidxamples please!" Perhaps these basic, creativity-driven toys are a reactionary thing against the TV Culture that the youth has been bred into, to stimulate the mind into being more active instead of these spongy masses that seem to occupy the cranial cavities of the kids we see clogging up the malls. Maybe I'm a bitter, aging hipster with an earring that's looking increasingly out of place and I rage with jealousy like rivers of magma beneath an active volcano, waiting to explode in a destructive myriad of ash and decapitated children at any moment.

Roger's Connection, which claimed to be the original magnetic stick 'n' ball building kit, was a simple and empty-looking booth which hadn't yet set up any large models. So, Dan and I each built something to spice up the bare tables at the request of the booth manager.

[Collin's creation belies my methodical, formulaic approach to construction, and furthermore, life. Notice the solid, triangular base form created with congruous colors, branching out into a series of unusual projections, reaching out into the universe and awkwardly asking 'why are we here?', much like the artist's own stumbling, doubtful existence. He added the singular branches after he saw that Dan's construction was cooler than his.]

[Dan's creation, complete with dangly parts, is like some thalidomide monstrosity of sensible mathematics and unfortunately, created a slowly expanding patch of antimatter in the corner of the Javitz Center. Watch for it approaching your house soon!]

We scored a sample pack of seven sticks and five balls each, as well as an extra for Dan's chick, with the promise that we'd be getting more to have fun with on the site in the coming months. These were a lot of fun to use, and employed larger parts than the rest of the magnetic toys we'd see later on, with pencil-thick sticks and, um... larger balls. Already, this early in the convention, the heaps of literature and freebies were accumulating and making the beginnings of a very nice bruise on my right shoulder

And then came Sideshow.