Legogal

Thanks for the article and photos....great stuff! Reminded me of BrickCon two years ago. It is great that you share with us your architect's eye for LEGO. Architecture is such a fantastic series of sets and a topic that interests most of us adults.

Thanks for the kind offer! PM-ed already. OTW's post reminds me an interesting point...this forum is built on the sharing of ideas, builds and trading. It is wonderful how folks try to help others by sharing. EB members do a wonderful job of helping each other. Thanks!

Fantastic review with incredible photos! Congratulations! This is even harder to do for a set you are not thrilled with. An excellent use of a review to tell the rest of us about the product. Does not matter whether or not we like the set; we just need to know the details of it, and you aced that objective. Thanks!

Yeah, I hear you! Trying to do the same here, too. I made my first trip this month to our LEGO store in Raleigh on Tuesday to see if they finally had a RI for me, and they did. Will save it for my granddaughter. I had planned to buy this years' holiday set and get the freebie set, but alas, they had run out of the gift. So I decided I can do without the Christmas set. It took them so long to sell me a RI and that I missed the promo set. So it must be time for me to cut back on LEGO purchases and focus more on saving for what could be a rocky retirement finance-wise if health and dental care costs don't level off. I think we have enough LEGO to last the rest of our lives, and it is time to play with what we have. It is a shame to have unopened sets sitting around for years unless they are duplicates that one intends to keep. Also when TLG decided to kill the holiday sale discount, it took away much of my desire to load up for the holidays. I doubt I am alone in this move toward spending less on toys.

This sounds like fun! I can't wait to play Duplo with my granddaughter! Congratulations, Grandma!

Yours was wonderful! Especially the lamp cord, arrow signs posted as artwork, dartboard, and all the little details. Keep up the great work!

I tend to recycle boxes unless it is a rare set like Marina Bay Sands or Duplo 2770. Then I try to collapse them into a smaller pile. I do keep all instructions including most of the multiple copies because it is a good way to keep a record of what you own; these stay dry inside the house in containers. So this just leaves the problem of small sets with no instructions and/or no boxes, which tend to get missed in my inventory. Most new sets are emptied into a baggy with the set number written on the outside and instructions inside until they is built. This makes it easy to store unbuilt sets in a large container saving a ton of space.

Hahaha! Great bus stop...very modern and sleek looking. Glad you found the lost seagull. (He must be exhausted flying from Denmark to Missouri.)

Yup, there is a green DUPLO vine running up one of the pieces! The creative use of pieces is outstanding here. It looks as if you reached into a bucket without looking, and picked out random pieces that somehow are a perfect fit. Everything looks so delicate and yet about ready to explode. Congratulations!

Great beginning for an airport... there were many little ones like this in the US until about 20 years ago. Now they mostly are quite large. Cool to use Grand Emporium parts as your starting point.

This baby needs an empty trail, a serious driver and a full tank of gas....badly! Congrats on one helluva truck!

It is a real challenge turning Creator sets into modulars that fit with ones collection. You have done an outstanding job of this! Many of us are still trying to figure out how to do this so that our old Creator sets look good on the same shelf as the modulars. Thanks for more fine builds and lots of ideas on how to combine the two lines.

These should make wonderful gifts to female friends who are thinking about getting into or are already into LEGO and their daughters. So grab a few if you can. What town are you in? I have not yet seen them in a TRU in NC. Hope they make it to TRU because our LEGO store sold out all fifteen or so within a few minutes after their arrival this morning and just before my call to reserve one 30 minutes after the store opened. The price you listed sounds reasonable with such high demand. Good luck!

I have noticed this in many of the LEGO books with a free minifig. And it is really prevalent in big box stores like Wal-Mart. As long as buyers are willing to pay high prices for certain rare figs, this will continue. I refuse to pay over $15. for any fig, and usually try to stay around $5 or less. This removes some of their opportunity to sell for high prices. Often the LEGO boxes have torn ends with holes large enough for fingers to take out whatever they want. Maybe we are moving towards the day of having to shrink wrap all LEGO merchandise. With all of the credit card program hackings at Home Depot, Target, Chase, etc., there is a huge opportunity for thieves to buy LEGO they sell with stolen credit card numbers. It could be that most of the LEGO sold online was obtained that way. All our cc's have just been changed for the third time in four months. And we just noticed some fraudulent purchases that began in January and repeated each month. Fortunately the amount was low, and we are not liable for it. Please carefully review your cc statements. This is getting quite old.

FINALLY I found a Target with CMF 12 for 2.99US instead of 3.99!!! Wooooohoooo! They only had half a box left, but three wizards and three princesses/queens ain't bad! Been looking in our Targets for months. Also had a $5 gift card from shopping there and the 5 percent discount for the Red Card, so they were CHEAP! Wish that more Targets stocked CMF's.

It feels like I am morphing into a crooked person the longer I look at this unbelievable creation! Congrats on making us feel so crooked!

infinityman, What a cool accelerator! I love accessories like that...forget the purses and other bling! Sarah, Like your examples of vignettes for RI Two. The dissections of animals is big in biology labs, so frogs and rabbits come to mind among other critters. (Sorry PETA folks.) The oceanologist could do things with LEGO fish, sharks, whittles, crabs, lobsters, coral, and other underwater plants. Would be great to hang her from above like she was suspended in the water. The physicist would be using some large machines like the above accelerator to test theories and of course the proverbial white board covered with long equations. A herpetologist studying snakes, etc, would also be a fun build. A microbiologist testing for Ebola would be timely for sure. A physician looking for a cure for dementia could use the bald and gray haired heads for subject seniors. The soil scientist with a scope trying to identify pathogens in dirt. The oenologist tasting barrels and bottles of wine, etc. And many, many more. Pull some new gal torsos out of the hat and let her rip! (I spent so much of my undergrad biology/chemistry time in labs that this is an easy assignment!)

Thanks for the lovely photos even if taken with your phone! They show so much of the exhibition that folks who could not be there can enjoy the art. Much of his work here was shown in NC a year ago at a the Graham Childrens' Museum with no admission free through a grant from an NC foundation. I thought the show was brilliant! It does belong in an Art Museum type of place because it appears to me to be art rather than LEGO. If you use LEGO as the frame of reference, you could miss much of the "art" value of the exhibit. Even if the admission fee had been 20US, it would have been worth it to me. And the drive of 45 minutes or so was easy at this end. No crowds and free parking next to the door was also big pluses. I spent about two hours just gazing and taking photos of the works. It helps to sit down and take a few minutes to think about the pieces during your visit so that the art does not overwhelm you. Whenever I began thinking of it as just "bricks," I tried to shift my focus back to art and how we view art in other museums. By doing this it was easier to compare his sculptures to that of other artists and to visualize his messages contained in each piece. Art can be a form of communication of how you view the world and how you make sense of what is what. And what represents what it is in your own view. It is different for everyone. No one sees a museum piece in the same way; it always is subjective. You cannot take yourself out of who you are and view anything without being influenced by your background and preferences. And if you have professional training in art or art appreciation, you will undoubtedly see things that the rest of us miss. On top of that, the amount of "fine" sculpture that you have viewed in person greatly affects how you rate an exhibit like this. (Of the many art museums I have visited, for some reason this exhibit pulled out of memory my love for the d'Orsay in Paris.) Sculpture can be very moving if we let it soak in slowly. Revisit your favorite sculptures if possible and see how they affect you many years after your first visit. Our individual preferences change over time as well. It surprises me how I now feel about sculptures I first viewed 40 years ago. What often seems to happen when I visit museums is that I get a quick glance of everything there, take photos of the ones I might like, and feel quite overwhelmed by all of it. While editing the photos a month or so after returning home, my perception of the art usually has changed quite a bit. Pieces that did not catch my eye while in the museum often jump out at me. It makes me very glad I took the effort to photograph so much during the visit. When reviewing the photos years later, other works become my favorites. Looking at your photos of Nathan's work a year after seeing them in person helps me see things I missed in person. As to the self promotion comments, it is necessary for artists to market themselves and their work these days because there is so much competition for entertainment spending. But I can agree that it can get tiring at times. Thanks again for the outstanding commentary and photos.

FINALLY found this set yesterday in Nashville while on a business trip. It was the last one at the store there. Phew! Just built it and love it. It does display better with larger plates; I am thinking of combining all three vignettes into a one plate build. This looks excellent! Thanks for the photos. Now we just need to keep the Research Institute line going with RI Two...maybe an oceanologist, zoologist, and physicist. Everyone in our family has a science degree, and we need to promote the study of science in a world where almost no one understands how anything remotely scientific operates.

The LEGO House is an abstract model and looks great built on the shelf. It will look even better with the new Billund Airport set. Thanks, LEGO!

WOW! Lovely rendition of a fabulous building! CONGRATULATIONS! All that is missing out front is the crowd of tourists....and the entertainers of all sorts; my favorite was the totally white mime. And standing inside the eerie afternoon light crawling through the tall stained glass windows while taking in the majesty of Our Lady. Fantastic build RE!

It seems that my many minifigs need a place to sleep at night. Could we have a few apartment buildings with more than two tiny apartments? There aren't even enough park benches for folks to sleep on, so let's push for some housing for our homeless minifigs. Isn't this what CITY should be all about?

Welcome, to the Dirty Club, oops, I mean "older than dirt club." It is a very exclusive place to be, so please enjoy the honor. Growing up in the US west in the Fifties, we played mostly with dirt, mud, sticks, and leftover wood. Had to stay outside most of the day back then when not in school. Moms would not let you play inside much. So the six of us built forts, quicksand pits, hanging posts for our dreaded next door neighbors, tomato slinging catapults for nailing the mean neighbors' white garage from a distance with ripe tomatoes from their garden, tent camps in the backyard, and whatever else we could dream up. My four brothers made play guns out of anything they could find. Toys? Not the store bought kind unless we earned the money mowing yards or babysitting the other neighbors' snotty kids. First time I saw LEGO was in 1973 in Fairbanks when my nine year old Austrian stepson came to live with us and brought a box. Never seen anything like that before. The start of my ruin...

I buy a ton of used or almost new Duplo off eBay and BL and second most of what was said above. Sometimes Craigslist has good bargains or rare finds because so many Duplo sets (like 4966 and 7225) were produced in low numbers many years ago and/or not sold in the US. New Duplo parts tend to be very pricy anywhere, but sometimes the used ones can be badly chewed up. If you cannot tell from the pictures in the listing, ask for more photos. And avoid most parts that have had daycare use. I build with the ones in decent condition and put the others in a container of damaged Duplo for my granddaughter to play with next year when she turns one. It is sad to waste new Duplo on a toddler if they like to chew on things, which most do. If she wants to play with my good bricks when she is older and can take care of them, that is fine. When buying anything on BL, i tend to scour the seller's Duplo listing for reasonably priced bricks because those in good condition can be quite rare; white bricks are a good example. Few are sold, and most are faded or damaged. Others have noted that many Duplo pieces are huge and expensive. Sometimes I pay as much as 8US for 4966 type playhouse roof pieces or large plates 8 x 16 in good condition. Often these are only available from sellers abroad, so the shipping costs can be enormous. If you really need some Duplo pieces, begin looking early for them as it can take a year to find some of the rarer ones. The supply in Europe tends to me much larger as much more Duplo has been sold there over a long period of time. Licensed set pieces can be especially expensive; I tend to avoid the figs from those sets because my builds resemble real neighborhoods and Batman looks out of place there. But they can be a good source of basic bricks on BL. Good luck collecting Duplo; feel free to message me if you are having problems finding a specific piece or set. I only buy Duplo, but spend a lot of time looking at what is available. Be aware that many "Duplo" listings on eBay and Craigslist may consist mostly of clone brands because sellers often don't know the differences in brands. I try to get partial refunds when this happens and donate the non-LEGO to charity.

Just picked up 11 of the 16 that I really wanted, and they look wonderful! The review was quite helpful because it is hard deciding which ones to get without that info. Thanks, Fangy! I am impressed with Series 12. Hard to choose a favorite. The princess and wizard are just lovely and easy to feel with their cone hats and large skirt pieces. Piggy and Mermaid have great designs and colors. I finally found these at TRU and received the Bricktober theatre as a bonus, so it was a good time to buy them even though the price went up from 2.99 to 3.99US. from earlier regular series figures.( Our Target still does not have them on the shelf.) The neatest thing about CMF's is that everyone seems to have different favorites and views of the figures, and this makes for interesting reading and increases building variety. And you can buy just the ones you want if you spend the time feeling the bags in the store. I am still a huge fan of CMF figs because you don't have to buy a set that you feel lukewarm about just to get so many figures you want.