Your five most involving childhood obsessions:

2. The Beatles/The Beach Boys/Rolling Stones "Start Me Up"/Billy Squier "Everybody Wants You"/Pete Seeger God Bless the Grass/Journey "Any Way You Want It"
3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/He-Man/Silverhawks/Inhumanoids/Centurions/basically any cartoon that was made to sell action figures, which I also was obsessed with.
4. Police Academy series/Mannequin/Who's That Girl/Small Wonder/Out of This World/Circle of Iron/Sword of the Valiant/Clash of the Titans/Nightmare on Elm Street/Friday the 13th etc etc etc.

Spencer is she still cute?

Title: Transformers
Log line: Giant robots are able to morph into cars, trucks and planes.
Writer: John Rogers
Agent: Martin Spencer of CAA
Buyer: DreamWorks and Paramount
Price: n/a
Genre: Action
Logged: 11/3/04
More: To be adapted from a story by Tom DeSanto, which was based on the toy line from Hasbro. Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, Tom DeSanto and Angry Films’ Don Murphy will produce. DreamWorks' Steven Spielberg will executive produce. Rights first acquired in June 2003. The project was then set up at DreamWorks in July 2004.

Not a goodies, the Goodies. As in yum yum.

encyclopedia brown
star wars
getting my foot stuck in trees somehow
getting my head stuck in stairrailings somehow
the cover of queen's news of the world (i remember this absolutely fascinating me when i was four or so).

it reminds me of the ADAM my aunt used to have (wait, she still has it!)

ihttp://www.cedmagic.com/tech-info/remote-control/coleco-joystick.jpg

oh oh oh oh:

6. Choose Your Own Adventure books

LEGO

Battle of the Planets/Star Wars

Coins with holes in the middle

Pretending to be a cat

dinosaurs
greek mythology
famous american inventors
peanuts
the atomic bomb

1. Johnny Cash - at four/five, I had Sun Sessions (first record bought) and there is a photo of me greedily hugging Live At San Quentin because it was given to me for Christmas that year. I used to write him letters and drew on the postage instead of buying a stamp.

2. HORSES. Prohibited by doctors from riding, I instead followed Triple Crown racing, collected Breyer models and caned Walter Farley/Marguerite Henry/Anna Sewell. My damn dad had also left us to go look after saddle horses for showjumping friends so when we did see him it was FARM! HORSIES! If you LOVED me you'd BUY one! Horse drawing contests every fucking day in second and third grade (I won a statewide art thing with a horse drawn when I was 10).

3. Little House: entire class of girls built forts in woods, traded virtual horses for 'currency', bought sunbonnets and lunch pails at Fort Snelling (class trip place where every day is 1825) and there was even a rush to acquire Empire-waisted muslin girl's dresses. Plaits/French plaits a must. Went trick-or-treating with best friend as Laura Ingalls, me as Nellie Oleson. Can sill do a reasonable "Pa! Pa! I'm BLIND, Pa!"

4. Anything medical. Planned to be a doctor and cure cancer. Read medical books for idle pleasure from about the age of six.

These will have to tie for fifth:

Rabbits/Watership Down. It's basically Tolkein for people who care little for elves and shit. Had rabbit, Muggs, who could be trained to ride on my sledge in winter and in bike basket in summer.

Mythology. Greek, Roman and Egyptian, later very useful for correcting teachers being sloppy with Odyssey.

Religion: never had one and went shopping for God information at various services attended by families of friends, even the Jesus freaks a few doors down who my mom thought were in a cult. Told Christian Scientists I was going to med school (I was).

Witches: thank you, Elizabeth Montgomery. Decided to check out Wiccan books from library at 10 when friend's church group leader started giving the class a bit of Satan talk (not the hands-in-the-air Jesus People, these were Free Evangelicals). Formed coven for about six weeks with recruits from church group.

Ghosts. Wished we lived in haunted house with nice ghost gifted in the intelligent conversation department.

The books I remember being most obsessed with were by Susan Cooper - Mum thinks it's hilarious that on one holiday I spent a very sunny fortnight holed up in the caravan with all of the Dark Is Rising Sequence. Hmm, do you see what they've done with the covers?http://www.thelostland.com/overpuff.jpg vs http://www.thelostland.com/over.jpg

1. microwaving dough

Not only do I know what you're talking about, I probably read every single one of those Sunfire romances! The really bad thing is, early this summer I saw a huge lot of them for sale really cheap on ebay and in a fit of nostalgia decided to bid on it. Now I have a huge stack of them sitting on my bookshelf and I feel very silly. If anyone wants one, I'd be happy to send them off.

YES YES YES!

i loved those. aside from the titanic, the others i remember were about the great depression - one featured a girl who went from oklahoma or wherever to hollywood and became a movie star, and another one was about a girl whose wealthy family lost everything in the stock market crash. the stress was so awful that her father had a stroke, further complicating their poverty.

what about the CHEERLEADERS series?

I somehow missed out on the Sunfire books but was a big VC Andrews fan.

what else did I like? hmm purple, stickers (loved the pickle and grass scratch & sniff), records, heavy metal magazines, playing school.

Creating elaborate rollercoasters out of building blocks and hotwheels track for marbles to roll around on.

Setting up war scenes with those plastic green army guys, especially putting them in a fake fireplace to pretend that they were getting burned alive.

Drawing designs for "traps" where say a rollercoaster would suddenly go through a trapdoor and all the riders whould have to jump out before it crashed and make their way through an elaborate maze of torture to win a bunch of money.

Playing dj/singing along with my dad's and sisters' records.

runner up: my carpentry set

Horses

Reading - in 3rd grade I decided I would read every book in the town library and got very obsessive about it. Also, Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, and the Happy Hollisters.

Bobby Sherman (Mr. Jaq thinks this is "cute" and has given me quite a collection of albums and singles in picture sleeves of Mr. Sherman in his black leather pants, adorable hair in his eyes and pouty lips. I'm over it now.)

totally. when I was in Seattle last I went to the U. of Washington bookstore specifically to revisit the shelf where I first found his books, but they had - boo - remodeled the interior, depriving me of the experience.

the trampoline. Loved that thing. Spent forever trying to train myself out of the fear of doing somersaults. Got there for a while, then sprained my neck in gymnastics when 14, and got the Fear again.

I've got medals and shit for trampolining. I competed at national level! The thought of doing backwards somersaults fears and amazes me now, yet I could tuck and pike, forwards and backwards, with the best of them once.

2. occult stuff - Tarot cards, astrology, witchcraft, etc.

3. my numerous childhood fears, most notably robots, quicksand and dinosaurs (all of which roamed free in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin...)

4. ballet and anything dance-related.

5. reading - it started with the Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames books in the attic, then moved on to Choose Your Own Adventures, VC Andrews, Stephen King, and from there to this ridiculous booklust for numerous subjects, both fiction and non

Prince: circa Purple Rain
Running as fat as I could in the field behind our house (I think it might've been Olympic training)
Lego (especially space station ones)
My older sister's Judy Blume books
Cutting / pasting pictures out of magazines (don't dare call it scrapbooking!)

Baseball: Either playing or listening to games on the radio during the Yastrzemski / Mantle years. Baseball cards were pretty big stuff. The duds went to my bike, clipped to the fenders with clothespins to rub against the spokes making motorcycle sounds.

Da Beatles

Snow forts, sledding, skating and the wintry stuff. Not shoveling though, unless it meant a day off from school.

Lee Cailler, Leslie Smith, Nanette Elliot, Nancy Bartlett, Nancy Thomas. I guess I knew there was something going on , but damned if I knew what.

HELL YES THANKS was the obvious reply. So she totally bought it for me. How cool.

I don't know if Remy still reads ILE (?) but he should really try SCUBA diving.

I used to play Monkey with my friends as well. We always fought over who would be get to be Monkey. I often ended up as Sandy, which is interesting as the Sandy side of my personality seems to be the dominant one.

classy.

1. my society of MARBLES and their very intricate friendship networks and coolness heirarchies!
2. gouging skin off my arms and legs to make SCABS! to the point of staging "accidental" falls in front of my parents so as to blame the scabs on that (don't think it worked)
3. climbing my favourite TREE and all it's associated pretend scenarios
4. JESUS/ THE BIBLE including secretly delivering my secret homemade evangelical pamphlets to neighbouring letterboxes on my bike
5. RUNNING

2: Batman: is a reasonable and unorphaned childhood the only thing preventing me from being you?

3: The end of the world and its imminence and how it probably won't be anything like Gamma World.

4: What is this berry/leaf/piece of bark and is it edible and could I live off of it after a nuclear war (cf. #3)?

5: Taking things apart and/or throwing vacuum tubes at things so they pop and/or breaking rocks with other rocks.

(I wrote this before looking for my old answer; the rocks and end of the world overlap.)

The following are my "five most involving childhood obsessions", inspired by a thread on That Forum. This is what I'd post on it if I still wanted to post there:

1. The '60s. Everything from that decade pop-culture wise. It was from listening to my parents' oldies radio selections, but ooh. Loved the rock music from that decade. I was aware of the Beatles/Stones rivalry and had my own stake in it (I was a Stones girl all the way). I also loved The Doors and first became aware of my attraction to the opposite sex when I heard Jim Morrison's voice. And I suspect I liked a lot of psychedelic music because of the way it made me feel when I listened to it (not by accident but by design, I'm sure), but at the time I was unaware of the chemicals behind the music. Now I'm totally, like, "EW, the SIXTIES?? Are you KIDDING me??"

2. The Weather Channel. And meteorology in general. I tried to pretend to be an on-air meteorologist whenever the "local at the 8s" came on and would read what the screen said in my most authoritative voice. I think I still know the difference between low-pressure and high-pressure systems. I also kept track of the most minor tropical depressions, learned what made a depression into a tropical storm, and a TS into a hurricane, and other things. That was one of the things I wanted to be when I was small: a meteorologist.

3. Another thing I wanted to be was a pharmacist. I would read up on a used copy of the PDR I acquired from my doctor aunt. I stared at the pills and read what they did. My parents always had to take a copious amount of prescription medication, so I would always ask them what they were taking and what it did. I've totally lost all of my old knowledge in this field, though. Sad to say, because that could be really useful these days.

4. Robert Cormier. I didn't read much in the way of fantasy books, but I did enjoy fiction that had some basis in reality, and you really couldn't ask for much more reality than Cormier. Looking back at it, I can't believe that I as a little girl made it through Fade with its accounts of pedophilia and incest, but I guess this was okay with me because I was always exposed to more grown-up forms of entertainment and so this kind of thing wouldn't have been too shocking for me.

My mom was very strict with me, but she took me to see all kinds of movies. I remember watching Wall Street and Hannah and Her Sisters before I was ten. And Fatal Attraction, too. I didn't go to see very many children's films, come to think of it. (Though I did get to see E.T. and Labyrinth many times.) I suspect this is the reason why I hate animation as a rule.

5. PBS programs. At first these were just limited to the children's programming lineup (well, "just"), but then I got to where I'd watch anything PBS put on throughout the day -- when I was off on breaks, that is. This was back during the GED telecourse heyday, so I would watch a lot of telecourses. There was this one I was particularly involved in that played out kinda like a light drama. A man who worked as a writer lived in an apartment complex where a recent immigrant to the U.S. also lived. She spoke with some kind of European accent and worked at a department store as a clerk-type person. She would regularly go to this writer's apartment and ask him to help her out with reports she had to type out, and he would teach her the rules of English grammar and syntax. This was my first experience with 'shipping, too, as I really wanted those two to get together. (And if you have any idea what that program was called, I'd sure appreciate you telling me.)

Actually, come to think of it, it was my love of PBS that got me into British comedy in the first place. I saw these little promos for Monty Python on a PBS affiliate in the late '80s and remember laughing so hard at what I was watching, so I stayed up super-late (for me anyway) to watch an episode of it and became hooked. So hey, connection. Oh, and my "I hate animation" rule was excepted whenever Sesame Street aired animation. I liked THAT.

Ah, how all of this took me back.

Editing this to add:

Fear of being kidnapped and murdered. I read someone mention this and thought, oh yes, I definitely remember this fear. Though thankfully at the time I was most especially fearful I lived in a house I was convinced was inhabited by ghosts, and I felt very strongly that those ghosts were protective ones who wouldn't let harm visit any of us.

National news broadcasts. I think this led to the above, really. I remember being a small child and having my first news-related experience be that of confusing Ronald Reagan with Donald Regan. And I heard about Edwin Muskie and Alexander Haig and Oliver North and William Westmoreland and so many other Big News Names From The Eighties.

The LIBRARY. Oh how I loved libraries. I visited one at least once a week and my little library cards always got well used. I'm still more at home in a library than I am in a department store.

Oh and Trayce: here's the YouTube link to that Butterfly Ball song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og-sZ8jvdfQ

Your childhood sounds a lot like my thirties. Maybe I'll get into string next.

Vegemite: I was into the markers too, just not as much as the Scratch-n-Sniff stickers, cause ... well, they didn't have a Fried Chicken marker.