Top Hat Sasquatch

Hello, readers, and welcome to Presidential Madden, a little labor of love I cooked up in response to my declaration that Mitt Romney was 74 Overall. Before I actually go about listing the roster of Presidents and their respective ratings, I need to clear up a few things, namely, an introduction for myself and the ratings I will be using. 

I am John Risley, a twenty-seven-year-old Independent with Libertarian leanings. I was a History major in college, and have always loved the study. Since I vote Libertarian, you can be assured that I am not playing favorites with these Presidents based on my political leanings, as I would not have voted for any of them. Besides, there are plenty of good Presidents with bad ratings, and vice versa. It is important to remember that this will be hilarious and diverting, and you WILL disagree with many of the points presented, and the ratings attached to them.
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Calling all geeks! The awesome geeky website and friend of the ‘squatch, Strange Kids Club, is running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the printing of issue 3 of their Strange Kid Comix. There are just a few more days left and they need about $300 more bucks pledged or it won’t happen.

Besides the amazing cover by Jason Edmiston, this issue has content by a veritiable who’s who of geek bloggers, including our buddies Shawn Robare of Branded in the 80s and Brian Adams of Cool and Collected.

There are all kinds of awesome rewards for pledging, including back issues, a t-shirt, posters, animation cells, toys, and more. I highly recommend supporting these guys, their work is awesome and I really want this magazine!

Check out their Kickstarter page and help them reach their goal!

When I was a kid, one of the best things in the world was going to the mailbox to see if any of my mail-away offers had arrived. I saved my proofs-of-purchase, enclosed a self-addressed, stamped enveloped, and waited the requisite four-to-six weeks. It was such an incredible feeling to rip open a mailer and get the eagerly anticipated goodies.

You can get that same thrill with a new service called Loot Crate. You can sign up for a monthly package of geek and gamer goodies. You give them $13.37 (get it?) each month and they’ll send you a package of carefully selected video game-related stuff worth three times as much—over $40. There’s cool junk like snacks, gift cards, collectibles in each care package.

Not only that, but each month they pick one person to receive the Mega Crate, a special prize collection worth over $250. It’s like a lottery where everyone is a winner.

I was born in a time that has since become known as the “Dinosaur Renaissance”, a period that arguably began in 1975 when paleontologist Robert Bakker, the bearded, hippy-looking guy with the long hair and cowboy hat that we all know from PBS and the Discovery Channel, published an article in Scientific American that gave the era its name.   It was here that many people first heard about dinosaurs being far different from the way they had previously been portrayed – as large, sluggish, rather boring lizards.  Bakker and others like him posited that dinosaurs were in fact warm-blooded, social, vibrant, and voracious creatures that shared more characteristics with modern day birds than they did crocodiles and turtles.

Once dinosaurs became more than just over-sized iguanas, educational book publishers sat up and took notice.  Here was a way to make science cool again; probably for the first time since the space race.  So they started cranking out books for kids with garish, almost comic book-like covers of dinosaurs that were based on these newly-presented ideas.  It worked.  And as a kid born the same year “Dinosaur Renaissance” was published, my early childhood was inundated with books, toys, cartoons, games, and everything else imaginable that starred these “terrible lizards”.
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Now that I finally updated my Mac to Mountain Lion and got my POS scanner working, I thought it would a perfect time to introduce a new series on the ‘squatch: Action Figure Cards. 80s and 90s packaging in general gets me super nostalgic, and that definitely goes double for action figures.

As you can probably guess, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures had my favorite card designs. The first one I grabbed off my stack is from one of my favorite TMNT villain figures: Super Shredder. Super Shredder briefly appeared in TMNT II: Secret of the Ooze after Regular-Type Shredder™ made a bad life decision and chugged a canister of ooze.

He looked badass in the movie and as a kid I lamented the fact that he only existed as Super Shredder for a couple of minutes. Luckily, they made him into an action figure.
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