JabrWoky - Following the white rabbit since...

hot wheels

If there were a toy to top my Christmas wish list (if I had one!!) this would be it. The new H-Racer hydrogen fuel powered sportster is the toy equivalent of what would hopefully be a full-sized all green environmentally conscious car. Time magazine has ranked it as one of the best transportation inventions of 2006. And the Shanghai based Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies which makes the toy car describes it as the smallest and coolest hydrogen fuel cell car in the world. You can read more of its cool battery-less features and get to see a little demonstration video on the site.

The more important point is that in this environmentally challenged time we live in, this toy is a good starting point for parents to educate their kids about green awareness and pollution and all that bad stuff. It'll make a great toy that'll make them think about issues relating to gas consumption and why hydrogen fuel makes sense for the future. They'll probably ask a lot of questions. Why does this run on hydrogen? How does it work? Why not a battery?

So this christmas it'll be great if parents chucked the toy Hummer or videogame idea and got this car for their kids.

Gashapon

Gashapon is the craze that originated among the toy and anime crazy communities of Japan (and then trickled down the rest of South East Asia) where little plastic figurines of Japanese anime characters such as Naruto and Dragonball reside in tiny capsules, sold in a vending machine as commonly found as phone booths.

Its name is interestingly derived from Japanese onomatopoeia, from two sounds - gacha (the sound of the turning of the crank on the vending machine) and pon (the sound of the capsule falling into the receptible of the vending machine). It is also referred to as "trading toy".