I should just stick to writing about sailing.
Santa has visited early this year, and has brought a Lego Advent calendar. There are 24 little numbered doors, each containing a dime bag of Legos. There’s a new toy or doodad to build every day, which, in turn, builds anticipation for Christmas.
I will build these and attempt to discern what they are.
December 8: Hearty Breakfast with an Obelisk
They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day*, and a balanced breakfast starts with a stack of pancakes the width of a table, a hot cup o’ joe, and a symbolic polyhedron. Therefore, we bring you Hearty Breakfast with an Obelisk.
Yes, I know it’s technically not an obelisk, but we’re using our imaginations here. Obviously.
Rating
Fun ★☆☆☆☆
Maybe Hearty Breakfast with an Obelisk would be fun for a filthy 19th-century child living in a well full of cholera in a ramshackle corner of London. Or maybe the thought of pancakes and coffee (tea?) and the looting of Egypt would be a stark reminder of his plight. Tough to say.
Ease of Build ★★★☆☆
Compared to the Pastry Altar, this was easy as flapjacks to build. It had the usual hurdles of the instructions being tiny and the concept being incomprehensible, but, speaking of comprehensibility:
Comprehensibility ★☆☆☆☆
What are these things? Seriously. Are we building a microscopic food court of desserts? Are these pancakes? I’m hanging on to pancakes because of the coffee cup, but I have no idea what the polyhedron represents. Jenn suggested that this was a layer cake with a slice of cake beside it, but there’s no slice taken out of the cake, and can you even see the layers of a layer cake if it has yet to be sliced? The layer cake hypothesis is supported by the red ornament on top, which is more of a flower than a random splash of red (that I was considering a strawberry under the pancake/obelisk hypothesis). The table also seems remarkably small compared to the coffee mug and the food, regardless of whether it’s pancakes or a layer cake. Maybe it’s a bench? But then…why?
Extra Parts ★★★★☆
This certainly does have a lot of extra parts: a light brown square, a white square, an additional red thing, and another medium polyhedron. This is enough parts to build a second slice of cake with a side of icing flower (cake hypothesis) or another partially-destroyed monument to the sun god Ra and a strawberry (pancake/obelisk hypothesis).
Overall ★★★★★
* Who are the “they” who keep saying that breakfast is the most important meal of the day? A cursory perusal of the world wide web points the blame at Adelle Davis, a 20th century nutritionist who apparently didn’t always back up her assertions with scientific evidence. While she did seem to get some things right, the 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health also said that she was “probably the single most harmful source of false nutritional information.” But since we’re all randomly speculating here, I’d like to blame C. Everette Koop. I have no idea what Koop actually did or didn’t do, but for some reason, he was (at the time) the only Surgeon General in the history of Surgeons General who anyone could name. I recall being wildly confused as to why he wore a military uniform, especially one that made him look more like the Generalissimo of a Latin American dictatorship. And wild confusion brings us back to the Lego Advent calendar, where things keep getting weirder with the addition of the Hearty Breakfast with an Obelisk.
