Apologies to Jan & Dean.

We've carried Smurf items almost since we opened the proverbial doors here at Awesome Avenue.  A generation after their first introduction to the US people still seek them out.   We have a collection of Smurf Plush toys, Smurf Miniature Action figures, and a lunchbox.   Most recently we picked up the piece de resistance of smurf collectibles, the Smurf Mushroom house.  They're still made to exacting standards by Schleich.  Also check out our Smurf T-shirts.  The jailbird Smurf is my personal favorite.

As always, we offer free standard US shipping on the Smurfs.  Postmark; Smurf City.  Here at Awesome Avenue.

We're not really hard-core trekkies at Awesome Avenue, in fact the William Shatner Priceline ads are starting to irritate us.  No honest pop culture enthusiast or critic can deny the role that Star Trek has played in this society and others around the world since the show first aired on CBS back in the 60s.  Many of you will recall the show was not particularly successful at the time. 

Awesome Avenue has brought in some unique Star Trek merchandise.   We have a number of t-shirts.   Recently we brought in some items which you might call toys, or might think of as interesting desktop items.   We have a replica Communicator, a replica Phaser Gun, and a 40th Anniversary Commemorative Edition model Starship Enterprise made by the classic English scale model house, Corgi.  For the right enthusiast, or the right client, it certainly can make a handsome office decoration. 

Check out our website for full details on these and other Star Trek items.   As always, we only sell quality, officially licensed items here on Awesome Avenue.  We can't quite get these things to you at warp speed, but standard shipping is free and we can send things overnight at an extra charge.   Sorry, we don't beam merchandise.

We're probably the last people who should be making any comments on anything that has to do with the NCAA.   David follows tennis (just ask him about the US Open), and I follow baseball mostly (don't ask me about the Dodgers).   In fact, I can tell you more about baseball in Japan then I can about college sports.  

But it's not about us. Awesome Avenue has a number of retro-inspired college t-shirts from a few Big 10 and Pac 10 schools.  Hey, were in LA and the Rose Bowl is just over the horizon.  Check out our Michigan State and Ohio State T-shirts, as well as USC and UCLA-the local favorites.   The UCLA and Michigan State shirts aren't specific to any sport, so if ice hockey or track and field is your thing, they're not only stylin' but appropriate. 

As always, free shipping for standard service here on Awesome Avenue, and we can do overnight shipping at extra charge if you must have it by kickoff.

David, our founder and buyer for the store, was in Las Vegas earlier this week at the Project trade show.  It was very hot and smoke from the fires surrounding LA was visible in the air over the Valley of the Sun, some 200 miles away.  Some TV reports I saw had the smoke partially blocking out the sun as far as Denver.   Yesterday I was in Chinatown here in Los Angeles and 5pm looked like 7pm, as the smoke eclipsed the sun.

This posting will mostly have nothing to do with fashion, music or pop culture. It's about Labor Day  It's been interesting being in Los Angeles this past week, the dog days of August/first week of September, the scene was at times apocalyptic, as this time-lapse video clip shows.   This weekend, while many of us will enjoy a long weekend with BBQs, trips to the beach or lakes, many will toil in relative obscurity in shops, restaurants, hotels, gas stations, hospitals and airports to make our long weekend possible.  In this part of the country, the labor of a few truly make this weekend possible, and I think the television pictures over the last week make it clear who I am referring to.

Labor Day is about different things to different people.  I think this year it is about sacrifice and dedication, at least for us here at Awesome Avenue.

I was wandering in New York City with my mother last week.  Having finished an hour at the Guggenheim, where I think we were the only Americans, we walked down Madison Avenue for some lunch, taking note that there we were, in mid-August, 90 degrees out, and the store windows were showing winter wools.  So according to the fashion world, it may be 90, but it's fall. 

Another sign of fall is the that the NFL is in the news, and that pre-season games are on.   In the 1960s and 670s my parents had some of the first NY Jets season tickets at the old Shea Stadium, and we all remember Broadway Joe.   So naturally we couldn't resist bringing in some retro-NFL gear.   Check out our retro logo shirts from the Jets, Broncos, Patriots (who remembers when they were the "Boston" Patriots?), Giants and Falcons.   Can't forget the 49ers either.   Also check out our retro NFL Vibrating Football Tabletop game for those dull 1-2-3 punt moments.  Everything we have is retro-inspired and NFL licensed.  

This is our idea of fall colors at Awesome Avenue.   And we'll be here waiting for the Jets' quarterback to guarantee a win.  As always, we offer free US standard shipping, and if you need it in time for the game, we'll send it out overnight to you (at extra charge).

Last time I visited Mom in New York, we noticed that Martinson's Coffee was back on the supermarket shelves.    Martinson's was my grandmother's (her Mom's) favorite coffee brand when the old A&P stopped doing coffee right.  I noted that I had been buying Maxwell House again, and that it seemed that many of the old coffee brands were being brought back to compete with the various premium providers.   We both racked our brains for a few minutes trying to remember the old Maxwell House Slogan but could not, until we checked one of the new cans on the Supermarket shelf-and lo and behold-the old slogan was still being used, albeit less prominently; "good to the last drop".

Other products from those days, and even earlier, which had some memorable and long-lasting slogans were breakfast cereals.  Wheaties was "breakfast of champions", and of course Tony the Tiger was the face of Frosted Flakes.    It seems like today many of the cereals like to emphasize fiber content and their affect on cholesterol levels.   Are we that much more into health or are we just having less fun?  

At Awesome Avenue, we decided to do our part to make sure we're all still having fun.  Check out our retro-cereal logos and slogan t-shirts.   And as always, we offer free shipping to US destinations and APO addresses.

We were cruisin' through Silver Lake today checkin' out the scene, and could see the light towers of Dodger Stadium off in the not too distant distance.   The MLB All-Star Game takes place  tomorrow evening in St. Louis.   The All-American game will be played in a Stadium named for the Busch Family and now owned by a Belgian brewing firm.    Anyway, to me Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang will always be associated with baseball and I think the way we view the sport was changed by Charles Schulz.   CB on the mound, Schroeder behind the plate humming Beethoven and Snoopy catching a fly ball in his teeth.   Ichiro, Pujols, Chad B, and Mariano R got nothin on' them.  We even found a Portuguese version of a Charlie Brown Baseball Cartoon.   We had no idea this resonated even in the Mother Church of Soccer.

True to our form here at Awesome Avenue, we have a Charlie Brown baseball shirt.  Although we doubt Charles Schulz would have used quite this rendering in the Sunday Morning Comics, we like it.   So whether you're heading out the ballpark in St. Louis or to the bar to watch your game, you're sure to get noticed in this item.   

My mother always tells the story about how when I was 5 or 6 I made some remark about "the old days before television".  I don't know the context of the remark and I think even my mother has long forgotten why I said that, it's just one of those stories a mother tells about the days when her kids were saying cute things.  Over the weekend I read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, about how a teenager in Britain did not recognize an original Sony Walkman or be able to imagine what it was for.  Cassettes?  For music?  Some of our classic toys might fall into that category, like the Fisher Price Chatter Telephone.  A generation ago, it looked like many of the telephones in use, today, with all-cellphone homes increasing in number, might some small child today, upon receipt of this particular toy as a gift,  fail to recognize it as a phone?  

Two generations ago, nobody would dream of going outside without a hat.  My grandfather had a collection by the front door, and Grandma had a whole bunch of hat boxes in the attic.  Big, round things, which often dwarfed the hats themselves.   We have our own collection of hats and caps here at Awesome Avenue.   We have a bunch of baseball caps featuring classic brands such as Orange Crush, (don't forget the matching lunchbox!!) Miller High Life Beer and Ford Mustang, as well as a line of Fedora style hats from Penguin.  Fedoras have changed quite a bit over the past 100 years and started out as a women's fashion item.  The broad-brimmed style of the 1920s and 30s gave way to the more compact style of the 1950s and 60s, as men's jacket lapels, matching the narrower men's jacket lapels which became more popular during those years.   Our collection is a bit more Rat Pack than Capone.   As ol' blue eyes might have said "grab your coat, don't forget your hat, leave your worries on the doorstep, life can be so sweet on the sunny side of the street".   Stay cool, and enjoy the summer.  Check out our full collection of headgear by clicking here.

  While the discussion in the media is about Palm's new phone, the new I-phone, the Sony vs. WII battle, here at Awesome Avenue we have experienced a rise in demand for Rubik's Cube. 

For those of you who don't remember or weren't around in the heady days of the 80s when  legions of people with polo shirt collars turned up could be seen trying to solve the puzzle almost everywhere, Rubik's cube is named for its Hungarian inventor, Erno Rubik, who worked at the Academy of Applied Arts and Design in Budapest.  It was the sudoko of the time.

We know there is a TV ad out there for Sony PS3 featuring the Rubik's cube which may have caused this surge in demand.  Maybe it's going to be the party favor of choice at 4th of July BBQs this year.  A neighbor of mine is a developer for a video game firm, and I often see him wandering out of his apartment to the mailbox or something fixated on his own Rubik's cube.   Perhaps that says it all.  In this era of CGI and SPX, maybe simpler is better.

Check out our selection of Rubik's Cubes.  We have the classic cube, a pretty cool keychain, and the piece de resistance, Rubik's Revenge  and as always, free domestic standard US shipping on Awesome Avenue.