BUGGY

Your Humble Narrator has never been much of a toy car guy. Certainly I owned a few toy cars as a kid, but they were mostly fodder; their usual role was to be stomped or otherwise menaced by rampant dinosaurs or space monsters. Cars racing, or crashing in demolition derbies, held little appeal for me, though I had plenty of friends who regarded this as the highest form of play.

But at a vendor’s event last March I happened upon a fellow selling Hot Wheels, hundreds of them, in a startling variety of fanciful makes and models. I don’t remember having Hot Wheels cars as a kid—to the extent I cared, I was a Matchbox man—but I spotted one among this guy’s wares that I had to own, paid him a buck, and now…

Monster-of-the-Week: …it’s this week’s honoree, the Eevil Weevil…

…a sort of cybernetic car-scorpion. I learn online that the design has been around since 1986, though the current coloration of the creature’s eyes suggest, if Shakespeare’s Iago is to be believed, that its sting is that of jealousy...