Like most men my age, I grew up playing with Transformers. I think these were perhaps the greatest toys ever, especially for a budding tech-geek like myself. You can imagine my dismay to find out that my parents casually discarded all of my old Transformers. They couldn’t even tell me if they sold them at a garage sale, donated them to Goodwill or just tossed them into a dumpster. Can you imagine? I spent so many fun-filled hours with those little guys and my parents didn’t even give it a second thought.

Live-Action Transformers?

Last summer I heard that they were making a live-action version of the Transformers. Naturally this piqued my interest, and I spent several hours scouring YouTube and Google for a glimpse of a $100 million hollywood CGI Transformer. Needless to say it is pretty cool (see teaser, trailer). I’m sure it will end up being a pretty lame movie because it is by Michael Bay, and while The Rock was pretty entertaining, I don’t think I can ever forgive him for Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, or Bad Boys II. So I am not holding my breath. I find that when I set my expectations low for films like this, they generally get exceeded.

Anyway, the point of this topic was not really to opine on the Transformers movie, it was to talk about the wonders of my very own in-house Transformer, Jackie & the baby (as an aside, this reminds me that if I’m going to blog about this and we’re not going to find out the gender, we should probably come up with a better code-name than “baby”). Really, if you think about it, I have two Transformers living in my house! Not to get too overly geeky, but the closest Transformers analogy would be Soundwave–he’s represented by the animated GIF above on the far left. Soundwave was a boom box. How that made sense to wage battle against the Autobots by posing as a boom box, I’m not quite sure.  The cool thing about Soudwave, though, was that he had cassettes–yes, that’s right, magnetic analog audio tapes–that also transformed into some sort of vicious bird. Right? So, you see where I’m going with this now? Jackie’s a boom box/robot, and the baby is a cassette tape/vicious bird. I wonder what Freud would have to say about that.

Okay. Truth be told, this whole thing has been a mildly entertaining and ill-conceived ruse to show off my very own animated GIF of Jackie transforming… get it?