I have a 10-year-old brother

This is a good thing because he is a member of the LEGO Club. If it weren't for him, I'd have to join myself and that's an expense I can't afford right now ;) But I do love reading the catalogs. This most recent one excites me quite a bit because, in with the Bionicles and Harry Potter and the ever-evolving quirky business they come out with, I see some genuine old-school sets. And some new sets with a very "retro" feel to them. In fact, there's even an order form in the middle for ordering individual brick types in mass quantities. Old school indeed. Pure imagination, or recreation of simple every day objects. Thus is the imagination honed and sharpened without being overwhelmed. When one is building models of items that were created by someone else's imagination, and that habit an entirely other world, it is all too easy to let the imagination get caught up in the immense storytelling possibilities of the alternate universe. This is a great benefit and seems to be the focus of most recent LEGO sets. However, it does not hone the building creativity and design potential of the individual in the way that these sets used to do. It appears that they are still offering many of these old-fashioned, Earth-reality sets.

Also they have a scale model of the Death Star II. The work that goes into designing a LEGO set that is not a recreation of a finished project, but of an unfinished work-in-progress, girders protruding seemingly at random into Lucas' star-filled space...this is a mental feat of genius for which I must thank the people at LEGO.

AND they have a feature on their website where you can design your own set, brick by brick, and then have them actually build the set, package it, and ship it to your door to build in real life. It is a breakthrough of immense implications. If LEGO, after years of languishing in shallow, formulaic, consumer-driven entertainment has returned to its roots and then built mighty edifices of new product upon that old foundation, what other establishments of pop culture might follow similar trends? Television? Radio? Movies? Coffee shops? Rock 'n' Roll? Politics? Economics? Gas Prices?

Seriously, a look at the path of the LEGO mindset over the past twenty years parallels that of our culture as a whole over a slightly longer period. If the LEGO cycle doesn't match our culture's cycle perfectly, then I would say that is proof of the fact that all life follows cycles at least, whether they are the same cycle or not. And so our pop culture will cycle back where it belongs, passing through a narrow band of acceptability before plunging out of view like Halley's comet. If we are blessed like Mark Twain to see it twice in our lives, we should thank God and tell our kids.