Those long-time readers might also recall that Ben had published a book back in 2005, titled Off the Top of My Head, which collected the columns he had written while working for the Katahdin Times in Maine. The book is still available in hardcover and paperback, starting at $20.99. But I recently commented to Ben that he should look into Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program as a way to bring the book to the Kindle platform, and he took my suggestion. The book became available tonight to Kindle users for just $4.99. And it is in the Kindle Lending Library so Amazon Prime customers can borrow it for free – though Ben could use the five bucks, so I hope you buy it if you like it.

Sure, he’s been my best friend since we met back in 1991, so I’m admittedly biased, but he’s a clever & witty writer and the columns are full of humor. And I feature in a few of the columns, when he’s relating tales of our misadventures.

Instead, the head office acquired this little gem: a Neuton CE 6.2 electric lawn mower.

Low Expectations

I was, I’ll confess, not sanguine about this. I’m of the generation that grew up knowing in our hearts that battery-powered versions of things customarily powered by gas engines (or mains electricity – cf. cordless drills) would forever be disappointing. They would also promise all kinds of cool freedom from starting rituals and/or umbilical connections, and they would always turn out to be pathetically underpowered, with no useful endurance, and thus they would actually waste more of our time and energy because we’d have to start out with them, then go get the real tools when they crapped out halfway through the job or simply proved unable to cope in the first place. This always happened and always would. This was simply understood.

But hey, the masters in the Big House paid 500 bucks for this thing, so I was obligated to give it a spin. I unpacked it from its shipping container (carefully saving the box and whatnot, as the instructions encourage, so that it’d be easy to send back when it failed to live up to even the most generous expectations), hooked the battery up to the charger, and left it overnight to gather its strength, then stepped forth the following morning prepared for disappointment.

Clever Design

My first inkling that I might like the beast came when I installed the battery, an operation which consisted of – I’m not kidding here – dropping it into a socket and turning a little plastic thumb-like device 90 degrees to steady it a little. Despite the fact that it’s a lead-acid battery – the same technology you’ll find under the hood of your car, unless you have a MINI Cooper S, in which case it’s in the trunk, or an original VW Beetle, in which case it’s under the back seat – there are no cables or terminals to screw around with and no tools required. It’s got contacts on the bottom of it that mate with contacts in the bottom of the place where it sits, just like a giant cellphone battery.

In fact, the whole design of the mower is like that – smooth, sleek, rather clever. It’s more like something you’d find in a kitchen than a piece of yard equipment. The only thing I’ve found on it so far that could be considered a design flaw is the socket that the little circuit-completing “safety key” device fits into – the contacts are a bit fragile and it’s easy to damage them by bunging the key in without knowing what you’re doing. (In fact, the mower comes with a piece of paper noting that they have been known to get damaged in shipping, though how that’s possible when they’re in a recessed socket inside the mower’s closed casing I don’t know.)

Apart from that, it’s all just… intuitive. There’s the key gizmo, there’s a three-position rocker switch that sets the operating mode (more on this in a moment), and there’s a deadman’s-handle squeeze affair at the top of the guide bar, which has a bit you have to slide sideways on purpose to get it to engaged… and that’s it. Those are the only electrical controls it has. In fact, it has only one other control, a four-position ride-height lever that works just like the one on a vacuum cleaner.

It’s also got three different ways of disposing of the cut grass: a side ejection chute, a bagger attachment, and something called a “mulching plug”, which looks like it just plugs up the hole where the chute or bagger would go and makes the grass recirculate back into the blade. I’m not a believer in baggers and our old mower has been fitted with a mulching blade forever, so I stuck the mulching plug in first thing. This may not have been my best plan, but we’ll see.

The Task at Hand

I should step back for a moment here and explain that there are three lawns here on the estate. There’s the one in front of my house, which is small and rectangular and has only one moderate slope, making it the easier of the three by far to mow. There’s the one out back of both houses, outside the fence we must, by law, have around our pool, which is large (the lawn, not the pool) and has some annoying cornery bits where trailers and fence angles have to be mown around, but is mostly rectangular and mostly flat. And there’s the one inside the fence, beside my house and in back of Mom’s, which is insanely shaped and studded with things that must be avoided, all on a 10-15° slope. I hate the inside lawn with an incandescent passion. One of these years I’m going to have the whole thing replaced with crushed rock while Mom and her husband are in Arizona. But I digress.

Shaves as Close as a Blade

For the Neuton’s first test, I decided to throw it an easy fastball over the plate and mow my own front lawn. It’s the smallest and simplest of the three and it’s generally the least shaggy. So I made sure the mulching plug was secure and out front we rolled.

As you might expect, starting the thing up is simplicity itself; you just flip the rocker switch from “off” to “mow”, slide the interlock you have to slide to make the deadman’s grip work, squeeze said grip, and voilà. And there’s another similarity the Neuton has to a vacuum cleaner: It sounds eerily like one. I suppose they both are, at heart, electric devices that spin a blade rapidly.

In retrospect, I think I may have made a serious error here, but I didn’t realize it until I was partway done and by then I was committed. I left the mower set on the height setting it shipped on – 1 – and pretty much scalped my lawn. I kept finding the thing impossible to push, lifting it up a tad to see what the problem was, and having it eject enormous wads of cut, but not particularly mulched, grass onto my shoes, I think simply because I was having it cut off too much in one pass – which should have been a clue, since the grass wasn’t crisis-level long to start with. When I was finished, the lawn looked like a Marine’s hair (except green). I’ve never seen it that short in my life.

Here’s the thing, though: despite being asked to cut more grass than it could mulch at walking speed, the mower itself never bogged down. I bogged down, as the grass built up at the back edge of the machine to the point where I couldn’t push it any more, but it kept whirring at full power the whole time. One of the, er, beloved hallmarks of our gas mower is that if it’s pushed into a particularly dense patch of longish grass, it will tend to stop running, and won’t start again until it’s dragged up onto the sidewalk and the top deck is banged on to release the grass. The only thing the Neuton seemed to care about was that the stuff was eventually piling up enough to interfere with the wheels. The blade did not, apparently, give a crap.

(So that’s my project for tomorrow – take it around back, set the ride height to something a little saner, say 3, and see how it does. And maybe put the ejector chute on, if it turns out the mulching plug just isn’t up to the job.)

It Does Tricks, Too

Or, well, a trick, but it’s a pretty good one. After I gave it its first test run and reported the mixed but surprising results (and my suspicion that most of the problems were because I wasn’t doing it right, see above), Mom remembered that she’d also bought the accessory pack. Most of the stuff in said pack is pretty mundane – its biggest-ticket item is a spare battery – but it does come with a Clever Attachment. This is another thing that reminds me of a kitchen appliance. I’m not used to yard tools with Clever Attachments.

In this case the Clever Attachment in question is a trimmer/edger gadget. Like the battery, this is dead simple to install – you just plug it into a little slot on the front left corner, where one of the headlights would be if it was a car, and away you go. No tools required.

The trimmer/edger is basically a string trimmer – a weed whacker – that mounts on the front of the mower instead of having to be wielded by a man with better biceps definition than I have. To use it, you flip the rocker switch on the mower to AUX, which diverts power away from the main motor and out to the trimmer socket, and then operate as before. Instead of mowing what’s under it, the mower will instead whack the hell out of whatever’s within a few inches of the left front corner. This is utterly handy for doing things like getting that grass that grows just under the edges of the raised timber boardwalk crossing part of my lawn, where the sun gets to it but the regular mower won’t reach. If you press a button on top of the Clever Attachment, it flips upright, which is supposedly good for edging, but since I don’t give a crap if the edges of the lawn are neat, I probably won’t use it much, if at all, in that mode.

In the interests of full disclose, you can also get a striping roller that attaches to the back of the mower, but since I care even less about giving the lawn that crosshatched Fenway Park look, I’m even less likely to ever use one of those. The head office didn’t buy one and I’m certainly not going to agitate for the purchase of a tool that would require me to make multiple passes over the same lawn in differerent directions just to make it look cute.

So… Is It Worth It?

Let me just say up front that I’m not much for ecological consciousness. I may have mentioned this before around here. I like cars that burn gasoline and I do not lie awake at night reproaching myself for my colossal American carbon footprint. So I’m not particularly interested in whether the Neuton is going to Save the Planet or anything like that, which happens to be one of the selling points the manufacturer really leans on.

However. I have no sentimental attachment to lawn mowers that burn gasoline; in fact, I hate them. They’re loud, they make me smell like I’ve been hanging onto the back of a bus, they’re heavy, and their little gas motors like to be Difficult. All other things being equal, I’ll take the Neuton’s “drop in the battery, squeeze this bit here, Bob’s your uncle and the grass is cut” action every time.

So the question is: Are all other things equal?

Well, I haven’t performed a complete analysis yet, since I haven’t done the other two lawns nor entirely divined the correct ride height or the full limitations of the mulching plug, but right now, as a preliminary finding, I would have to say… yeah, I think on balance they are. In fact, a quick poke around the Interwebs seems to indicate that the Neuton may have some actual advantages. Consider:

Here is a conventional lawn mower from a well-regarded manufacturer for the same money as a new Neuton 6.2 (assuming you have the Neuton shipped to you, but you go to Sears and collect the mower yourself, and leaving the Clever Attachment out of the picture). Now, on the face of it, the gas mower looks like a better deal. It equals or exceeds all the Neuton’s mowing capabilities: it has all three grass disposal modes, it’s two inches wider, and it’s self-propelled, which the Neuton isn’t.

But! Well, for starters, it better be self-propelled; it weighs 108 pounds. Even with its great honking 23-pound lead-acid battery in it, the Neuton comes in at 69. And in the real world, those two inches of extra cutting width aren’t going to amount to anything discernible unless your lawn is so big you should man up and buy a riding mower anyway. Also, if you’ve got anything a bit low-slung in your yard – I have a couple of trailers to mow around, for instance – the Neuton’s lower profile, without that big motor sitting on top, is going to be your best friend. (I’m expecting the Clever Attachment to come in awfully handy there too.)

Okay, so we’ll do a more apples-to-apples comparison, the Neuton against a non-self-propelled three-mode gas mower. Like this one. Now you’re looking at about half the money (again, mower-to-mower, not including the Clever Attachment; if you bought the gas mower you’d have to buy a separate weed whacker anyway, and there’s no need to get into that here)… but you’re still going to be yanking that ripcord to get the thing to go. You’re still going to be faffing around with gas and oil (though not combining them; two-stroke lawnmower motors are strictly for suckers), and probably getting gas on your hands. You’re still going to have numb fingers from the vibration when it’s all over, you’re still going to have to wear earplugs, and you’re still going to smell like you’ve been hanging onto the back of a bus all afternoon.

Some Parting Thoughts

Me? Even with the Environmental Concern thing pegging a solid zero on the motivationometer, I’m still going with the Neuton, unless something catastrophic comes up in the rest of my evaluation that eluded me in Phase I. (If it does, I’ll let you know.)

The one significant issue on my mind right now is the socket that the safety key widget plugs into. I’ve already managed to bend the contact tabs in mine, and though they straightened out again with a judicious application of the key (no pliers or anything were required, just the key itself), the documentation warns that, once bent, the assembly should be replaced outright. I’ll be calling them up and inquiring about that tomorrow. For the moment, though, that seems to be the only significant flaw in what is otherwise a damned clever, user-friendly, streamlined design. I honestly believe that the small problems I had during the first mow test were the result of improper handling, and I hope to have a follow-up tomorrow confirming this after a second test run.

So there you are. My assessment, from the guy who thinks electric cars are a meaningless political/fashion statement that should be subject to a pretention tax: Yes. You should get an electric lawn mower, if you can afford it. Specifically, you should get this electric lawn mower. You should even consider paying more for it than you would for a comparable regular one. Just be careful with that key socket.

A little to the left of the middle of the range is Transforming WALL-E. Admittedly, “Transforming” is a bit much if you’re used to toys that transform with the elaborateness of, well, Transformers, but he does change shape. Those of you who have seen the movie will remember that WALL-E has a “storage mode” in which he changes from a little track-driven robot into… well, a box, basically. This is the toy that replicates that particular gimmick.

As packaged (in “robot mode”), he stands about the same height as a standard DVD case. His head is attached on a swivel so that he can look around and tilt his head, and it’s hinged in the middle so that he can do his happy and sad expressions. The spring associated with the “transforming” gimmick means that while he can look up and down as well, he can’t hold those poses; if you let go his head springs back into a “neutral” position.

His arms rotate and hinge at the shoulders, so he can rotate them a full 360° and swing them out to about 45° past parallel with his body. His hands are nicely articulated, with independent two-jointed fingers and thumb, but his wrists don’t rotate, so he can’t be put into the character’s signature “idle” pose (with hands held horizontal and sort of left to hang in front of him, T-rex style). Sadly, his shoulder joints aren’t mounted on sliding tracks as they are in the film, so the one arm position is all you get.

His tracks aren’t, really – they’re molded as one solid piece – but they do have nicely freespinning wheels mounted into the bottom, so rolling him across a surface isn’t hard. They’re also not set up in their typical triangular shape, because they’re one solid piece, so if they were in that shape they wouldn’t slide underneath his body.

“Transformation” consists of four simple steps:

1) Slide his two track units together so that they lock into place underneath, instead of below and to the sides of, his main body.

2) Once they’re locked, push them up inside his body.

3) Position his arms in the obvious grooves on his sides and squeeze his shoulder joints in until they lock. (You’ll then have to fiddle with his fingers a bit to get them to lie correctly in their recesses at the front corners of his body.

4) Squeeze the sliding bits at the front and back of his head together, then push the whole assembly down into its recess until it locks.

Voilà! Your WALL-E is now in box mode. Reversing the transformation is even simpler: there are four buttons on him, one to release his head, one to release his arms, and one on either side that, when squeezed together, make his tracks drop down and pop outward.

Detail work is pretty good, as you’d expect on a toy of this size. He’s mostly construction yellow, with appropriate grey bits, and a lot of the mold details on the yellow parts have had a brown paint wash applied to simulate surface rust. His chest panel has a decal representing his power level indicator, and his speaker and record/stop/playback buttons are molded in and painted. His arms have their proper industrial caution hash marks painted on, and his eyes are a dark blue plastic that appears translucent under strong light. Flipping down the panel on the front of his body that gives access to his trash hopper in the movie reveals a label simulating a hold full of crushed trash.

Drawbacks are few, and mainly relate to the way the transformation gimmick interferes with poseability, as mentioned above. Also, on mine at least, the catch that must be engaged when folding his head down is fairly stiff; I always have to push a little harder than I’d really like to in order to get it to take.

Still, he has a satisfying size and heft, and at $20, if you’re looking for a larger toy than the standard figure but don’t want to spring for one of the pricier electronic ones, he fills a niche.

As an aside, I would find it exceedingly difficult to recommend the movie any more highly than I already do, because, frankly, I don’t think my scale goes any higher. I mean, come on – a tender love story coupled with a race against time with the fate of all humanity hanging in the balance, told in something very like the style of one of Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” silent films, and they’re robots with voices designed by Ben Burtt? D’accord! I wanted to buy stock when I got out of this movie the first time.

Slower, but more heavily armored than the Iron Man armor, Stealth Operations Suit the [sic] boasts a much broader array of weapons, from repulsor rays to rocket launchers. Jim Rhodes pilots it on missions too sensitive for the high profile Iron Man to tackle.

Yep, that’s War Machine, pretty much. Apparently they don’t mean “stealth operations” so much as “deniable operations”, though one questions how deniable it is when it’s carried out by a guy who looks just like Iron Man except for his color scheme and some additional weapons. It’s been pointed out to me by a friend that, like chain-exclusive figures since the dawn of the practice (about, what, 10-15 years ago now), it’s mainly just a repaint of a toy designed for the regular mass market – in this case the standard Iron Man Mk III figure (depicting the “finished” suit that appears on most of the movie’s promotional materials).

Still, it’s surprising what a difference a color scheme makes. The movie suit’s helmet looks kind of War Machiney anyway, mostly in the way the “mouth” part of the mask comes together (though I wish they’d bothered to at least remold the figure’s head slightly to include the laser designator), and when it’s rendered in black and silver instead of red and gold, it looks considerably different. The overall effect is kind of “What if War Machine had been designed by Adi Granov?” – which is pretty much what they were going for. (Mind you, Adi Granov was probably all of ten years old when the War Machine suit first appeared.)

A few years ago, the trend in action figures was to mold them in dynamic action poses that pretty much rendered them unposeable. They still had articulation, but they were molded in such a way that if you moved them into any position other than the one they were packed in, they just looked ridiculous. Fortunately, that trend has partially abated now. This figure does suffer from it to a small extent – the legs are designed to suit the pose it’s packaged in and look a little odd in other positions – but nowhere near as bad as some earlier figures (early McFarlane Toys figures, for instance). It’s about the same height as, but oddly, much sleeker than, the earlier Marvel Legends War Machine figure, making it seem like it’s in an entirely different scale bracket when the height indicates otherwise.

And, as I had hoped, the articulation in this smaller figure is considerably improved over the larger Repulsor Power Iron Man (previously reviewed). This guy has ball and pivot hip and shoulder joints, double-hinge knees and elbows, a small amount of wrist and ankle articulation, and a working neck, plus a strangely positioned torso rotator (it’s not at his waist, but rather about halfway up his chest). Some of his joints are a bit hard to work because of interactions with other joints – it’s difficult, for instance, to make his upper legs rotate without twisting his hip joints, which can foul up the way they swing outward – but that’s always the price you pay for having more joints on an action figure in the first place.

Of course, War Machine wouldn’t be War Machine, even by another name, without his trusty shoulder-mounted missile rack and Gatling-style minigun, and the mold on this guy has been altered from the standard Mk III with the addition of a couple of sliding mounts for these two accessories, so that they can be moved to their stowed position on his back. This is a major improvement from the way these weapons were handled on the Marvel Legends figure, where the missile box was a) too small and b) attached in such a way that it flipped up, not back, and the minigun wasn’t on a flexible mount at all, just pegged onto his shoulder. On this figure, it’s pretty easy to pop them off of their mounts when trying to slide them, but they go right back on. They each have a spring gimmick that fires the “fake muzzle blast”-style missiles that are de rigueur these days; that particular design trend doesn’t impress me much, but since they’re missiles, they can be removed for display easily enough (so that he doesn’t look like he’s freeze-framed in the middle of shooting).

The downside is that the, where the shoulder weapons are handled wrong on the older figure and right on the new one, the exact opposite is true of the distinctive War Machine wrist cannons. On the older figure they’re molded right to his forearms. On this one, they’re a pair of bulky, ill-fitting snap-on bits. Also, his shoulder caps aren’t attached – they’re just kind of sitting there, held on by friction – so it’s very easy to knock them right off while trying to get the wrist bits attached.

Still, for what it is – a hastily-arranged repaint of an existing figure to use as a chain exclusive – Stealth Operations Suit does a pretty good job. The mounts for the shoulder weapons are very nicely done, and it looks different enough (and enough like the character it’s supposed to represent) that the effort isn’t a completely hollow one. (This is in sharp contrast to the “Repulsor Red Prototype” Target exclusive, which, as far as I can tell, is just the Mk III with the gold bits painted silver instead. Despite what the color scheme suggests, it’s not even a faint attempt at emulating the “Silver Centurion” suit, which is a bit of a disappointment.

Of all the currently announced movie toys I haven’t seen yet, the one I’m looking forward to most is the Iron Man Mk I figure, if only because the Stan Winston guys did a tremendous job on that prop and I’m eager to see how good a job the Hasbro designers did at replicating it in action figure form.

Twice.

So you might expect that I’d either be looking forward to the movie with a barely contained passion… or dreading it utterly. After all, there have been some damn fine superhero movies, and, uh, some not-so-fine ones.

Well, the trailers for Iron Man look pretty damn good – and don’t have anything to do with the brain-damaged bull they’re shoveling over in the comics these days – so I’m excited. And even if it wasn’t any good, it might produce some cool toys. Most of the first round of movie toys hasn’t reached this part of the universe yet, which isn’t all that surprising, but the area’s Wally Worlds do have at least one of the early ones in.

Repulsor Power Iron Man is a sizeable toy – he stands 12 inches high – but his articulation level is a bit disappointing, especially for a figure this size. Except for his neck, he has only simple swivel joints at shoulders and hips and basic hinges at elbows and knees. That’s it. He doesn’t even have a waist joint (presumably because his torso is stuffed full of a speaker and the control module for the speech feature), and both of his arms have to be rigid from the elbows down to accommodate the gimmicks built into his hands (the left one has a light-up repulsor in the palm, the right fires a plastic missile that’s supposed to be molded to look like a repulsor blast), but why the rest of him is so immobile, I don’t know; maybe just to keep the price down after the cost of the electronics.

Apart from the light-up palm, RP Iron Man has three main electronic gimmicks:

• Pushbutton-activated speech. His unibeam (that round bit on his chest, for you uninitiated types) is actually a button. Pressing it causes the button to light up yellow and the toy to say one of four things: “I am Iron Man!” (predictably, though at least he isn’t doing an Ozzy impression), “Repulsor blasts!” (followed by a repulsor sound effect – this one also makes his left palm light up), “Target engaged!” and “Auxiliary power!”
• Arm movement thingy. Basically, if you wave his left arm around, it makes the palm light up and elicits either one repulsor blast, a series of them, or the “Repulsor blasts!” (pew pew) sound option from the chest button. I assume because of the wire connecting the motion sensor and the light to the core of the electronic gadgetry in the chest, his shoulder only rotates through 180°.
• Boot jet sound effects. This one doesn’t work the way it says on the package, at least on the one I have. The package says if you tilt the heel of his right boot up, it plays a “boot jets start up” noise, followed by looped “flight” sounds that are interrupted by “swooping” noises if you move the toy around in the air, and you turn them off by tilting the same bootheel down, which plays a “shutdown” noise. On mine, the heel only tilts up, so it’s up for on, then up again for off. It’s quite easy to set this off by mistake, so it’s a good thing there’s a switch on his back that turns the electronics off. (It has a third setting, the one the toy is packaged in, which disables the boot and arm triggers and restricts the chest button to two of the four sounds.)

On the plus side, it’s a nice sculpt. It looks a lot like the Adi Granov/”Mark III” design featured in the bits of the movie trailer that come from (at a guess) the last half or so of the film, so if you like that design, you’re golden, and the large scale allows for a lot of detail. The only real downside is that his very restricted articulation means there’s really no good display position for his arms – since they’re molded permanently in a “repulsors firing” pose, putting them at his sides looks weird and the only other really viable pose makes him look like he’s surrendering. (Well, and if you had an appropriately sized globe and some Fun-Tac, you could turn him into a statue of Atlas, I suppose.)

All in all, a little disappointing, if only because over the last few years I’ve been spoiled by the dramatic advances in action figure articulation technology. This guy’s only a little more poseable than the original 3-1/2″ Star Wars figures. In a 12″ figure, these days, you tend to expect a bit more. On the other hand, I’ve seen catalog entries for (but no pictures of, yet) other 12″ toys from this series, so maybe those, lacking electronics to accommodate, will do a little better on the “action” front. Also, the smaller figures in the line look promising on paper, though I haven’t seen them in person yet.