If you surf on flickr you have probably understood that it is December 1st and that everyone has opened their 7958 LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar.

Just run a search with the keyword LEGO and you will be inundated with pictures of the first gear out of box 1 of the calendar. Nothing fancy, the ship is simple, the instructions are inside the cover of the box and it's fun three minutes before moving on. 

I promise, I'm not going to put it in the blog every day, I just wanted to mark the launch of the hundreds of photos that we will be entitled to daily. Here is mine, not very good, but I am progressing slowly ....

Do you want to measure yourself against other MOCeurs? Are you tired of the endless MOCs of ships and looking for an original theme to express your creativity?

Then you have to participate in the competition organized on SeTechnic with the winner of the set 7879 Hoth Echo Base, set released in 2011 and which contains 773 pieces, 8 minifigs and a Tauntaun.

The object of the contest is very simple: To recreate a scene which features a creature from the Star Wars universe.

Dewback, Tauntaun, Wampa, Rancor or Saarlac, Star Wars has no shortage of creatures, each stranger than the next. The whole must be carried out on a maximum surface of 48x48 tenons without limit of height and must be presented before January 15th, 2012 midnight.

To find out more about this original themed competition, visit the dedicated topic at SeTechnic.

For information, the photo illustrating this article comes from Christo and Calin's flickr gallery and presents a Dewback (Original LEGO), a Kaadu (Original LEGO) and a custom Tauntaun of which I was able to get a copy and which I tell you about in this article.

The English are now accustomed: Periodically the tabloid The Sun offers an offer to exchange a coupon to cut from the newspaper for several LEGO sets in polybags (sets in bags) in the WH Smiths and Toys R Us stores.

This Saturday, December 3, 2011, the readers of the newspaper will be able to be offered the set 30055 Droid Fighter (45 pieces) sold from 3.37 € on Bricklink.

Wait until Sunday or Monday and its price will surely have fallen further with English sellers ...

You should know, and it's always good for our personal culture, that between 1962 and 1988 it was Samsonite who manufactured the bricks under license and distributed the LEGO brand in Canada and the USA. Manufacturing stopped in the United States in 1973, when LEGO moved to the United States. TLC then moved to Canada in 1988 when the first brick separator was released, but that's another story.

From this time, rillette11 posted on his flickr gallery photos of original boxes or scans of catalogs. Something to impress, and if you understand English, linger on the comments of each photo, you will learn many things about this LEGO by Samsonite era. You will find other visuals on the same theme at this address.

To go even further in the discovery of the LEGO company and the evolution of the visual identity of its products over the years, visit the reference site: Brickfetish.com.

Be careful, we quickly spend a few hours without realizing it. There is so much to see on this very well documented site.

I didn't know what to wear for the title. And it shows.

It is on the occasion ofan article written on the subject that I decided to order two sets that were missing from my collection: The Comic Con Exclusive Clone Wars Set (comecon001) sold for $ 75 at Comic Con 2008 and produced in 1200 copies and the Mini Republic Dropship Mini AT-TE Brickmaster Pack (comecon010) printed in 500 copies and sold for $ 49.99 at Comic Con in San Diego in 2009.

After some customs tribulations, which will have cost me the VAT and customs clearance fees, here I am in possession of these two sets that I wanted so much .... I note in passing that the contact with the service in charge of customs clearance parcels from abroad improved significantly.

I wouldn't be talking about money here for these two sets, that's not the point. The only thing to remember is that you must be prepared to set yourself a maximum rate that you consider to be the limit of decency or your means. It is at this price that you will be satisfied with your purchase and that you will not be frustrated with spending indecent sums on your passion.

These two sets are not even an investment. They will only be of interest to collectors at the end of the line, who are looking for the rarest pieces and who have already acquired most of the range. But these collectors are rare and many are those who give in under the lack of space or the need for cash and who abandon their collection to newcomers on eBay, Bricklink or Le Bon Coin ....

If I speak to you about this notion of investment, it is in reference to the report broadcast this evening on M6 in 100% MA and which featured Festibriques, a passionate MOCeur apparently a member of FreeLUG and a guy by the name of David who accumulates at his home, in a dedicated room, boxes for later resale.
The report is well done, honest, but the presentation of this guy disturbed me. She misleads the viewer who risks believing that the few boxes of LEGO he has are worth gold.

It also conveys a rather pejorative image of the AFOLs that we are by highlighting a guy who is not an AFOL. We must not hide our face, there are many speculators in the LEGO world and the second-hand market lends itself to active speculation as the capital gains are enormous in some cases.

But the community is not just home to this type of collector-speculator. Of which act.

If you want to discuss it and share your opinion, do not hesitate to post a comment or to go to the already cult dedicated topic at Brickpirate.

Below is the extract of the report broadcast on M6 which really makes us look like imbeciles .....