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Be sure to visit the full photo gallery of this Tolkien ring box on Flickr, and don’t miss the rPhone™ while you’re there!

The runic lettering is from Tolkien’s transliterated English alphabet, and the rune that looks like the letter ‘S’ actually DOES stand for the English letter ‘S’…. which is great because it’s also the letter on the button that opens the secret compartment on the top of the box. This is great because ‘S’ stands for ‘Sauron’…. see?? And…. if you look in the video you can see that the ‘S’ rune button does poke out a bit more than the other keys, but that’s just because I got lazy and didn’t adjust back into place before shooting the video.

I built this thing in the early 90s, long before the Peter Jackson film series debuted. Pretty cool, huh?

And Peter? This isn’t for sale!!

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This is a photo of actor Jeff Garlin holding a box of doughnuts, standing next to Leo Murphy, the Propmaster from Robocop 3 (shot here in Atlanta back in 1991). Now, I know that it’s Jeff Garlin, because I remember taking the photo. But… there’s no way that you can tell that it’s Jeff because the film was “skunked”, obliterating part of the image, which was often the case of Polaroid film on set..

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Inexpensive (free, actually), lightweight and easy to carry, this simple paper storage unit will change your life… or perhaps it already has?!!

I first began using a Cardboard Briefcase on a day when I’d brought a change of clothes to the office. Looking for a place to put my discarded slacks I spotted a stack of Office Depot copier paper boxes near the door and grabbed one. It was perfect! Small, with cushioned handles (you know, those punch-through oblong holes), the thing even had a lid that fit like a dream.

The next morning, headed for work, I was trying to get out of the house while juggling a handful of bills, a novel, some NetFlix movies meant for return, a small coffee thermos and some cookies. The cardboard box from the day before was just laying on the couch doing nothing so I dumped everything into it and toted it to the car. Talk about convenience!!

During the elevator ride up to the office I was busy trying to find my cellphone, which I’d tossed into the box at some point. It was rattling around somewhere along the bottom of the box and I couldn’t find it right away, which is probably why I didn’t pay attention to the people in the elevator that morning.

But as I recall, everyone seemed pretty nice.

EXTREMELY nice, in fact.

Sure, when I got to the office the folks at the front desk made relentless fun of me for carrying my mail around in a cardboard box but I laughed it off, comfortable in my dorky little world and very happy that I’d solved the problem of carrying a wide variety of stuff, all at the same time.

Soon, things began to collect in my box.

• Medicine
• Toiletries
• iPod headphones
• Paperclips
• Willy Wonka “Nerds” Candies
• Business cards
• CDs

All of that stuff was in there and it was easy to see, unlike the interior of my old Samsonite satchel, which was really dark on the inside because it was made from ballistic nylon…. and that stupid case always took my papers and scrunched them into little fanfolds after a few days.

So I was loving my box and kept adding things to it…. things like:

• Magazines
• Dental floss
• Action figures
• Pullovers
• Camera gear
• Parking passes
• Sketchbooks
• Passes to the Georgia Aquarium

It wasn’t light anymore, but it was still convenient.

Well, sort of.

Well, not really.

I began having conversations about my box with the girls in the office. We’d discuss how hard it was to find things in the bottom of our containers…. they in their purses and me in my…. well, dammit, it was a purse…. a gigantic frikkin’ cardboard purse.

So I took a Sharpie and wrote “Man Purse” on it as a kind of joke…. an homage to a pretty writer’s assistant I once knew who’d been involved in the conception of Joey’s “Man Bag” on the popular show “Friends”.

Even with that infringement on my masculinity, it was too late to stop now.

I decided that I didn’t like the marker scribbles so I went to the copy supply room and traded up to a new grafitti-free cardboard box with even sportier markings. Around the same time I began adding smaller boxes inside of my cardboard briefcase. Those little cardboard boxes began diving the space in the box into even smaller cubbyholes full of:

• pencils and pens
• toothpicks
• battery chargers
• cellphone accessories
• eyeglasses
• eyeglass repair kits
• shoes
• lampbulbs

I was hooked. I didn’t care what other people thought. It was convenient and I’d gotten use to it and it was cardboard dammit… CARDBOARD.

I could hardly turn my back on cardboard.

But then I finally started noticing the looks.

IF it was after 4pm and IF I got onto the elevator with my box, I’d inevitably receive those furtive “pity stares” from the other people in the elevator. I didn’t pick up on it for a long time, but once I did I realized that people thought I was doing a corporate “walk of shame”, with desk-in-box and box-in-hand. For a couple of weeks I’d laughingly explain to people that I was “fine” and that I hadn’t been fired, especially trying to reassure the morning elevator crowds that I wasn’t some lunatic corporate discard who’d come back to exact his revenge.

This experience got me to thinking and I realized that during my time with the cardboard briefcase, I’d come to learn how seldom I actually needed or used:

• my chinese throwing stars
• a handheld 200x microscope
• a packing tape dispenser
• an extension cord
• volume “P” of the Encyclopedia Britannica
• Algebra III flash cards
• an instruction manual for a 1983 Snapper lawnmower

And then it became a medical issue.
My shoulder began hurting from all the over-the-shoulder toting of my cardboard briefcase.

It was time to stop using it.
It was time to let the dream pass.

These days I’m back to my Samsonite and, while I miss the smell of the cardboard box, my shoulder is almost back to its original range of motion (shout-out to my therapist Sarah!!) and I’m doing pretty well handing out fans to people in the office… after all, warm weather is back!

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Before we begin I need to review the rules of Cardboard Costuming, namely:

The Fundamental Rule of Cardboard Costumes
If your cardboard costume looks really nice, you’ve done it really wrong. Your costume must look as though it were ripped from the inside of a garbage compactor. It should have strange, upside down logos. It should be hastily taped together with obvious seams, obvious mends and similar errors of construction. Basically: it should look thrown away.

Kids, get your parents and/or legal guardians to help you make your Chewboxxa costume because you shouldn’t play with sharp box cutters without adult supervision.

The Body
To build your Chewboxxa costume you’re going to need a rather large box, preferably a tall appliance box (in relation to your own size). If your first thought is “I know! I’ll use a refrigerator box!” you’re on the right track, but stop and think for a second: surely your body isn’t wide enough for your arms to comfortably poke out of the sides of a refrigerator box. Imagine how uncomfortable that would be. Consider taking a box that’s tall then cutting it open along one side then refolding it so that it keeps the height but reduces the side-to-side, front-to-back width. Arm comfort is always paramount when you’re wearing cardboard.

The Head
Booxiees are really, really tall. It follows then that their heads should be really, really way up their body, near the top… probably higher up than your own head. But what makes Booxiees funny is the fact that their head is part of their body, they don’t have a neck!

The Face
All you need to do is worry about your Booxiee’s face so go ahead and cut out some good looking eye holes way up above where your head will actually be. Your Booxiee’s intelligence will be inferred by its eyes. If they’re really close together it will look stupid. If they’re far apart it will look creepy and slow. I recommend trying different sized eyes and you should never, ever make the eyes square and even. Asymmetry is the window to a cardboard costume’s soul! Have fun with the mouth, which should be drawn with a fat, black marker.

Operator’s Vision
For you to actually see out of your costume you’re going to need to cut out some “practical” eye holes at the level at which your eyes will actually be located inside the costume. Better yet, I recommend that you cut a thin horizontal slit all the way across the front of your box, that way you’ll have a really good view of everything in front of you and the line might be lost to casual viewers in the cuts and folds and patches that make up your costume.

The Legs
The box should come down so far over your legs that you only need to create cardboard “spats” that cover your legs from the knee to the ankle. This should simply be a square cardboard tube big enough to slide over your lower leg. Do it with your shoes off then put your shoes back on. This will “lock” the spats in place on your leg.

The Arms
I’m going to do a write-up about how to make good cardboard arms in a later post. For now take a look at the drawing and you’ll get the basic idea.

The Bandolier
For a really “showy” look you might consider using Chocolate Pop-Tart boxes taped into place. But if you’re in a pinch why not just bend and fold your own clips and tape them in place. Remember, nothing on your costume should be glued on. A good cardboard costumer will always have a roll of duct tape with them, ready to be patched at any time. If your costume begins this way you won’t be surprised when something falls off and you’ll be much better prepared to repair yourself when the time comes.

Remember the Point!!!
This is to have fun! If you’re busy worried about tearing or staining your costume then you can’t have fun. Go on, eat, drink and spill all over your Booxiee costume, it’ll only get better!!!

I’d love it if some of you would like to post your comments below suggesting other costumes you’d like me to illustrate in subsequent posts leading up to September. I feel that this provides a valuable service to the fan community.

* Cardboardish: a term first identified by Alfeo “Lightspeed” Dixon, the “caution tape” trooper from 2006.

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In the midst of my time of doubt I was sent a sign…. a sign in the form of a guy I knew from the sound department on “Sweet Home Alabama”: Todd Sayre. I looked up to see Todd loping after a slender-but-busty blonde woman in aquamarine pedal pushers, her flyaway Farah Fawcett hairdo gliding on the breeze. From the way that Todd was chasing her it appeared that she’d stolen his wallet or perhaps suggested to him that the planet was about to blow up and that he’d best stick close behind her if he wanted to make it off-world alive. Dude was really moving when I shouted his name. He stopped chasing her slowly, grudgingly, like when you yell at your dog to stop chasing a squirrel… you know: “Oh, alright… but I’ll have you know that I could’ve caught that thing if you hadn’t stopped me.”

As it turns out, Todd wasn’t chasing the woman at all. No, he just thought she might have been a potential celebrity and wanted to see her from the front…. just for confirmation you understand… not chasing at all. No…. ummm…. Anyway. Todd’s pretty new to the whole convention thing and let me take this time to say that I’d be happy to introduce him to any ladies out there who might be interested in meeting a real person from one of my stories. You’d really save us all a lot of worry if you could keep him distracted with your own feminine charms long enough to stop him from chasing potential celebrities around hotels. Really. Truly. Please.

Fortunately for me, Todd had spoken to Elliott and was up to speed on the whole Box Robot thing and agreed to participate which was a HUGE relief. After all, one person dressing as a cardboard robot is a sure call for help. Two people dressing as cardboard robots isn’t strange at all. No.

Strange or not, we needed cardboard and time wasn’t on our side. We made an erratic beeline toward Peachtree Center then split up to begin asking the assorted stores and restaurants for their spare cardboard boxes. I decided for the “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine” approach so I walked up and bought a brownie from a man at a cookie stand on the corner. As he handed me the change from my purchase I casually, nonchalantly, slyly inquired as to the availability of any cardboard boxes that might happen to be loitering about his fine establishment gathering dust and being generally in the way. The guy stared at me for a beat then shook his head in that universal way that indicates that he didn’t speak English.

Fine. Not at all embarrassing. I didn’t need his stupid foreign cardboard boxes anyway.

As I turned to find another store I ran into Todd who already had three or four big boxes that he’d scored from the Dairy Queen. I was SO going to lose this scavenger hunt. While I was trying the polite consumer method, Todd was scoring boxes like crazy (a provider trait that you single ladies out there should take note of should you want me to introduce you to Todd). All of the food places I checked had already taken their trash to the dumpster or were too busy to help. Thankfully, the girl working at Barnes & Noble gave me three small boxes from the back room. Having those three little boxes made it a lot easier to go up to store owners and ask them for their empty boxes. It essentially authorized my quest for cardboard to the other shop owners, making me a legitimate consumer in the stiffened paper products marketplace.

I called those three boxes my “starter boxes”. It didn’t matter, Todd had four times as many boxes as me.

We finished up at the store called “GA Electronics & Gifts” where the owner, a man named Morris, gave us our most important cardboard of all: our cardboard torsos. Here’s to you Morris!! Off we trudged to the deck outside of the Hyatt’s main bar where we hastily assembled our costumes to the bemusement of a small group of convention attendees. At the appropriate time we slipped into our badly made costumes and headed inside. The crowd’s reaction slowly fixed on us as we clumsily clomped between the tall tables toward the bar. By the time we made it to an open space people were staring at us, some of them laughing out loud, some of them taking pictures – like the reporter I know from “HowStuffWorks.com” who even asked us to say something which must have certainly been unintelligible. The best I could manage were loud “meeps” and “moops”. When Todd started jumping up and down and flapping his arms like a baby chick the girls squealed with delight. That move was immediately added to my own repertoire.

If you’ve read the previous article about the flash mob schedule you’ll know that we had to do specific things at specific times…. the only problem was that we couldn’t bend our arms to check our watches to see what time it was… our arms were made from a dingy Dairy Queen box that we’d neglected to articulate (meaning that the arms didn’t BEND). So we sang and we clapped and we beeped and we left and went downstairs. Everywhere we went we brought a little ray of cardboard sunshine. Later that night Elliott voiced his fear that some people might interpret our costumes as an insult to everyone who’d spent a lot of time and effort crafting their costumes but from the reaction we were getting people LOVED the cardboard robots. Later I found that a stormtrooper had scribbled “scout trooper Jaster” on the side of my robot head. I don’t know if that made me an honorary Imperial or if that was his autograph.

After an hour of bouncing around in those boxes (mine has the big toothy grin) we got hot and decided to put them in my car which was parked under the Hilton. We’d made it almost all the way through the lobby of the Hilton, almost to the elevator down to the the parking garage, when the Bell Captain’s voice came over the loudspeaker with the announcement: “Attention Please, Attention Please: All Cardboard Boxes Please Report to the Loading Dock, repeat, All Cardboard Boxes Please Report to the Loading Dock.”

I am *not* making that up. It couldn’t have been funnier.

Except for later that night when Alfeo Dixon showed up and wanted to go cardboard roboting wearing Todd’s suit. We suited up in the parking garage, went upstairs and crashed Trader Vic’s (lots of pictures taken by people there), then we crashed the fancy upstairs costume photo area of the Hyatt (where we had an enormous photo-op encounter with a fancier light-up cardboard robot), next we crashed something called the Buffy Prom (where there was much robot dancing) and finally we crashed a bar with near disastrous consequences (Elliott having slipped into Todd’s costume by this time). I’m told that the next evening at the big costume contest Elliott and his wife Kim sat next to a woman in the audience who started telling them all about the cardboard robots that she’d seen at the convention the day before.

The best part of all may have been when I happened to walk by the hallway costume contest results board on Monday and discovered that we’d been selected as the Judges’ Favorite. On behalf of our troupe I’d like to thank the judges and hand out some awards of my own; I’m calling them CardBottie Awards: The first CardBottie Award goes to Todd Sayre for his diligent cardboard gathering skills and his engineering prowess on the forward visioning systems for the robot suits (which basically means that he cut the head holes in the top of the boxes just right… in the middle). Todd is to be commended for his stalwart efforts to get us into a photograph with every hot girl in sight. If someone could be so kind as to point SithVixen to my site to read this article she needs to know that there’s a kind heart under that dingy cardboard exterior even though his bot’s serial number is I-124Q. I’m just sayin’ is all….

The second CardBottie Award goes to Alfeo Dixon, first-time sci-fi convention attendee and general horn-dog about town. Alfeo’s CardBottie goes for his use of a beaver-festooned trucker cap taped to the top of his robot’s head and for the incredible spit-take he did (inside his helmet mind you) after I shoved the straw from his mai-tai into his eye and up his nose while trying to give him a drink at Trader Vic’s (remember, 1st generation cardboard robot arms don’t bend). Alfeo is also recognized for his portrayal of a “redneck robot” as cited by the drunk guy in front of the Hyatt.

The third CardBottie Award goes to Elliott Boswell who is as convinced that this was his idea as I am that it was mine. I, however, have the power of the internet on my side and since I’m handing out these Cardbottie Awards I am pleased to award Elliott with Best Portrayal of an Out-of-Control Cardboard Robot. Suffice to say that when Elliott goes into character he goes high octane.

If we posed with you, danced with you, stepped on your toes, peed with you, knocked paintings off your walls, rode the elevator with you or crashed your events in any way, we truly enjoyed it.

Thank you!