Houstonian wins Lego master builder search

Houstonist admits it: We're jealous of Jason Poland. See, deep down inside, we're still huge Lego fans, and Poland, a Houstonian, is going to get to build stuff out of Legos for a living — yesterday, he won Legoland California's national search for a new Lego master builder.

It was a much more involved process than you might think. The Lego finalists were chosen from seven regional events across the country, and the winners gathered this week in Carlsbad, Calif., for a series of building challenges and interviews. On Monday, the finalists each had an hour to build a model of a face and an egg, and Tuesday, each had two hours to build a model of something they thought would be a good addition to Legoland. Poland, in case you wondered, built a fire-breathing snowman. (During the regional contest in Dallas, Poland built a pirate-themed model of "a castaway looking through a spyglass with a mermaid in his hand and a crab on his head." In an hour. We're lucky if we can manage to build a Lego cube in that amount of time.)

The prize for winning the competition: Poland will become one of the six official Lego master builders in the U.S. Not a bad job for someone who just graduated from UH a couple weeks ago, we'd say.

Photo from CNET News.com