News, Views Etc . . . New Content - Airfix Blog, Galoob, Football, Card Collector's Flyer +

New content has been added to various small-scale posts on the Airfix Blog today, including horse/base comparisons on the Bedouin/Nap. French Infantry/AWI Grenadiers posts, new content on the 1st & 2nd version WWII Eighth Army, 1st version WWII German Infantry, Civilians and the Infantry Combat Group, while the Lone Star/Airfix comparison shots have finally been added to the 1st & 2nd versions of Afrika Korps & WWII German Infantry and to the British Paratroops. Most have had some text, but it's only reminded me of how behind I am over there!

I've also added two pairs of new pictures/screen-capchas to the Galoob page - numbers 40; pilot, and 41; a new carrier-deck bib-colour/base variant.

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For any fans or collectors of tea, gum and cigarette cards, The Card Scene magazine (formerly Card Times) is the one for you - if you've not found it yet? Six issues a year (each with up to 36 pages) for £17 seems reasonable value for money compared to other publications of the same type.

Contact:

[cheques payable to Ace Card Ents]

Ace Card Enterprises (C/O J. Devaney)

10 Yelverton Road

Whitley

Reading

Berkshire

RG2 7SU

johndevaney222@btinternet.com

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Football News

The first casualty of the current pig's-bladder kicking contest in Putin's war-mongering gulag may be Panini's UK-distributor Connect. After some negative publicity earlier in the year over how many packs you'd have to buy to guarantee a full set following - what seems to be an act of pure profiteering - a price hike from 50p to 80p (about a Dollar or Euro), sales dropped, leading to an ironic - if you accept my charge of profiteering - profits warning last week!

Although this is not to mistake a profit warning as equating to a lack of success; with or without a price hike the two packs (single and x6) were the second and sixth best selling items in the toy sector; week-ending 19th may, according to analysts NPD Group.

Nevertheless, Mark Cashmore the CEO of Connect has resigned and WHSmith the High Street newsagents (themselves, recently declared worst shop on the said High Street by the consumer watchdog Which?), felt the need to organise an in-store 'Swap Event' (Saturday 2nd June) encouraging kids (or dads?) to come in and swap their duplicates with each other, in order - presumably - to minimise purchases, in the normal course of events I'd say "You can't make this shit up" but in the new Trumpundbrexit 'world order' it seems anything goes while we wait patiently for the end!

The cause of all this was a work published back in March by mathematics Professor Paul Harper who calculated the cost of obtaining a full album to be a eye-watering £773.60p which is probably about the same as my total toy-figure spend in two or more years.

With 32 squads to collect plus the special-page and whole-team stickers it could be more, I'm not sure he's calculated the potential inequality of the 'randomness' of packs contents (vis-a-vis batches or waves) given that a sheet (seen at the printers - in the i newspaper; Thursday, 7th June) only had 200 stickers on it (A1 sheet, 20x10), suggesting different batches will have different duplicates - if you see what I mean?

As far as other football playthings go, Match Attack and Top Trump football sets are also selling well at the moment. Apparently football-related toy-sales have doubled in recent times for the periods of each World Cup or Euro-Championship, making up 6% of toy sales in those years, for a seasonal industry relying on Christmas and summer 'super-soakers' - that's not small beer.

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Toys in the Media! This is a current flyer locally my friends got sent, for the central heating firm undertaking checks for Vivid, who are the new name for several local authority's preferred housing association. It looks to be a library shot, possibly available on-line somewhere, as it's unlikely a central heating company in Farnborough would have access to a HO-railway model of an alpine chalet, but you never know! Anyone recognise the model/maker/brand?

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Returning to Galoob; my assistant - being as helpful as always - decided that sorting the Micro Machine G.I's numerically by base-mark is just not the sensible way to go at the task, in her own words -

"Hughman - You need to sort them leastest lastest, mostest firstest, and the red & white ones can go on the floor for now, look, here; I'll do it for you, you're obviously 'busy' faffing about with that camera!"