About Me

My photo
No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Saturday, October 21, 2023

B is for Blast Off!

I'm sure we've had that title before, but it keeps appearing in popular (and not so popular) culture, the 'Blast Off' hook; books, toys, board games, T-shirts, nightclubs, maths programmes, several movies, songs, poems. . . and now, these eraser sets!

I thought I'd shot these on the rugs from the kitchen before I put them into storage, but I'm not so sure that it's the same pattern, so I'm not so sure that I did? Therefore, they may be feeBay images, but whatever, you can see a nice set of erasers with a large'ish astronaut and some space-related items - a nice pulp-type ship atop a 'pillar of flame' (to milk the metaphors) and two planets.
 
Then I saw this in Home Bargains the other day for less than a fiver, and thought "Blog!", so grabbed one, not realising the contents were different, so I will go back and try to get a spaceship one with another-colour of figure for a follow-up post!
 
Credited to a TJM, which I think is the in-house label of TKMaxx? Which would mean that TKMaxx, Homesense and Home Bargains (a downmarket clearance type rival to B&M) are the same company, as is Maxisave in Australia! We are being corporatised!
 
Clearly the UFO (or it is Saturn, one of the planets in the other set, given a skirt?), needs some hot water, and the shooting star is the weakest of the seven items ID'd so far (astronaut is the same in both sets I think), but - from its shape - would be the best eraser!
 
The pencils are all gray/graphite pencils, not coloured 'crayons', and each has an uplifting motto, including the eponymous Blast Off! There's no sharpener to get them started though, which given the cheap nature of the units we've looked at here at Small Scale World for things like novelty sharpeners and Christmas crackers, seems a bit tight?

No comments: