About Me

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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.

Thursday, October 19, 2023

S is for Sometimes . . . I Can be a Fuckwit!

The other day when I posted the 100 pipers swizzle-sticks, and said I thought I'd posted them here, but couldn't find them, it was because they hadn't been posted here, they'd always been at the back of my mind to post, but were in storage, and the mention of PW magazine was because I probably did shoot them for that mag, so when they were at hand (2008-11), between storage phases, I didn't post them as they may have appeared in the mag first!
 
Obviously, when interest in the mag' waned, and its future took a back seat, they could be shot for here, but were back in storage, only they ended-up in the garage, and were shot, not in that batch of board games I did out on the lawn, in the autumn of 2020, with a little help from Girly-Girl, shortly before she died, but over that Christmas, while I sat here waiting for mum to pass, all a bit crappy, but with Boysey-Boy dying last week, I've come to realise that getting old is about taking increasing amounts of sadness and dealing with it.
 
Anyway, the shots were down in the boardgame section of Picasa (1962) all along, where there's about a dozen board-games in the long-queue! So here, now adding to the tags they could have created earlier, are they!

 Marketed by Marketplan for Seagram's, it's obviously a promotional, but whether it was a commercial exercise (Christmasy gift section of Department Stores?) or a more pub-oriented 'issue', like ashtrays or beer-mats, supplied by the distiller or their agents (Marketplan?) to landlords for customers to play on the premises I don't know, but it's quite common on feebleBay, so it may have been a shop-buyable thing?
 
The .gif! These board games do rather lend themselves to gif-production (not 'Jiff' teeheehee) so long as you set the camera and watch the lighting!
 
Double fuckwittedness lead to me not shooting the figures because even before last week, I thought they HAD been on the blog (I'm pretty sure one figures was in a donation report from Peter or Chris, but I obviously didn't tag it!), so both these have been cropped out of the image above and one of the .gif stills!
 
The figures are flats, about 28/30mm, and tend to break at ankles or neck, which is why the yellow gets cast out in the animation, he's already lost his head! I also thought the errata slip made for amusing reading - that 100 chickens could win or lose Scotland, as The Bruce might have said to a blue-painted Aussie!

The rules, if you want them, clearly it's a card-based system of play, with dice for movement and a few elements you'll recognise from Monopoly?

I00 Pipers are owned by Pernod Ricard India now, while Seagram had become one of those ridiculously over-extended 'conglomerates' so fashionable in the 1970's and which mostly imploded under the Thatcherite-Raganomic free-for all of resent years, a free-for-all which will kill us all, shortly, it's actually incapable of not doing so.
 
They did leave us with a series of notable buildings around the world though, and I used to show all the Segway sales-team people the 'Seagram Building' in London - The Ark - when I gave them my impromptu guide to the London sights!

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