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.

Wednesday, December 10, 2025

L is for Leifur Eiríksson

Another instalment of Brian Berke's shots from Iceland (he had terrible flu, and I think we're lucky to have these shots), and we're looking at Leifur Eiríksson, known to us as Lief Erikson, or Lief the Lucky, son of Erik the Red and as a famous Viking explorer, who hailed from the shores of Iceland, and is accepted to have discovered North America (for Europeans, probably where modern Canada is), some centuries before the European genocides and colonisation!
 



Struck by the strange, angled, sub-base, and identical pose, I assumed they must be depicting a specific statute, and a bit of a search, left me fully gen'ed-up on the statue created by American artist Alexander Stirling Calder, in Reykjavík, in the 1930's!
 
Obviously, available in a gilded or plain-metal finish, and probably a base-metal or tin-alloy of some kind, and issued in two sizes, it's definitely the sort of thing you might pick up in a charity shop at some point?

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