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.
Showing posts with label Building blocks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Building blocks. Show all posts

Thursday, February 20, 2025

P is for Pantasy - I think?

I didn't get the name of this stand at the Toy Fair, but Google suggests the products are made by Pantasy, although the stand may have been another agent or importer. Lego-likey building bricks, so not much blurb needed!







 
Licences for Manzinger Z, Garfield, Astro Boy and King Fu Panda among others, with different figure configurations and a few original brick-designs. That's it, a quick box-tick.
 
The only link I could find is the Amazon Merchant Portal;

Saturday, December 14, 2024

S&S is for Scale and Size!

 Can you see what I did there! As well as our regular visits to the canyons of New York, there has been this for . . . about seven or eight years now, I think - the annual Christmas toy-related display by the Fleet & Crookham Local History Group in Fleet library, which this year is all about size/scale of like subjects.

Another 'lazy' post, in that it can be blurb-light, it is what it is! I would add that the FCLHG do other presentations through the year, local development, the medieval period, how the maps change, that kind of thing.


























It's getting like we've seen most of it before, hence a different theme every year? I think the Furby's are new this year, they used to be called Gonk's, when I was a lad, and were made by Travellers on old loo-rolls for the fairground-prize trade. They were a good introduction to loss and death, as their little paper faces slowly dog-eared, ripped or even slid off, and eventually damp got to their cores or an adult's foot or arse flattened them!
 
The Exhibition normally comes down in the first or second week of January, so if you're passing, worth a quick visit.

Monday, June 17, 2024

T is for Toys in the Media, Part the . . . God Knows!

A trio of Hestair Kiddybrick related adverts from the archive tonight, call it a Lazy Post with a bit of a tangential rant, and realise things will get better here again, shortly!

Advert for Intel, now rapidly being eclipsed by nvidia, they were the market leader for a couple of decades! And an actual Lego tie-in, so presumably the Evil Empire paid some of the marketing campaign fees?
 
One of the few Building Societies to survive the Capitalists' demutualisation frenzy which ruined not just British, but global banking back in the 1990's (made a small number, of mostly white men, very rich!), the YBS are still going, their blocks are artistic renders, I think?
 
A&L demutualised in '97 and finally packed their bags in 2011 (about the same time mine, Halifax, began is slow decline to now, a mere brand of Lloyds!), this might be a GCI image, the bloke and ball probably are artworks, of some kind, but while the blocks are based on Duplo, or Megabloks 'biggies', if it is a photograph (this trio is from the 2000's), they are probably cheap own-brand generics from Toy R Us or Mothercare? Both of whom have also disappeared!
 
It's funny, since around 1979/80, it's been one, long, fire-sale, an absolute bonanza for a few public-school educated money-men and asset strippers, which has left a Chinese car dealership on the old A30 into Hook, which I noticed tonight, a couple of miles from the huge billboard for Ranil Jayawardena (local Tory candidate, who has decided the corporate colours for the Tories round here will be green and purple!), why do we even let this state-subsidised shit into the country?
 
I mean, I like to think I'm a liberal, but I also have a sense of justice and fair play, which some might claim is overdeveloped, I blame the Asperger's, but it leaves me quite intolerant of our Government's tolerance, which boarders on incompetent complacency. And how can fair play or justice be 'overdeveloped', it either is, or it isn't?

Yet these despots; China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, &etc; they just don't play fair, even when they can't stand each-other, they will side together, get a few African kleptocrats and a couple of Central American nutters on-board and cause no end of trouble for the whole world, with a power-bloc that blocks any attempt to make the world a better place.

But the cars will be perfectly reliable, reasonably outfitted, with all the mod-cons and gizmos, and cheap, why would you pay three-times as much for a Volvo in a 'cost-of-living' crisis, created by those same landlord/landowning/speculative hedge-fund bwankers, who will now be importing these cars, using the money they don't seem to pay much tax on!

Sunday, December 10, 2023

A is for Athenaeum's Annual Airing of Amusements

And so to Fleet library for the hoped-for and found exhibition of old toys, and as in previous years a fine collection of nostalgia-buttons await the visitor, this year they have dived the main cabinet into four themes with the low display case having construction toys.

The Farm




The Garden








The Zoo




The Aquarium






 
Educational Construction Toys
 






And many thanks to Fleet Historical Society for putting this on every year, remember the Tories have closed over 800 libraries in the last 13 years, and rely on volunteers and non-book related activities to keep the remaining ones open or relevant.
 
Disgusting, I know, but with half the population to the left of the bell-curve (because they never used libraries?) and voting, it's not something (the destruction of community learning) which we've seen the back of.