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.
Showing posts with label Easter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Easter. Show all posts

Sunday, April 5, 2026

J is for Jährliche Osterhasenparade

Did you anticipate this post? I'd totally forgotten . . . again! But Brian Berke has done one of his regular photo-essays for us, by heading down to Scully & Scully, at 54 Park Avenue, an address, to Americophiles, as prestigious or exciting, as something on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées would be to a Francophile, or Park Lane to an Anglophile! And why has it taken me nearly a decade to look that up?
 
Brian had real problems with reflection this time, hence two visits were called for, and he even tried different cameras, and while I've done what I can with cropping and contrast, you can see a camera in three or four of them, and I cropped the mice out of a larger image, so that one is a bit fuzzy, because they were background!
 
As always, the sculpts, and their painting are exquisite, and while we've seen some of them before, it's all new painting, and/or some new vignettes, along with new trees, I think. I didn't reject any of the images, so there's a bit of duplication.
 
Nothing else to add, as they are a perennial here, now, so please enjoy a bit of Easter magic from the Big Apple.
 
























Many thanks to Brian for these, they are a real treat!

H is for Happy Easter . . .

  . . . although I'm not sure what's supposed to be so 'happy' about the crucifixion of a human being? 
 
There's a number of reason why I haven't posted recently, and I'm not going to list them all here, but really, what is there to be happy about? America is being run by a potty-mouthed, narcissistic, inveterate, constant liar and megalomaniac, who seems, along with his friends Putin and Netanyahu, to be determined to destroy the world economy, the world order and international rule of law, maintained since 1945, sometimes at great cost, for what? So he can rename everything after himself?
 
Starmer, along with the King, are proving to be a pair of gutless fuckwits, and while they seem to be starting to stand-up for themselves, Europe hasn't preformed much better. Easter has become another money-fest with most supermarkets only closed today, and otherwise observing none of the Bank Holidays, and with an October storm in March, the weather is clearly as fucked as a Messiah with nails through his hands and feet.
 
Sighs . . . anyways, here's some Easter stuff, both new and from the archive, with a better post later today.
 
Scanned in '22, I don't know if these where from then, or earlier, it was a major scanning session with several hundred bits of ephemera scanned, most of which is still in the long queue! But, card flats, to join the card-flat zone! I don't know if the names change from box/batch to box/batch, and they are obviously renditions of the Lindt chocolate bunnies, from the back of a Lindt egg box.
 
One of my fondest memories of Easter was hunting the Lindt foil-wrapped, mini-eggs; in the garden if the weather was nice; in the house if Christ's tears prevented outdoor activities.
 
Mum would buy them from the big glass jar in Richard's newsagents in Hartley Wintney, and she would have the staff ensure there were equal quantities of each colour (maybe she just ate the spares?!), which I remember as two shades of gold, a pastel green and blue, a heliotrope-purple, a mauve, and a red which was closer to pinkish-crimson/maroon.
 
Anyway, there was a big divvy-up at the end, between my brother and I, and if the two piles weren't balanced, we'd have to go off again and find the missing ones! I don't think you can even get them any more, it's all unwrapped, licence-related eggs, in plastic bags now, and getting very expensive in the last few years, for a number of reasons, not the least being the chocolate-loving, 8-billion souls.
 



Somehow missed when I did the chocolate bunny season back in '24, this was the Kinder effort, I thought it might have a 'maxi' egg, but it's a bog-standard sized capsule, with what appears to be a lamb in a blanket, but it's not 100% clear, and the toy's 'aint what they used to be!
 

Staying with the edible theme, I actually ate these weeks ago! Branded to World of Sweets, I think they were in B&M, but I honestly can't remember, they might have been in The Range? Anyway, they were a sort of generic tutti-fruity flavour, and are 'Spring', not Easter, is that Trump's hated 'woke', or just canny marketing, from money-grubbing, middle-class executives, no better than Trump himself?
 

Some actual Toys! These WERE in The Range, a couple of weeks ago, and remind me of an old Christmas stocking gift we got one year, which were egg-shaped vehicles, with fat 'racing slick' tyres, like the Marx fire engine we saw here, but as animals, so, more like the Pelican marker pens we saw here, given that one was a grey mouse and the other a pink rabbit, if memory serves? I occasionally look for them on eBay, but haven't found them yet!
 
These are a selection of sort of monster/alien types, using the same craft foam you can buy in sheets, applied to basic blown-plastic eggs, Not sure what the plastic type is, but it seems very thin, so some ethylene hybrid probably?
 
And, as I said at the top, something better, which you might have anticipated, latter today! Bah! Humbug!

Friday, April 18, 2025

H is for Have a Happy Easter!

Well, I seem to have managed to get Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday off, so I might get a bit posted, but I might go off and do something more meaningful! I fancy a walk this afternoon, but in the meantime, it is time for the regular look at what Scully & Scully have had in their window this festive season, courtesy of Brian Berke from the New York office!
 




Trees and shrubs were a noticable portion of the display, and Brian actually went back to shoot a couple more. I think the first one may have been flocked with micro poly-beads, but the others just look to be painted?
 

They seem to have moved them around between visits, so we get different lighting, if not different angles, hard to shoot flats anyway other than straight-on! We saw this sculpt (or Edition, as the flat 'publishers' call them), last year, but they always seem to use a new painting, when they do re-use the models.
 


 

A hundred-and-fifty meters to Easter people, a few circuits of the garden, or pop-down the corner shop and back, you'll be there! And if you don't use the carrot-car you'll get a bit of exercise!
 






These are a delight, every time, and just as traditional as chocolate eggs, although I was now years old when Kalani Ghost Hunter (one of my current secret pleasures on Facebook reels) educated his followers to the fact that the American's don't do chocolate eggs like the Europeans do, his mind was literally blown (non fatally!) by the wall of eggs in an average UK supermarket, and when he went back to the 'States, he showed us a Walmart display, and apart from a few Cadbury's Cream-Eggs, similar things from Reeses, and a few minis, there was nought!
 
And, many thanks, as always, to Brian for taking and getting these shots to us.