O is for Other Books

When I showed the new additions to the collectables' library, I mentioned a few other books I'd bought recently, half in the Alton second-hand bookshop, most of the others in Waterststones, and a couple in TKMaxx, of all places, not toy soldiery, not toy'y at all, but it gives you a better idea about who I am, or what I'm about!

 

Old Shire Albums, but specifically, the Natural History sub-set, which have more colour images than most Shire's, certainly the older ones, and looking at a small field in some detail, snails perticularly tend to get passed-by, unless they are perticularly colourfull in the shell department.

 

Same Alton shop, different day, and they had these two, even more academic works (same author on the Ants), and Hoverflies are among my favourites, there is a wide number of them, and they can differ quite a bit, even within local populations, so photographing them never gets boring . . . like is does when, for instance, you find something covered in domestic honey bees - after a few good shots, you just stop shooting them!

 

I also grabbed this, it's a truism for a lot of reference works, even military ones, the text of the old ones is better, the illustrations of the new ones is superior, and with everything in storage, I picked-up this spiral bound work, going cheap, just so I'd have something here, the best feature of it being the open/closed artwork.

 

This was the Waterstones, not that pricey, and I've since been back to get the matching volume on wild flowers, as I always get confused by all the white umbel-flowered types, some of which are deadly poisonous (hemlock), others totally safe (cow parsley).

 

This book has a good range of insects, covered in some depth, with most of the European visitors included, as assumed summer finds. Not much on the North American visitors, and I've encountered two in recent years, both beetles (longhorn and pine), blown over by storms.

 

This was a bit of fun, I think I remember it from junior-school, and nostalgia is a powerful tug on the wallet sometimes, also you can find poses, colour-ways or now debunked physical features in these early works, which you can match to specific, contemporary toys, as the sculptors or art departments used the same books!

 

I bought a batch of raffle tickets at the BMSS's annual show in Reading and won these two. Both related to post '44 France, in World War Two, you can't go wrong with Ospray, and while I tend to collect the uniform works, these will be an interesting read, and once read, can always go in another raffle!

 

The first was an impulse buy, in the Basingrad TKMaxx, only for me to find the other at Farnborough Gate's store, a week or so later. They are supposedly academic 'fan' works, looking at an aspect of the Tolkien world, comparing it to the world Tolkien lived and wrote in, and tying all the loose ends together . . . kind of things?

 

I've only briefly dipped into them, but I think they will prove interesting, and anything which simplifies or explains in a shorter-form, or in a language I can follow, all the tediousness of the post-Silmarillion books, and the 'Tolkien Universe' stuff issued by the son, is a good thing, but the fact it appears there are still five to find, has curbed my enthusiasm somewhat!

 

What triggered the impulse of the first purchase, was the feel of them, they have a sort of faux-leather, which is almost micro- or nano-flocking, so they feel soft somehow, but colder than leather, so a treated polymer foil of some kind? They also look a bit like the ancient world library I built, from Folio Society books, years ago.

 

But anyway I have them now, and with a small sub-library of Tolkien books, including a few bestiaries, and fantasy art-books, they will add to the oeuvre, and enhance the eventual auction-lot, before I leave the room permanently!

T is for Ptobar's Pterosaurs n'Ptings

Just a quick follow-up from the I pay for this shite so you don't have to department; I mentioned when looking at 'paper' 'planes the other week that the discount store had several and that I might go back for a couple, well; I did!

I also said I couldn't remember what the third thing was . . . well, it was insects! Along with dinosaurs and the same 'planes as HGL and HTI, these are all badged to Tobar, and it turned out the Sikhs had got them in because I'd been asking for them a few days before . . . so I had to buy a few, although they were already going out like hot cakes with all three dispensers more than half empty, after only a few days.

Pterodactyl was purchased as the signature species! But three other designs are available and I would imagine they will be a lot of fun for people of a certain age? However . . . spot the deliberate mistake . . .

. . . you can't get the wings through the hole! To do so I had to carefully extend it without creating a cut-line that might spread, and one has to wonder how such a thing occurred or how it was allowed to leave the factory? And it's not a question of QA or QC, it's a technical problem 'at the coal face' . . . very odd!

The ant, I wanted a dragonfly, but they had all gone . . . verily - fussa-russa! But the ant's bearable, he has an odd tail-plane and stabilisers which I suspect are supposed to be a bit of foliage or something; there's no explanation, but the alternative (if you know about these things) is a brain altering, lethal fungus - hardly child-friendly?!!

The bee is just silly . . . and a near-duplicate of the ant (wings are different), while the two beetles are also cut from the same die, the mantis looks to be a cut-above and . . . I really would have preferred the dragonfly!

Back to the 'planes; I got the Hurricane Mk IIC . . . it might as well be a sausage. I think it's trying to be a Western desert theatre airframe, but suffers from the poor print resolution and reverse code bollocks I pointed-out last time we looked at them.

Now, along with the oddities alluded to above, this sort of think bloody annoys me . . . I know they are 'cheap and nasty' or pocket-money toys, but . . . the artwork was done once and costed-in, I suspect decades ago, and it's about time they were all upgraded/replaced. The overall cost would be peanuts in an ocean.

These are clearly selling well, and constantly as a 'traditional' toy, They are now in three outlets locally, in Basingrad I saw the HTI ones in the Entertainer, again with plenty of room in a once full stock-carton, so they are probably selling in their millions world-wide. They come in very basic paper envelopes (like Sobres), and consist of a few scraps of Styrofoam/expanded polystyrene (which will have to go back to balsa or card as the - overdue - polymer backlash gathers pace).

All-new artwork for the twelve/thirteen known aircraft could be CAD'ed-up in a weekend by a couple of commercial artists and the cost per unit, over time would be fractions of a penny. And there's a misrepresentation element here, under consumer legislation, the artwork on the outside of the envelopes is not depicting what falls out of them.

The problems are not to be seen on the dinosaurs, the insects or the foam-board/foam-core unicorns we saw last time, suggesting the war-planes are relying on print-plates which probably go back to the 1970's - come on guys, sort it out; you muppets! Get on to the Chinese supplier and tell them to sort-out the printing (and the insects wings) before some local authority's Trading Standards unit sues you!

F is for the First Hornet of Spring . . .The First Hornet of Summer!

I like the hornets, they get a bad press, but are in fact less aggressive than wasps (who are - themselves - less aggressive than their press!) and have become regular visitors to the garden, always happy to pose and never having had a go at me!

Tuesday found all these (cropped and collaged to approximate scale with each other) sunning themselves on the fence panels, although two were also busy making wood-pulp for their paper nests.

The hornet (left) is a newbie, and not much bigger then a queen wasp; half the size of the big brutish-looking ones who will be getting drunk on wind-fall apples in five months time! The wasp is a worker, there has been a queen hovering round the back of the house looking for somewhere to start a nest, but this is the progeny of a sharper one, who's already got started elsewhere!

The bee seems to be a carder or mining bee of some sort, or maybe a rarer eucera? People tend to call them all bumble bees but most of them aren't! I shoot loads of fury bees through the year and one day I'll sit down with a good bee-book and sort all the pictures out - then I'll really bore you!

Earlier (last week particularly - but for most of a month now) we've had some lovely weather and a lot of butterflies have been out, I've seen holly blues, an over-wintered peacock (in March), lots of brimstones and various small whites (mostly female brimstones and female orange tips), these are speckled woods which were sunning themselves on the Spirea

At the same time I caught this ant dragging a fortnight's rations home to the nest! I have a little video I'll try and upload to Youtube, if successful a link will follow. I think the victim is a smaller beetle larva.

That worked! I'll have to do more video's? 

My favourite butterfly at this time of year (it used to be brimstones, but they are two-a-penny!) is the orange tip (or copper tip) and they can be fidgets; difficult to catch, but on cool mornings  they prove a little sluggish before they've topped-up the tan, and can be photogenic!

Something that's really hard to shoot is the bee fly, it never stops and so is never in focus as every (literally 'every') fibre of its being is vibrating like a humming bird! I love them, they seem to be a cross between teddy-bears and alien Starfighters - little pointed triangles of purposeful fur!

This is some kind of dwarf euphorbia I think, the flies and hoverflies love it at this time of year.

I also shot these commas at the end of March, the wing-edges are lacking the usually more uneven topography or crenellations distinctive of the species (particularly the left-hand example), probably due to them being over-wintered specimens who's wings have somewhat 'rounded off' with wear and tear!

It also has the darker colouration of the winter generation. The commas have two generations per year, which makes the instinctive behaviour of each all the more remarkable, as all the genetic coding has to jump a 'season' in order to get the child to act like the grandparent, not the parent!

We dumb, curious monkeys struggle to teach basic manners to our children with the aid of a compulsory schooling process, a police force and a judicial system - yet we're threatening most butterflies and most other life on earth!