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 Kutsuwa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kutsuwa. Show all posts

Monday, October 16, 2023

F is for Found Objects - Three of . . . We'll See

Stationary here at Small Scale World usually means erasers or sharpeners, and sometimes pencil tops and while there are some pencil tops here, there's also a fake, a novelty pen and a pen-converter!
 
Some stationary items I found in an old desk, there was much more obviously, conventional stuff, one of which is here purely for a scaler - the iconic BiC Crystal, but among them were a joke rubber pencil (silver jobbie) and a teeny-tiny rabbit pencil top, on his own bespoke, teeny-tiny pencil, both credited to the Japanese Kutsuwa, who are still going 50-odd years later, this is just the kind of thing they were known for in the age of miniaturisation!

Either PVC or silicon rubber, it's not that clear, a bit soft for the former and a bit hard for the latter, I suspect PVC, as it has reacted with the 'paint' coating of the pencil, usually a form of powder-coating back on the day, to produce a chip-resistant surface.

Two more rodents turned-up a few weeks later in another part of the house/piece of furniture, and they triggered a memory of my having bought them for Mum, with my meagre pocket-money years before, they came in a little PVC wallet with a matching mousey notebook, and I think there were about eight or ten different little animals?
 
My brother bought a similar set of Snoopy ones I think (just printed pencils, no toppers and a little bigger), we wrapped them, and hid them in the tree at Christmas, so when she was helping us look for our chocolate bauble treats, she found them! I think, over the years, they were used as pencils with her pocket diaries, which always lose their little pencils!
 
This was mine! I don't know how it's survived, lost under the bed and found by Mum after I left home, maybe? It's an arrow! You could probably fire it, from a small bow, but you'd need to weight the end slightly to stop it spinning end-over-end! Unmarked polystyrene, but probably Hong Kong manufacture?

It was a Christmas stocking filler, we would have got one each (she was always scrupulously fair) but my Brother's may not necessarily have been the same, just another novelty pen of similar/identical cost . . . might have been a giant nail?

This actually came in recently, but I thought it could be added to this page for reasons of interest, as while we have a couple of pencil-top posts in the long queue, this is more of a converter, turning the writing instrument into a fish . . . of sorts!

It's actually too big for pencils, but works well with these Sharpies, I want a bunch now, different tails, dinosaur tails, a kangaroo tail . . . shaggy-dog tails!