Bits in salmon-pink are later additions, notes or further information supplied by others.
Bits in Khaki-green are 'work-in-progress' listings and anyone is welcome to add missing details, whether single items or whole chunks.
All photographs are 6.5 (old Fuji), 8.3 (Samsung) or 16 (new Nikon) Mpx, and most will blow up to greater than screen size if you hover on them and click. However I've noticed some of the older images aren't enlarging, this is probably a Blogger/Picasa/date/traffic/auto-archive thing?
If you think you can add some information, or identify any of the 'unknowns', please use the comment feature rather than emailing me.
Bold; denotes 'real-world' product titles or nomenclature - sometimes!
Please report any dead links, and suggest any links you think should/could be added.
Note I have now found out how to switch-off the slide-show thingy, so just clicking on the photographs will open them on a whole page where most will then enlarge further with another click - if the cursor is in a 'plus' sign.
This doesn't seem to work for some of the older posts, this is a Blogger/Internet coding change thing I can do nothing about, one day I'll update or replace the more important ones but that's years away.
While waiting for an ok to join the RPG Bloggers network, I became a bit
frustrated.
So, here is a current blogroll of 1000+ English Language RPG blogs, an...
... and with strange aeons even death may die.
I'm not dead, just working on something else. That "something else" should
be released before the end of the...
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.
Further to yesterday's post on this weeks dates (below) - I missed this one, although it looks to be mostly console or arcade type stuff, there is cosplay and so on, so worth a punt if you're in the area with time on your hands!
Bit of a lazy post, because I had a lazy
weekend and didn't get anything ready for yesterday or today, except the stuff
for the other Blogs announced in yesterday's post! Both these were shot at the May show, both
self-explanatory and the second probably seen before - certainly seen before in
some form.
This is obviously a touristy-thing; I
suspect from Ireland, it's err . . . a Jaunting Car! For going for a jaunt in,
obviously! I said they were self-explanatory! Nothing else to say really, it's
a brittle or tinny polystyrene, airbrush-decorated through stencils and around
54mm or 1:32nd scale, almost in the style of a porcelain 'fairing', the sort of
thing it probably replaced.
There is no clue underneath as to make or
origin, date or anything else, so that's the first; a probably Irish jaunt'er! It's also the leading candidate for the most boring shot ever loaded on Small Scale World Dot Blogspot Dot Com competition! However, don't think I dislike it, I bought it - after I'd shot it!
The second has been before, but I can't
remember if it was a boxed one, and whether or not the figure was PVC or
ethylene, but here's another one and it'll get it in the tag-list so it comes
up with the previous post/s. This bronze version is - I think - the earlier one
(even though I consider the vinyl figures more common than the ethylene ones)
that the Hong Kong copy was based-on.
[checked upon posting - it was red with
white horses and the PVC spear-man]
The box, nice 1960's (?) artwork;
playing-on the Chariot Race from Ben Hur
on one panel, with a reasonably accurate depiction of the contents on the
larger side.
Mixing the 'small scales' here with little
animals, small plants and small plastic plants, it's a sort of 'News, Views - Bits & Bobs' with a
ragged thread running through it!
I shot these over a few days at the cusp of
the months just gone and just arrived, I'm sure they are Ink Caps (Coprinus),
but which one (there are a dozen or more) is not so clear, my bible for such
things (Philips - of course!) doesn't have a perfect match, these (in the pictures)
being a bit small for the 'standard' Shaggy Ink Cap (Lawyer's Wig), but a bit
big for the Coprinus Lagopus they otherwise more closely resembled.
The detritus left in the third shots is
what you can make the ink out of and which gives them their common-name, except
you should harvest it before it gets to the state shown here!
Apropos the Wade /
Not-Quite-But-Probably-Irish-Factory-Wade Leprechauns we saw the other day,
Peter Evans sent me this a couple of days later and I was saving it for the
actual 'News Views' but thought this was an ideal way to mix toys and
naturalism!
Those of you with a good eye will have
realised - immediately upon seeing the above - that what I wrote the other day
was a load of cobblers, he wasn't carving a boat OR a crib . . . he's a
shoemaker!
He's plastic and not sitting on an Ink Cap,
but rather a Fly Agaric, or at least a hand-painter's idea of a Fly Agaric! And
there are shade's of Fontanini in the
Carrara'esque sample of Connemara marble beneath the Fly Agaric!
A distant relative (by time rather than
blood) used to breed Connemara Greys for the London taxi trade and is known in
the family for his pronouncement in the 1900's that petrol engines were noisy
and smelly and would never take-off! He (and the taxi trade) lost his horses to
the hell of Flanders and as the Western Allies grabbed large chunks of the
former Ottoman Empire with its cheap oil (throwing electric vehicles on the
scrap-heap for three generations), he chose to retire
Sadly although not distant by blood; he's
far enough away for me to be unable to apply for Irish Citizenship - so I'm
pinning my hopes on the Tories wreaking Bwreakxit!
Shades of Tintin!
This is meant to be a Fly Agaric too, it's
a Hong Kong (branded to a 'KT') plastic cake-decoration version of a Japanese cast-lead miniature
garden ornament, the lead versions themselves replacing the even earlier
ceramic/pumice ones. It's posed in an apple I rescued from three Hornets . . .
26th September 2017
. . . these three Hornets! Note the nervous
beating a retreat . . . twice! I'd chopped a few of the rotten apples up with
the mower and they were emanating a cider-smell from the top of the
compost-bin!
24th September 2013
They get so drunk on apples at this time of
year they can't fly! This chap (probably a barren chap'ess!) fell of the
woodpile several times before I started filming and went on to make several
more attempts, getting caught in the spider's web again too!
Like human drunks struggling to make their
legs walk in a straight-line, it just couldn't get its wings to work properly,
buzzing furiously, it was going nowhere, flight-wise!
It's funny, you should be looking at
something else here today; but I put it on the back burner after faffing-around
for three hours, writing two-and-a-half lines, renumbering the images twice and
adding a screen-cap . . . it needs more work! Likewise some lovely Swoppets
were sent to the blog this week, but I'll sort them over the weekend, they
would have been rushed if I'd posted them tomorrow (Friday); so I grabbed these
two from Picasa.
Except that it's three but we'll look at
the one first! Hailing from Comet/Authenticast's
subsidiary Gaeltacht Industries'
works in the Republic of Eire, and frankly not up to the quality one would
expect from Holgar Eriksson, so possibly one of the other sculptors?
It's also funny that last weekend I shot
tons of stuff at Sandown Park, yet still haven't blogged most of the stuff I
shot at Sandown three months ago! This was one of them (from three months ago),
nice ECW musketeer, spoilt by the daft firing-arm with its elbow pointing at
the ceiling . . . or sky!
These came from a charity shop (British
Heart Foundation - I think?) about a week ago, clearly the gods (or 'your' god,
if you've only got the one!) wanted a T for Two Irish! When I first saw them
I though "Ooh, Wade",
picked up the unmarked one first and thought "No?", and then found
the mark on the other. I think they are related, the blue glaze is the same,
but for 'T is for Two' purposes, the one on the right counts.
They are similar to Wade's figurines (Seagoe Ceramics?) but
they don't have the lines on the bases. Equally they are similar to the bisque
cake decorations of yesteryear, but gloss-fired enamel, where the cake toppers
used to get a matt-paint over the fired clay. They also show signs of having been
glued to something with brown/animal glue; so maybe touristy something's?
Anyone got any ideas? I mean - clearly they
are Leprechauns and I have to be very polite to them, but - any other ideas?!!
The one on the left (Pádraig) seems to be carving a crib (Christmassy) while
the one on the right (Pádraic) seems to be panning for gold to put in a pot at the end
of a rainbow . . . of course!
For those not used to Blogger, the below 'index' allows you to find similar posts by their content, just click on the label (word) that best suits you search needs. I have tried to label by
- Country of origin of toy - Country represented by toy - Maker - Material - Scale/Size/Ratio - Era represented by toy - Whether subject is civil/military - Other 'themes' Etc...
Re-annotating the index is an ongoing project, in the meantime to save on space (there is a limit on the number of characters and the number of labels) I have started using abbreviations, which are as follows:
All other abbreviations are part of the recognised name of a company or organisation.
The hiarachy of the listing pushes non-standard letters to the end of the section so Märklin (with an umlaut) is the last 'M' &etc...the Cyrillic lettered brands are at the end of the whole list.
