E is for Eye Candy - Timpo Police Tourist Trinket

Actually a 'Seen elsewhere' item, but the two recurring titles will be interchangeable!

A simple window box with a commercially available postcard as the backdrop, and a set of the Timpo 'solid' Police figures. There appears to have originally been a smooth foil round the sides of the box, to illuminate with reflected light?

N is for Nostalgia - Christmas Bits

The last of the seasonal stuff I think, and an eclectic trio, one's been in the collection for decades, one arrived yesterday and the other pair are 'found objects' from this year's forensic crap.

This - shot earlier in the year as I was sorting stuff - is the box and contents (less the carefully removed charms) of a set we looked at here, a few years back, and as I said then, the set's vaguely titled 'Old World Series' but there's no apparent or hard-and-fast branding, it's the sort of thing Tom Smith might have been behind as contract-manufacturers/wholesalers for someone else, and is most interesting for the cross-over from bass-metal to plastics (see link).

This came yesterday, in a parcel from Kazakhstan! The contents of the parcel will make a separate post, but I thought this was charming, it's an old Soviet-era Christmas card, and apart from the Cyrillic-language of the 'Merry Xmas' (or whatever) message, is no different to similar cards available in the west, then or now.

You see, it's important to realise - as Putin masses troops on Ukraine's boarders - that away from the shit of capitalist industrialists, religious conservatives or those who would rule us, we are all the same, with the same hopes or dreams, sensibilities or sentimentalities, and while you can go-off those who get taken-in by the populists, they aren't 'our' wars, and there is enough money, right-now, on this planet, to feed, house and clothe every man, woman and child - approximately $250,000 per head.

The fact that a few dozen fuckwits are using most of it to have public ego-tripping, penis-size competitions, whether of the Putin/Bolsanaro/Trump type, or the Musk/Bezos/Branson type is immaterial - they will kill us all, while we buy their shit or vote for them!

Found these in Mum's papers! The exclamation mark is because we did get novelty combs in our Christmas stockings, several times I think, and one year we got elephants, which were styled like these (I still have mine somewhere I think?), and were the same red and blue.

Now, knowing how fair-minded Mum was, I suspect she intended to give us these the next year with colours reversed, but lost them in her chaotic filing system, as with the second pair of markers? I'll never know for sure now, sadly, but that that is what they were for - Christmas stockings - I have no doubt! I shall, at some point, pass them on to other little people, for the intended purpose.

M is for More on Mecki

Mr Berke of New York sent these into the blog, he bought them many years ago in Germany, and hopes to follow-up further, with more of the little Mecki figures, but it might be a year or two before he digs them out of the stash - a situation I can sympathise with!

There's something slightly disturbing about a lady-mouse with bare-legs in tights or stockings! And what's happened to Mr. Mouse's ears, is he trying to do a Micky impersonation? That's Micky the mouse, not Micky the Mrs. Hedgehog. It's as if they never finished them?

Threading a needle and picking Edelweiss of a cliff . . . they can be easier to find! Another worry is how many real hedgehogs were used in the production of the studio hedgehog puppets; that doesn't look like faux-fur to me! Indeed they are really gnomes with a whole-hedgehog head-transplant!

I love the little appfelsaft glass, I have many happy memories of stopping in these big roadside 'country-club'/beer hall/restaurant things in the meadow-valleys of Bavaria or Wuttenberg and having a large glass of ice-cold apple-juice; huge wooden chalets, with painted murals and colourful window-boxes, tables out in the sun and being allowed to say "Noch-mal" or "Eine-mal" and having the waitress tick my beer-mat with her biro!

Meanwhile Macki and Mucki are about to dive into a blank-monge! Funny; you give small black eyes to an alien in a sci-fi movie = evil; give the same eyes to a stuffed hedgehog = cute!

Saving frogs was never more salient than now, to be honest thought, that frog looks either dead and beyond help, or very hung-over! While I'm not sure if he's planting something exotic in the right-hand image, or cursing the spread of the dreaded wild-garlic to his allotment?

The reverse of the cards; thanks Brian, with these and Peter's group the other-day we have definitely 'informed, educated or entertained' the audience about Mecki, here at the Better Blogging Corporation!