B is for Best Non-Boardgames Game . . . With Pigs - Ever!

I can't remember when I first Played Pass the Pigs but it was a long time ago, and while I have the old wood-alike, mahogany-brown, parallel-sided, plastic-case in storage with a full set of all two porkers, I couldn't resist grabbing this for a couple of quid in a charity shop the other day. In fact - I think there is a little bag of them in storage with slightly different colours of plastic, or nose/trotter paint.

If you've never played Pass the Pigs, can I suggest you do. It may not deserve the 'Best Toy Ever?' tag, but I'm giving it anyway - as it's a while since we had one here - but it's definitely the most fun you can have with two pigs in a family setting without getting yourself arrested and carted off! As this weekend is all about visiting families and stuff, now is the time to rush out and find a set.

The case has been given a make-over, using design styling from 1990's remote-controls and the 2000's Nokia mobiles; it now looks like something Captain Kirk might ask 'Bones' for . . .

"Pass me the porker-patcher . . . I've . . . got . . . to . . . to  . . . learn . . . to . . . communicate . . . with them"

"Jim; you're not well, you need to rest now"

^^ Captain; your insistent belief that these small, naked, pink creatures hold the secret to life, the universe and everything is illogical, besides; I happen to know it's 42 ^^

Basically it's a dice game with pigs! Two of them, cleverly designed to fall several ways, some more commonly than others, leading to variable point scoring, with a race to 100 for as many people as you happen to have in the room and at a loose-end.

Pigs landing on either side are a 'Pig Out' and you lose all your points that move. All other likely landing positions are scored as follows, with single scores applied as part of a 'Mixed Combo', or some harder to attain poses earning quadruple points for doubles.

Moves are as long as you want them to be, you can score once and Pass the Pigs, or be a 'Pig-head' and throw again, you can keep doing so until you get a 'Pig Out' or something worse!

Pigs leaning the same side (either a marked or un-marked side-pair) is the commonest result and earns you a measly 1-point, it's called a 'Sider' and there's no 2-for-a-double!

The 'Double-Razorback' gets you 20 points, or 5 as part of a 'Mixed Combo', the similar but not-illustrated standing 'Trotter' is also 5-or-20.

A 'Leaning Jowler' (on the left in both shots, the pig is arse-up and resting on its nose and an ear) brings in a right royal 15-points, with the extremely unlikely double scoring a 60. On the right is a plain 'Snouter' with the pig resting on its nose only, for a 10-shot, the double; 40 points.

If the dice pigs end-up touching (and remember they don't roll straight, they're pigs!), that is the ultimate crime, known as 'Makin' Bacon' (the "...something worse." and you lose all the points you've accrued in the game so far - boo-hoo, it's like the Snakes and Ladders serpent at 98 which takes you back to 4!

Recognised as a theoretical result, but considered impossible, this is the 'Piggy Back' and would A) require some fancy dice pig-flicking, B) be a pointless thing to practice throwing, as it gets you a swift exit from the game for failing to wrangle you pigs in an appropriate fashion.

A throw resulting in a combination of two different point-scoring landing positions is called a 'Mixed Combo' and scores at the lower (non-double) scoring of the poses.

A quick shot scale-sizing them with various farm figures from Britain, France and Hong Kong, with a larger Chinese figure in the centre, these two little chaps often turn-up loose in mixed lots or 'bundles' of farm or farm & zoo animals on feebleBay having escaped Pass the Pigs.

The point counter (and umpire) is known as the swineherd and there is a gambling variation. This (illustrated) version is issued by Winning Moves, although  others have carried it in the past; originally David Moffat, commonly; MB Games (my storage edition).

Boardgamegeek Passing the Pigs

One of the pigs is called Hugh . . . Hugh Pigfellow . . . Soooowwweeeee!

C is for Carboniferous-crayon Correctasaurs!

Another quickie here, I found a quid's worth of polymer dinorasers in The Works the other day and thought I'd better grab them, as these things disappear if you don't buy them when you see them - ironically though; if you do buy them they often then hang-around for months!

While I had them in front of the camera I sorted the Dino's into new boxes and took a couple of comparisons of the existing eraserpods. At the same time I bought another quid's worth of puzzel-ball eraser in Rymans which has gone on the jig-toys page.

These are the newies, somewhere between the minis and the 'standards' in size and some new colours with - from the left - a sauropod, spinosaur, meat eater (fore-claws are too big for Tyrannosaurus) and ceratopsian.

Here they are with the previous effort from The Works we looked at a year or two ago, the strangely fully-round 'flats'! You can see the new ones are quite a bit smaller, but better sculpts, However; both these sets are at least original designs, all the other dinosaur erasers we've seen here at small scale world are from the same eight sculpts . . .

. . . as can be seen in this rubber round-up.

Front left are the Imperial minis Mr. Berke kindly sent to the blog last year, with the Wilco ones to the right. Immediately behind them are the four new ones and then the four older ones from The Works with a mix of WHSmith's (blue & red) and Paperchase's (orange & green) at the back.

The thing is - all four of the WHSmith set are reproduced in the orange quartet from Paperchase, whether this means there is/was a second set of WHSmith ones mirroring Paperchase's green ones or not I don't know. Further to that though is that the later mini's are also aping seven of Paperchase's eight sculpts.

This also suggests that an eighth pose (spinosaur) may be in some of the Imperial sets, if not the Wilco ones, or, given the Wilco ones were paired more carefully than the Imperial ones, that there was a whole second assortment in the Wilco eggs?

Hawkin's Bazaar have some lovely, well detailed, bi-coloured, puzzle-eraser dinosaurs at the moment, but they are  not so cheap, so while I have looked upon them with admiration - several times; I have yet to shell-out any shekels for one!

I knocked this up at the end in case my descriptive prose was more confusing than clarifying!

Comparison of the packaging - I stress these are all contemporary or should at least still be findable, there are older erasers in storage including some Dino's (I think) so a return to wrangling rubber is inevitable!

I is for Itsy-bitsy Teeny-weeny, Little Gum-ball Capsule Thingies!

Just a quickie, I managed to get a handful of mostly vintage gum-ball prizes . . . humm . . . they're hardly prizes if you've paid a dime or a quarter for them are they . . . I managed to get a handful of mostly vintage, randomly-vended, gum-ball novelties! And you won't often find the phrase 'vintage' here, but these - with one exception - are from the 1940/50's, so deserve the term.

The 'animals' - the larger sub-group; I considered sorting them further into wild and domestic but that would have left me with a fish and/or two birds to deal with so I shot them all together, and it's a reasonable image! From left to right, top to bottom;

Parrot, squirrel, deer, monkey, pig, elephant, lamb, cat, cat. cat, rhinoceros, lion, fish, cockerel, cat.

I think -despite the appearance of celluloid (by base colour) and the fact that they are always called such on evilBay - that these are all polystyrene, with the exception of the black cat, which does seem to be an earlier phenolic plastic.

As far as Christmas crackers go; elephants and cats are still with us, but the rest have dropped by the way-side these days. I particularly like the parrot with its three-colour 'spirit paint' scheme, and the squirrel has had an all-over wash to hide the base colour. I think the thing to the left of the lion is supposed to be a rhino, but it might be the - presumably - now extinct porpoise-dog!

The 'people'; I often watch these on feebleBay and the sample here is mostly of typical or common types, I never buy on-line, the buy-it-now (BIN) prices are ridiculous, and while these were a bargain, they weren't cheap and required a quick haggle.

Two of them are very odd (on the far right) being stamped/die-cut from celluloid-sheet with a blob of molten / liquid / paste 'something - for a face, with two rods of celluloid set into it - for eyes - before it sets solid and are probably earlier production (1940's), I suspect there may also be an element of negative parody or racism about them both?

The opalescent girl is almost fully-round, the yellow/red clown is fully-round and I thought the ship was Noah's ark with a figure [or animal] at each end (hence the inclusion in the 'people' shot) but macro-photography suggests a Viking long ship - if I spent my limited means on my outstanding glasses prescription rather than old toys, I might find the study of the old toys easier, but I'd have no new toys to look at, just  a pair of shiny glasses, so I shall continue with the odd comedy-error of myopic nonsense and buy toys!

The rest . . . all four of them! The ray-gun is relatively modern and quite common on feeBay, the sword/dagger (and possibly the coral) are earlier plastic maybe, the pen (being mightier than the sword, or Trupundbrexit gobshites) is highlighted in two colours, with a turquoise wash and a gold nib . . . and that's it, a quick overview/visit to vintage gum-ball thingies!

Y is for " ♫ ♪ You Gotta' Right t'Not-Fight, But Par-ar-ar-ar-taaayyh! ♪ ♬ " ! *

So this is the stuff I live to collect for - forget yer' Airfix, yer' Jean, Elastolin or Starlux, all mass-produced, common-as-muck stuff, and how many colour variations of Marx cavalry? Who cares, they were packed in quantity in huge play-sets and piled high in ten-thousand stores, every Christmas for a decade! Britains farm and zoo? There are over a 2000 lots on evilBay - today (Farm - 1,897 lots, Zoo - 780), there will be in ten days time, there were ten day ago!

But these . . .

 . . . never seen them before, may never see them again! Best thing from Sandown, best thing this year - so far, two cool for dance school! **

What'der-yer recon? Balkans? Removed from some larger piece of tourist tat like a cuckoo clock? Cake decorations? Presumably, back in the days before globalisation, there were things like 'local' cake decorations? Wedding-cake? They could be a wedding party?

They are free-standing, but with a tendency to fall backwards and note that there is damage to a foot at either end, so they may have been removed from something which might have been a simple base, a complicated plinth or some household object? They could be the handle of the lid of a cheap butter-dish, with the other figures from a matching cruet set or sugar bowl or something!

We know a lot about UK, US and Euro toys, have learnt a lot about Aussie and NZ makers form the ACOTS guys and are now getting quite a bit on the Soviet bloc's commoner stuff, but there's a whole world out there and we know little about most of it, we don't even know what happened to Tatra's moulds after they went to Africa, probably in the 21st century!

These could be from the 'Stans, from the Balkans proper, South to one of the former Yugoslav republics, North to Bulgaria, West to Greece, are they Maltese or Cypriot (which half?!), the hats are quite Cossack-looking, black rather than red and softer outlines than true fez's (so I've ruled out Turkey arbitrarily!) which could take us up to the steppes of the Urals?

Bagpipes! Now we're in Syria or the Levant! Yeh - Scotii, you got them from the Picts who got them from the Legions, the little baby Jesus [probably] invented them two-hundred years before the Picts stopped painting each other blue like monkey's arses for long-enough to kill some Romans and take their wheezing-cat bags, you just added some notes and a fancy tartan cover!

Joking apart, they have a lot in common with the Female Italian from Codec / Commonwealth / Sanitarium and the male Turk from Sanitarium in the various World Doll/World Dancer ranges, so maybe Turkey after all! The apron and simplified skirt-stripes could place the women nicely in Skutari, Albania?

Researching this costume stuff - as I've discovered before - is not made easier by the fact that fifteen or twenty of the modern states/countries the figures may be from were in three empires in 1900; Ottoman 'European Turkey', Austro-Hungary and Imperial Russia.

The bag-piper has a wire-nail trumpet, but a plastic finger-whistle-mouthpiece-thing and is a single moulding with the nail presumably set into a jig in the tool before each shot. The brown 'worms' on him and the figure below were perished rubber-bands, used to hold them all together at some point in the past - let's hear it for click-shut bags.

All the figures are a creamy-white or neutral plastic, definitely polystyrene (as I mended some damage to the line-up) and are all-over painted in at least 12 colours - all of which are on the seven-figure line-up; flesh, pink, red, blue, pea-green, dark-green, yellow, tan, brown, black, white and gold.

These two however only add to the mystery, they initially looked as if their arms had been broken off, but close-ups show that they are just formed flatter (and possibly - further glue-melted) and with the deliberate hollow formed in the centre of their chest they seem to have been removed from something large; a base-drum, a May-pole, a dancing partner, a circus act . . . who knows?

Someone does - somewhere! They had to be informally discussed, formally planned, designed, funded, ordered, master-sculptured, pantographed, cleaned-up, test-shot, manufactured, packed, wholesale-marketed, shipped, retail-advertised, sold, used, discarded, found, sold-again and moved to Surrey, over maybe a 30/50 year period? Somewhere; someone knows all about them!

You want to know more about Cherilea Wild West? Google them!

You want to know more about these? Tough!

---------------------------------------------

* With apologies to the Beastie Boys!

** Actually it's a toss-up between these and the whale, as Balkan dancers can't have a fair fight with a whale, it'll have to be a draw for now! Look out for best ever non-board game game . . . with pigs . . . ever; coming soon!

And many thanks to Adrian Little who as good as gave me the bag of bits which contained both these figures and the whale!

P is for Puff-powered Paper & Puffy-Polymer 'Planes

In my day (he says; making himself sound like an old git!) they were all paper or balsa-wood, now they are mostly expanded polystyrene foam, but you still find the odd paper one!

This post is a bit off the beaten track of Small Scale World, and was in part the result of unexpected consequences, following that weird sycamore-Superman I showed back in February, in that Brain B sent a couple of shelfies of equally wacky playthings to the Blog, and it encouraged me to build a post round them, mainly because one set were . . .

. . . Cars tie-ins and I hate Cars like I hate anything, so probably would not otherwise have used the images! From Unique who do appear here from time to time as purveyors of quality tat and novelty polymer loveliness, they are four to a pack and probably as much-fun as anything else in their price-bracket.

There is a Marvel Avengers Assemble set as well - also with four models, but they all appear to be the same; both sets seem to be made from die-cut foam-core sheets which may make them a tad heavy, still; a sharp push into the wind and they should do the business.

And the business is . . . ephemeral fun, which if not timeless, probably goes back to well before the Wright brothers - if Da Vinci was drawing them, chances are kids were experimenting with toy ones?

As Mr. Berke was sending me his shelfies I had been buying this from Clinton's as a birthday card for someone who's hard to buy cards for!

I went back for a second; the wings were a bit loose until I worked out how to shove them back into a tightening section, not bad and all-paper! Despite the militaristic marking, it's unarmed, clearly a two-seater and probably based on a trainer or powered-glider of some kind.

Ah, yes . . . this, believe it or not; is HTI's Thunderbolt. Back in the day - the balsa-wood day that is - they were either outline printed in black on wood, or they came with a reasonable two or three colour screen-print; this has been fully litho'ed, but poorly and onto un-sized, expanded-polystyrene, which gives a opalescent look.

It has fold-up ailerons and stabilisers in the wings and tail respectively which the old balsa ones didn't, but we sometimes put them in our folded-paper 'planes at school, it usually resulted in a nose-dive or a tail-stand . . . followed by a nose-dive!

By now I was on a roll vis-à-vis getting a post together, and discovered that not only do women get less wages and pay more for their pink stationary, but despite making-up slightly more that half the toy-buying population, they pay more for their glider-toys too! This was £1.50 against the 99p's and flat £'s of the 'boys toys'! Investing in journalistic excellence, or being taken for a mug? Doh!

More like the ones Brian sent to the Blog as shelfies this one from Grossman's HGL is properly three-colour printed on foam-core board, and despite it's odd look, fly's as well as any . . . oh yeah; there's been ruthless testing!

Only this weekend I saw Tobar gliders of Dinosaurs, the same fighters we're about to go back to, and something else which I've forgotten, something cartoony and/or thematic? And I remember birds from when I was a kid.

But here's a thing - when I was rushing around looking for a couple of these to Blog a few weeks ago, at 5.25pm in a small parochial town that goes dark at 5.29 on the dot - I went into the discount store and asked if they had any and they didn't, but on Saturday - they had three different boxes of them . . . clearly; it pays to ask!

Although now I feel guilty for the little toy shop, as they did have them last time and that's where I ended up getting the four in this post, but now they have competition a few doors down, and it may be my fault! They had HTI and Tobar mixed in the same dispensing box, and after getting the Thunderbolt, I went back for a spitfire and Tomahawk, and half-wish I hadn't, as we'll see.

But first a comparison of the two packagings reveals that there is a slight difference in line-up, both companies are offering 12 aeroplanes, but only 11 are duplicated between ranges with HTI offering a MkII Spitfire to Tobar's Hellcat, as these sets always had a Messerschmitt Me.109 when I wer't'lad, I can safely assume they are both purchasing from a longer list offered by the Asian manufacturer. Also there's a couple of oddities on the list - Focke Wulf trainer?

Tobar's artwork shows them as they could be, HTI's as they are, you will notice there are only a few different pressings, with HTI the different artwork used is 'best as can be'; once you've opened the packing the actuality . . .

. . . is far more disappointing, with very poor QC, very poor registering within the cut lines, very poor pigmentation, very poor accuracy (we have a Japanese Tomahawk!), mirror-image of fuselage-halve artwork, leading to inverted lettering and reversed codes, all very poor!

The reason all the shots of the Thunderbolt above show the same side, is because the other side looked more like melted bubble-gum than aircraft artwork! And these were almost as bad, all over - a pinky-purple mess.

At least HTI aren't going to disappoint to the level Tobar's are!

I will look out for vintage versions and maybe come back to these in a few years - there were advertising premiums and some used to have a central balsa spar to which a rubber-band motor and wire-mounted wheels could be added, but if you're of a certain age; you know that, we all got through a couple or more - every summer!

I think I may have a four-engined Lancaster Bomber from a beach-day in the 1990's somewhere in storage, which was a better print, but the same sheet-foam construction - for now though; that's 'paper' planes!

29-03-18 (Very auspicious day!) Re- Tomolio's comment, these are being imported into the Antipodes by Pink Poppy - anyone recognise the logo on the stock-box?

F is for Frangible French Fancies and Feebly Fragile Fellows

The reason I've so much in Picasa is because I shoot a lot of stuff without much thought, and then either don't know what to do with it, get a sort of writers-block, or just wait for something else to come along, this post is one of the latter, in that something else came along, but it was one of the former in that I didn't know how to deal with it!

It's a ridged vac-form; but polystyrene rather than celluloid and French; rather than Japanese. Or - at least - those present at the time of the photographing were pretty-much agreed it was 'probably' French, and that included a couple of the Dutch antique toy dealers, so they knew their onions!

For a while it looked like we might get a manufacturer's name, no-one could come-up with one (another reason they sat in Picasa for a while - I was waiting for the following show to see if anyone had anything further to add!), while the designs are a bit space-age for actual cars I think (but happily stand to be corrected; I'm no expert or follower of 1940's (?) cars).

There was only the two designs (on show - I'm sure the range was larger), the above racer and these long, sleek sports coupes, again; more space-age than actual I feel, the sort of thing you'd expect in a Dick Tracy or Mask cartoon! Although . . . the sports-car might be a known 'concept car' from the 1930/40's; with the blue-racer being a rendition of a real vehicle?

Wooden wheels attached to steel-wire axles; it's impossible to see how the axles are attached to the belly-pan due to the flush fairings, but presumably some kind of half-tube is glued over the little trench in the delicate tray, indeed - both body and tray/belly-pan are less than a millimetre thick.

Colours are understated but nice, and one wonders how they ever survived in this state, someone must have loved them enough to keep them un-played-with in a sturdy box, or maybe they were old shop-stock forgotten in a shed or garage?

The same sense of wonderment accompanied these, which were on Mercator Trading's stall at the last Sandown Park (the cars were on the same stand back in September) and may still be available from the website?

They are all different, also 'probably French' and full blow-moulds. They are all slightly different and seem to depict pre- or early-WWI French troops from before the move to Khaki, so could be well-over a hundred years old? I suspect only 'depicting' and probably from the inter-war or even immediate post-WWII periods, but still, how have they survived . . . and near-mint?

I know I shouldn't give the ammunition to my envious haters, but I'll have a guess at a mix of Alpine troops and Chasseurs? Rare as rocking-horse shit anyway! They were about five or six-inches tall (I didn't measure them), glued to 'plasticard' bases and unlike the string arrangements of similar Japanese-made figures they have plug-in arms like cheap dolls or the arms those Action Man clones used to have (except the officer who is a simpler, single-piece sculpt), again; they seem also to be polystyrene rather than the celluloid you'd expect of some Japanese equivalents.

27-07-2018 The Figures are now ID'd as Unis from the 1920s and copies of SFBJ metal sculpts - tags added

F is for First Bee . . . Not!

Actually it's the second, I saw my first flying bee about three weeks ago, even as the weather was closing in for the 'Beast from the East' (and the bloody 'i' ran with 'Snowmageddon', as I had predicted someone would in a post earlier that week - Grace Dent; shame on you!), it was a little black one with an 'international orange' bum, and it shot into a land-drainage pipe, set in a retaining wall outside an office building, so fast I didn't have a chance to photograph it.

This was the first of several today (Saturday 24th March), but it had been shut in the little greenhouse unnoticed, yesterday and was looking a bit weak, so I placed it on the daff' for a feed in the hope it would regain its strength and fly home.

They don't always go down the trumpet, I photographed this one in 2009, and you can see it's made one hole already in the back of the Daffodil, and is busy making another, I believe it had also felled the flower by cutting though the stalk first, in order to have a more stable 'breakfast bowl'? They suck the nectar straight from the reservoir - The vandals!

N is for Not!

Further to the unknown Rhineland frog, these are the figures I was thinking of, when I said I recognised the bases . . .

. . . and - as you can see - they are very different from the frog. These two Marx clones (the tatty, damaged one on the left may or may not be from the same source) are probably from some kind of candy container, or clip-into a cheap rack-toy AFV or bath-toy vessel, but with the stalk attached to the base; are very different.

So if anyone can help with the unknown frog its owner is still after an ID.

P is for Postponed Plastic-Plunder Post

I think 'P' only ever gets used for Plastic and Plunder! Over three weeks ago now, the first date in a calendar which these days only really has five dates in it, it's ages (eight or nine years?) since I went to the Kent or Birmingham shows, I caught a London show a while back (two years ago?), but really these days it's four Sandown Parks, Plastic Warrior, the charity shops and maybe one or two evilBay purchases per month.

So the shows are quite important, both for the collection and for the Blog; but before we see what I got, I think it's equally important to thank the organisers (BP Fairs) who moved mountains to save the show from the weather, and succeeded - in my opinion.

It was clear that a lot of stall-holders had cancelled, but by the time people started to arrive all the tables had been re-jigged to account for those cancellations (which can only have been short notice, the weather was only really bad from the previous Wednesday evening) in such a manner as to mean the hall-maps were still reasonably-accurate to where people where, and - as more sellers didn't turn-up on the day - they continued to spread the load - as it were -  to ensure than the day was still worth attending, which several buyers I spoke to said it was, and while traffic was down, it was still brisk and busy to the mid-afternoon.

The whole stash! You'll recognise quite a bit as we've had some of it on the Blog already, this was mostly from mixed lots, rummage trays, 50p tubs, one was a ten-for-a-pound tub, I had several quid out of that, and then there was a bag from Adrian I've previously mentioned (the whale Ahab; the whale!). I managed to find a handful of nice civilians on Abid's tables, I was tempted by some of his trains too, but I can't run to those budgets when there are figures everywhere!

And! A bag of put-asides had travelled down from the Midlands from Graham Apperley, which was very kind of him and a nice surprise for me! I can't remember everything in it (or Adrian's) as they were all sorted into the below without separate photo's, but it had all sorts of nice things in, much of the game-playing fantasy stuff for instance.

We've looked at the Lido stuff so moving swiftly along - the right-hand stuff is all composition apart from the hollow rubber or semi-perished latex British soldier. A few tatty 40mm Linol's that will need new rifle tips, a couple of train staff, one is in Schiffmann - Band 12 as unknown, the other seems even more unknown - bargain!

A couple of Brent's WWII (one of each size) and an export type, small-size (54mm), Elastolin (British head on German jack-booted legs, painted as an American!) make up the batch.

'Early British' or similar on the left, nothing terribly exciting, along with the VT wagon we looked at here the other day (it seems to have got itself into two shots!), while on the right were the animals - including the Whale . . . it's a whale; that dives and floats; too cool for cetacean-schools!

The two sheep are marked Italy, but a soft PVC so newish precepi I think? A Lucky donkey, a pug-dog which is interesting but has poor paint and a bit of hollow-cast in the rabbit and poultry department, although I think the white hen is a solid lump!

Vehicles and War Gaming sections; the vehicles are all pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, but the cereal premiums are in uncommon colours and the bag of green stuff (Lido HK copies) will reappear in rack-toy month, I was probably most pleased with the marked-Kleeware locomotive whistle, and I never say no to board-game flats, especially when they are also motorcycles.

The war gaming being a bunch of rather brittle Spencer Smith and two Willies . . . or were they Suren's, I've put them away now!

Civilians and Sportsmen on the left, medieval on the right, we've looked at the better of the medieval stuff, while the civi' stuff held no real surprises, apart from the bag bottom-right, which I took the shots of last night (Wed 21st) and will hopefully post sometime next (this) week.

Fantasy, carton, silly and gaming pieces on the left here, 'Interesting Misc' on the right, mostly Euro-polymer with a couple of early British and some 1970's small-scale space!

On the left the highlight is the plaster Christmas cake decorations, even though one is a bit molasses-stained (the plaster draws it out of the cake!) as I think they are both new sculpts to the collection.

Also in the fantasy lot the bottom-right bag is Havok, and figures I didn't have, no bases, but anyone following the blog back in the day will remember a bunch of extra bases, so hopefully I'll have another set out of it all?

Army-men and ancients, the big bag of Chinatroops will also return in RTM, the smallies are just colour variations of the sub-Blue Box stuff looked at before here, I think I have the HK-marked 8th army chap but two are better than one!

Now - does anyone know for sure which kit the cavemen come from, I tend to assume Aurora, but I'm not sure which kit (until I get the Aurora book out of storage), simply on the number of them that turn-up, but other people did kit-type 'playsets' including Revell and Marx I think and I'd like to get him labelled, there's a her as well - if memory serves - running?

See! The wagon snuck across the bedspread and got itself into another shot, like one of those 5th-formers or NCO's who used to run around the back of the school-/company-photo; to appear at both ends in the final print! I notice also te non-animal flats have escaped a close-up, but we’ve seen them on the blog.

The Gun has figures and is for RTM, the tub has something for a future post the black and multi-coloured bags are pieces from a board-game I have to research before posting (thanks to Graham Apperley for those), while I took the shots of the gum-ball charms last night with the ethnic dancers, so should post any day now.

All in all a useful haul, it all adds to the whole, thanks again to Adrian and Graham for the put-aside bags; that's where the real treasures and ephemeral oddities turn-up!

J is for Just Because

We used to be busy making a better world . . .

. . . now we seem content to watch it turning to shit around us.

Thought for the day

Everything drugged-up, long-haired, pinko, commie, lefties, that sexual deviant, work-shy, hippy trash, those beatnik, drop-out flower-children, the bohemian freaks and activists ever said about the environment, population, air quality water pollution, soil, trees, the oceans and rhinoceroses has come true, yet we allow the 'suits' to keep urging us to have more babies and buy more stuff . . . and pay more for it; why?

Q is for Question Time - Rhine Find, Saved from the Oceans!

Reader Sylvia found this in the silt of the River Rhine and asked after it, while I'm sure I have some flats with similar two-part bases (with heavy machine-tooling marks), I can't even picture them at the moment (with my eyes shut - which usually works), so does anyone recognise it?

Semi-flat frog musician, who I suspect is polyethylene; to have retained all the guitar-string tighteners on it's way down the Rhine? Were there some Italian toy soldiers with those bases? Anyway, if you recognise this, Sylvia would love to know more about it . . . premium?

F is for Follow-up - Lido et al.

I'm an idiot; I forgot to include these in the Lido post the other day despite Brian sending them to me at the beginning of January! I'd mentally put them on the back-burner as I wasn't expecting to revisit the subject for some time; now, not only have we had another Lido post (link), but here's a follow-up!

It was with a bunch of US Cereal premiums, but the 'Berserker' suggests it's a full size Lido original, and in a nice 'Dime Store' bronze plastic. Thanks Mr. B, and I'm sorry I forgot to include it the other day - one day we'll reprise all of them in one post!

While I'm on the subject, the really clean silver one I was not sure/wondering about? It may be a Le Hommeel Camembert cheese-premium? Thanks to Ludo's forum for that one!

F is for Follow-up - Blow Moulded Cart Horse

Just a quick follow-up to the other day'spost; showing that while a perfect 54mm/1:32nd scale and similar to Britains 'heavy' . . .

. . . the flocked HCF draft horse isn't exactly the same as the Britains one either (we looked at the Timpo version last time), but seems to be a pose of its own (unless you know better?) with a prouder head and more-bent legs. I took the opportunity to look - properly - for signs of a tail, or signs of a an ex-tail's glue or pin hole, there isn't any; so it's fair to assume he was docked from birth!