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.

Monday, December 14, 2015

S is for Scary-Monsters and Super-Creeps

Sung in a nasal voice: "She had an horror of rooms...full of toys!"

The term 'Rubber Jigglers' tends to brings to mind small hideous finger monsters, usually made of a semi-transparent silicone- or similar-rubber in an orange, flesh or khaki shade, over-sprayed with blobs of colour, maybe with eyes dotted in, but they have a term of their own 'Finger Monsters'!

The jigglers label extending out to various other cheapie toys (confined to capsule/gum-ball machines and shop-stock boxes or cards, rather than the smaller cracker and premiums type novelty sources) made of soft, synthetic-polymer, rubberised materials, which jiggle as they are moved, played with or dangled from an elastic cord.

We looked at a bunch of the sucker-fitted ex-LP sculpt jigglers a while ago, a large ant/bug thing the other day and I'm working on a page for the finger puppets (just because I say they're hideous doesn't mean I don't collect them!), but there are also more realistic jigglers, these constitute a quick overview:

Spiders, lizards (or are they newts?), frogs (not illustrated) a frog-monster, bats, snakes, all firm favourites with the William Brown type schoolboy of any generation in the last 50 years. But; leave them in a styrene capsule too long and they'll eat it with the same power an Airfix Tiger tank's tracks had, to eat their host, in the same era!

This is an early window walker, quite a popular novelty now, they can be much larger with ball extremities to flick-over and walk down the wall. This one on the other hand moves very slowly, and has leaked an unstable fluid into it's instruction-sheet over time, yet remains as sticky as ever! It's also tiny.

Three snakes, one a modern ethylene one (small, pale blue, semi-flat/relief design), you may well find in your cracker in 11 days time, under him is a 1970's classic in stretchy jade-green rubber (the only true jiggler in this trio) and under him is a more realistic 1990's dense PVC model with a half-hearted paint-job. We saw the spiders the other day, but boy; could you get you mother/sister/aunt to scream with a well timed reveal of a jiggling spider!

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