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.

Saturday, December 17, 2016

C is for Crackers!

It's beginning to feel a bit like . . . something's about to happen! And when it does, you'll be gutted they don't have stuff like this in Christmas crackers any more, not even chap ones!

I picked these up at the Sandown Part Toy fair in November, the one on the left is junk, a curiosity; cheap copies of Blue Box copies of Britains farm animals, of the type we saw in the Cragstan box on the Aussies post a while back.

But the one on the right is a little more worthwhile, for the shelf-space! A set of wild (or 'zoo') animals in a little bag of the type you might also find stuffed into the larger gum-ball machine capsules or on the easy blocks near the thrower at a hoopla stall.

They are all 'bag scale' (ie; no scale), with the monkey the biggest 'in scale' and the elephant the smallest, although it's weird that most of the animals are realistic, while the elephant seems to be based on the NOSCO drinks-glass cocktail novelties?

The lioness doubles-up as a tiger! However, the thick portion of neck leads to shrinkage if they are taken out of the mould too soon, with resulting distortion pulling the heads to one side and/or shorting the neck/dropping the head.

The bear comes from Britains, via a solid-moulded HK version, although both are copies of the previous one on the time-line rather than sculpt-clones.

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