Teenage Karimata

 As a young teenager I was obsessed with Samurai weapons.

One of my faves were the Karimata or braid cutting arrows. 

Recent I saw this set of hangers in a DIY shop and it all came flooding back, how I used the Y shaped ones to make my own Karimata, shoving the screw end into a bamboo stick and inserting card fletches at the other end. 

With my massively long bow they flew perfectly. 

Here's a sketch gallery of arrows including Karimata.

And here are the real thing with their tangs, minus the arrow bodies.

It's hard to put into words just how passionately obsessed I was with samurai and all things Martial Arts back when I was around 12 or 13 in the early 1970's. They were such gloriously happy days.

Here's a very grainy pic I took back then on an instamatic of my Kung Fu cellar in our house. You can just about make out a couple of bows far left on the back wall and at least one whistling arrow, but sadly no Karimata.

We're you into samurai or martial arts?

The Space Janter

This Space Janter looks so

 familiar.

Is it Star Wars? Batman?

I like it anyway.

You?

Wow! International Airways By Technofix!

This tinplate treasure looks a bit special. I mean, Javol!

By Technofix of West Germany it's a real avionic wonder. The finish and box art are superb.

Anyone got one?

Batman Aurora

https://youtube.com/shorts/SAWtfLL21ZE?si=pGEfFFn5ykq6Q0OJ  

Happy Halloween week Moonbase!!!

Regards MJ 

Sometimes a Great Lotion

 After rescuing all my four JR21 books from the waste compacter of Blurb's spring-clean, I was feeling understandably pleased with the prospect of all four files now being saved from corruption or deletion and reformatted to look the same like a fresh minty box set.

Yep, contentment swept over me like a bag of Haribo, but alas the gremlins hadn't quite finished!

Laid up yesterday in my sick bed nursing a bad dose of lurgy and Vick's menthol lotion on my chest,  I kept myself mentally busy writing a short story. Open to innovation I tried a Speech to Text app for the first time and happily warbled away with not a care in the world. Unfortunately after about five hundred words the app simply deleted the content! I should have heeded this obvious bad omen.

Fed up with innovation I switched back to typing on my phone, using draft Gmail as I always do.

Over several hours the story progressed and progressed, paragraphs being regularly saved and before I knew it I had a fully formed tale on my hands of about 5,000 words, about 10 pages and just short of the grand finale.

I was pleased with it and it was at this point I aimed my finger for 'save' once more but for some odd reason, which I can now only attribute to my cold, I pressed the 'discard' tab instead!

Now, if like me, you thought discarding a draft was like deleting onr, you'd be wrong and disastrously so.

Discarding a draft is like instantly shredding it and feeding the strips to the Pit of Sarlac, where they are dissolved forever.

After frantically searching my trash, junk and spam folders, only to find nothing, the terrible realisation began to dawn on me that I had lost my work for good.

Speech to text was just the opening act. The discard button, fatally positioned immediately below save, was the main event and no matter how much I tried the various desperate measures other discarded victims listed online, my story was gone.

With the bittersweet tang of Vicks vapour rub reddening my wide eyes I laid back and submitted completely to the abject misery of technology's wrath. 

Have you lost anything important readers?

☠️

Bommy Night

 Once huge in the UK, Bonfire or Bommy night has suffered the censoring scissors of health and safety, as fireworks have became more difficult for kids to buy themselves and burns and injury became an increasing problem during the 60's, 70's and 80's.

Now it's a fiery footnote to a much bigger Halloween here in Britain.

Still, when I was a kid, boomer bonfire nights were very special. None of the cordoned organised council fires we have now, most families lit a pile of timber in their own back gardens or streets back then.

The poor old guy was chucked onto the flames in an act of patriotic fervour, mostly lost on us kids, who, after hawking it round the neighbourhood or sitting with it asking for firework pennies, simply wanted to see it burn and eat some grub.

Food around the fire was mostly rustic but delicious fayre like toffee apples, pork pie and peas and bags of rock hard teeth-shattering bonfire toffee, which I still adore.

The highlight of the dark evening was the firework display of snowcones and roman candles, usually supervised by Dad and often the Standard brand, who ran a very catchy TV ad campaign, which British kids of our generation will no doubt be humming to themselves at some point today:

"Do you remember the fifth of November?

Light up the Sky with Standard Fireworks!"

As I write this post with my imaginary sparkler, what are you doing this Bonfire Night readers? 

🧨

Is it Already Time to Talk Christmas?

 The M&S Christmas food ad is on UK TV now.

Is it too early to be talking about Christmas?

When does it really start?

What do you think readers?

Is Dizzy Bug a Koyo Turtle?

 In the late Sixties I was given a game at Christmas called Dizzy Bug by Joyment.. 

I recall it clearly, a sort of frantic tin bug arena in a large box. It was great fun.

Remember it?

The tin bugs were blue and pink domes with a small head a lot like a ladybird.

Underneath were two powerful pull-back windable wheels, which gave the bugs the juice to whizz round the arena and into a coloured slot. White slots didn't count I don't think.

Those bugs really did whizz and I've often wondered if Joyment came up with the whizzing tin bug design.

I now think they were originally Japanese by a company called Koyo, a logo with a capital K inside a kite as seen below.

These Koyo bugs had the same wheels.

The most common design was a turtle in various patterns. These turtles may well be the brand's signature design. 

Koyo also released a ladybird too.

I have seen other designs such as this bunny.

The same wheels are featured.

There may well be many more styles.

So, Is it possible that Joyment got hold of some Koyo turtles and  as a result thought up Dizzy Bug?

What do you think readers?

Richard Allen's Skinhead

 I remember these from the Seventies. I saw them in bookshops back then.

My memory was jogged by a modern monotone reprint of Skinhead I saw in a charity shop in Castleford,  but it's the colourful NEL original I remember.

Suedehead is the other NEL paperback I recall vividly, never really knowing what a suedehead was. I didn't know any.

Richard Allen's quest to novelize every category of Seventies British yoof knew no bounds!

Books all new to me but available online include Knuckle Girls and Terrace Terrors.  I have to wonder if the author made these group names up or were they known like that?

Are the cover characters on the Allens actors do you think?

Boot Boys is a sub-culture I came across as a young teenager and these two fellas look more stylish than I remember them being. I knew them as Bovver Boys, who's passion was a bit of aggro and some argee bargee!

Sorts and Smoothies are new to me. Well, I can guess what a Smoothie was - I reckon a sort of mod - but Sorts, no. Clearly a girl thing. But hang on, that Smoothie bloke is on the Boot Boys cover too! He had two careers!

There's no doubt more Richard Allen field guides like these. What about Mods, Hippies, Greasers, Bikers, Teds, Punks, Yobs and Rockers?

Are these paperbacks icons now would you say? 

The Bluebird CN8

 I was amazed by this Bluebird CN8 design on isrinmin. I'd never seen it before.

This is a model by Soldan Models and I can find very little else about this particular model.

The CN8 was a conceptual supersonic vehicle with a view to breaking speed records in the 1960's, which was never produced.

It bears a little resemblance to the Century 21 Task Force 1, especially the Tarheel blue American.

Have you come across any dart-shaped vehicles, boats or planes readers?

Cold and Recovery

 Well, the whole family - daughter, SiL, Grandkids, Missus and me - has been struck by the common cold and members are at varying stages of misableness.

After keeping it in abeyance this weekend somehow whilst attending a large family gathering in Leyland its geared up with avengance today, so I've been in bed most of this Monday on my new laptop and drinking hot tea in between sneezes.

A big job has been trying to recover a corrupted file for my latest book project with Blurb on the X-series of toys.

After several hours of re-pasting Bill's fabulous photos and my archived pictures, Stage 1 of the recovery has uploaded and I now need to complete Stage 2, the text edits again, which will take a good hour.

More steaming Yorkshire tea is required before I carry on though.

Have you got a cold?

Have you ever lost or corrupted an important computer file readers? Did you recover it?

Image: Bill Bulloch

Kelly's Cover

 You can spot a Kelly Freas a mile off. It's those twinkling stars and the fluid limbs.

This ANALOG cover is a great example of his fantastic style. I don't fancy the explorers' chances. Those panthoids look hungry. Is one riding the other?

Do you like Kelly Freas's style?

La Navicella Spaziale Anyone?

 

This Italian space toy looks so familiar. What is it I'm thinking of? Space Precinct?

Anyone got this toy?

And the sticker at the top left says Kidco! Are they the importers?

Tron Ares

Ever since I first saw Tron way back when I've been hooked.

The geometry, the costumes, the grid, Flynns, the bikes, the whole techno world: I loved it all, which looking back, is odd, as I'm not a gamer at all. In fact I've never played a single computer game in my life.

A few years back I saw the superb Tron sequel, Legacy and just this week I caught the new Tron Ares.

I was blown away, I loved it as well. 

No spoilers here. Needless to say the whole Tron architecture is still there, all the sights, all the lines, all the sounds.

Wunderbar!

Is it something you would see readers? 

NATIONAL LUNAGRAPHIC

                               

One of the great benefits of working in a University library is that there are sometimes large donations of books coming in. Nine time out often, they will be text books or out of date volumes, but now and then we get other materials that donors have brought in, with the intention of being distributed again to students. This week we had 7 crates delivered of books, presumably from a staff member who was having a clear out and amongst the volumes of Shakespeare and linguistics texts, I spotted the unmistakable gold cover of a National Geographic. Even more exciting was the cover feature and the free gift! The July 2019 issue was a Moon Landing commemorative issue and included a facsimile edition of the July 1969 edition too. National Geographic is renowned for its editorials and award winning photography and both the early edition and the new one do not disappoint on either front.

The 69 edition covers the planning and execution of the landmark Apollo 11 mission and includes some wonderful shots of the period. The articles are laid out with large splash pages of glorious colour imagery to compliment the reportage.

 Besides recording the historic event, the article also capture the zeitgeist of the era in classic form

Interspersed with actual photography are some artist renderings of the manoeuvres and landing, as well as flight plans and maps.

The mission photography is glorious and shows all the salient points of the flight, especially interesting are the telescopic shots of the Saturn V separation and the spent stages burning up in the atmosphere.

The final part of the article looks at future ambitions for the space race, with a view towards visiting Mars and the development of the Skylab research station.

The 2019 edition is equally - if not more impressive, making use of modern graphical techniques and a wealth of data from the previous decade.

The article is heavily illustrated with images of Russian rocket launches, as the Soyuz capsule was in frequent use to supply the International Space Station at the time and NASA did not have a regular rocket based service in operation, relying more heavily on the Shuttle.

The main thrust of the edition is the move towards a return to the Moon and ultimately Mars, with a discussion on the projected direction of plans for NASA and commercial vehicles, such as SPACEX. It also looks back at the enthusiasm and wonder of the space age and how it was reflected in the culture of the sixties, from automotive design to toys.

One of the main spreads even includes a nod to Mattel's Man in Space, Major Matt Mason, with an image of the man himself on a fold out insert.

As expected with the National Geographic, the photography is backed up by sumptuous infographics and diagrams, showing the developments of the spacesuit and projected exploration of the Solar System.

Possibly my favourite part of the graphics is the map of the lunar surface, which clearly makes full use of current lunar photographic records as the basis, obtained by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, just as information from the Lunar Orbiter series of probes in 1967 was used as the basis of maps for the Apollo mission.