light up the sky with standard fireworks!

As Scoop said, its November the Fifth today. Bonfire Night here in the UK.

I loved it as a kid. It was MUCH bigger than Halloween then, a situation reversed now I would say.

Bonfire or Bommy Night in the 60's was a family affair where we all stood round a bonfire and Dad let off fireworks. Then we'd go and watch other people's fireworks too!

Even buying the fireworks was left to Dad for some reason and I can vividly remember my Dad own bringing home boxes of Standard Fireworks like this, THE brand of the 60's and 70's. 

We'd eat bonfire toffee and maybe have pea soup with ham shank to keep us warm on the cold winter night.

Fireworks were the thing on Bommy Night. I don't think I ever got any toys.

I think Bonfire Night is on the wane nowadays. Do you agree?

Take care if you are celebrating tonight.

REMEMBER, REMEMBER...

Although Bonfire Night is tomorrow, November 5th, most celebrations will take place tonight. If the weather's dry and still, there'll be an eerie glow in the air, as street lights mix with ash and the smoke from spent fireworks.

'Remember,remember!

The fifth of November,

The Gunpowder treason and plot;

I know of no reason

Why the Gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot!

As I write this I can already hear  firework sounds starting outside, and the sound of crackling wood. Although I find it tremendously nostalgic, thankfully, my pet cats, who I have to admit appear indifferent to the noise, are indoors, as the sounds will generally go on till just after 10.00 pm tonight.

For those not letting off fireworks in their back gardens, there's usually an organised event nearby. There might even be a small display at my local pub.

So if you're out celebrating tonight, take care and follow the firework code:

A Standard Fireworks TV Advert from 1986

And another, that's slightly less dramatic.

DALEK INVASION 3D DIORAMA

Being fond of dioramas, (and Daleks) I do like the Dalek Invasion Character Options 3D 'Time Zone' play set.

Although it’s very much set in the up-to-date rebooted world of Doctor Who, it does put me in mind of the classic Dalek Invasion of Earth story.

It’s scaled to suit the 3.75" Wave 4 Doctor Who figures, and comes with an exclusive bronze Dalek Hoverbout.

Here's the Hoverbout with the Character Builder Dalek Spaceship in the background.

According to the back of the boxes there are five sets, of which I have four – The Dalek Invasion, The Angels Take Manhattan, Hide and the later Into The Dalek (which features a black Hoverbout, as well as other figures)  I’m missing ‘Cold War’. Each set is designed to click next to the other to create a ‘bigger zone’.

The Hoverbout is the big plus point for me though, and a great accessory for the smaller range of figures.

Next time I’ll take a look at the larger Into The Dalek set.

attracted to space tractors

Above is the beautiful GM Bison

Above is the Japanese Starbood

Above is the Triang SpaceX Tractor T-5 and 12 wheeled MSR 12

Do you like space tractors?

the geek salad paradox

So what's new in the world of random geekery?

Well, the world of mathematics still puzzles me greatly and in particular what I would call the double negative paradox. 

In Maths 2--2 = +4. What? Plus four? How can this be? Surely its counter-intuitive that subtracting a negative from a positive gives a negative answer. Even worse is -2 x -2 =  +4. What is going on!

No-one has yet been able to explain to me in simple everyday language how this works. Can you?

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I read recently that CERN or someone like that have managed to teleport a photon from earth onto the International Space Station I think.

What?

How could they possibly know that it was the same photon?

Does this mean that Scotty style beaming up is just round the corner?

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I had a day dream the other day that the moon had become a Google asset and was covered in a ginormous hangar housing even more internet storage tapes. Ridiculously far-fetched I know but just how big can the internet get and how much room and energy in the real world will its storage take? The world's biggest Maths problem took up 200 terabytes before it was solved!

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The Mental Floss site of paradoxes is truly mind- coring. Consider the Bootstrap Paradox, a time travel problem. See what you make of it!

Imagine that a time traveller buys a copy of Hamlet from a bookstore, travels back in time to Elizabethan London, and hands the book to Shakespeare, who then copies it out and claims it as his own work. Over the centuries that follow, Hamlet is reprinted and reproduced countless times until finally a copy of it ends up back in the same original bookstore, where the time traveller finds it, buys it, and takes it back to Shakespeare. Who, then, wrote Hamlet?

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Another area that fuddles my lobes concerns light and vision: what would have happened to our culture if we had grown up in darkness? Would we have eyes? Would we echo locate like bats? Would we even have different faces? Then again how could any form of life evolve in darkness on Earth? We are all the spawn of light aren't we? Without light we would not be here. Or?

soap in the sixties

Young kids do get niffy.

Washing isn't always top of the list and it was the same with me in the Sixties. I regularly had a tide mark on my neck.

Besides corporation pop [water!], the main ingredient of the enforced daily wash was soap and once a week, shampoo, usually green toxic waste stamped Vosene, which was presumably SPECTRE speak for Bath-time Hell!

Soap was invariably bars of perfumed hardness. Brands which are surfacing from the scum of time include a strange material called coal tar soap and the market leader Cusson's Imperial Leather, which would later become the wash of choice for all cousins within the Star Wars Imperial Guard! ha ha

Coal tar soap was an oddity because the first two parts of the name suggested fossil fuels. You expected a black bar of dripping charcoal but instead you got a pearl white block. However, its cretaceous past was given away by the hidden scent, a mixture of crude oil and dinosaur-infested fern forests. Coal tar soap reeked. This wasn't washing, it was fracking!

Cusson's Imperial Leather was the coca-cola of soaps back then. It was everywhere and had that unique and essential feature, it smelt like soap and created an rather imperial lather. In fact I could never understand why it was called Leather and not Lather. Surely this was a branding typo, which just stuck. After all, leather is not the first thing that springs to mind when you need a wash, unless of course you are a mucky car in need of a shammi!

The other unique feature of Imperial Leather was a secret until the bar was used a few times. This foamy Easter egg hidden in the bar's mechanics had the glitzy sheen of an Imperial Shuttle and enough wow-factor to momentarily stop a docker soaping his armpits. 

Yes, I'm talking about the small rectangular foil brand label on top of the block, which as if by magic, would remain intact whilst the soap slowly dissolved around it. A product of genius, the label became a stand. Yep, the bar of soap could balance on this pedestal on the side of the sink or the bath, keeping it away from muck and hairs and allowing the valuable cake to dry until the next dowsing.

Is there anything else as clever as the Imperial Leather label in the bubbled world of  soap readers?

LETRASET LINK

Following on from the post I did yesterday on the 1999 Titbits article, a couple of people commented about the Space City image being used on one of the  Letraset  Action Transfer sets.

Well, the image above is borrowed from a fabulous site, which features pretty much everything you'd want to know  about Letraset.

Here's the link. http://www.action-transfers.com/index.html

Frank Bellamy's art for one of the ads for Letraset

miniature quiz

Can you spot the Project SWORD vehicle among this bundle of Japanese Omake?