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?