William Stout?

 

Looking for something else I came across these Lost World cards.

All new to me, who is William Stout? 

Galaxy Fifties and Seventies

 

These Galaxy covers are ace.

 I'm sure the top spacecraft 2 is a model kit as well.

22 years later another great ship, this time transporting asteroid chunks being drilled by the photonic blaster. I love the little dog ship fetching the chunks!

Do these grab you too?

The price went up in these 22 years! 

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? 

🧨