Category: Miscellaneous

Two Treasures

August 22, 2019

I picked up a bunch of weird stuff during my California trip. Here I’ll show two of them.

This LCD Star Wars pinball game cost me $15 which wasn’t bad considering it was new. A glance on eBay tells me I wasn’t ripped off. The guy that sold it to me made mention of treating it carefully since the plastic packaging had become brittle but of course I was going to open it!

And here it is! Note the poor sticker affixed between the buttons, as if after they made it they realized they forgot to brand it! You’ll also see that the only Star Wars evidence in the actual game screen are the droids on the backplate…

The batteries had of course leaked (it’s 24 years old!) but not seriously and it was an easy clean. I popped two more in and:

It has flashing lights, a vibration function and very, very poor gameplay! Also the game itself has nothing to do etc Star Wars, and I imagine the others in this like (such as a Barbie game) play identically 🙂

A curiosity though, already in a box never to be played again!

Following on, I also bought this for $5 at an amazing antique store in Gilroy:

A European Panini sticker pack from 1983! Panini made gazillions of sticker sets for just about every sport and licensed brand you can imagine and sadly they barely distributed outside of Europe. So I never got any Dark Crystal or E.T. or Pope John Paul II stickers in my youth…

The ‘original’ art stickers in this set are strange and difficult to look at for long periods, but most of the stickers were from the cartoon;

I bought this in the hope of sending you all some He-Man nostalgia via future postcards but the adhesive is too weak after 35+ years and these will therefore remain as priceless additions to my collection 🙂

Oh and even though this post was just supposed to be two treasures… here’s some of the rest of my purchases:

Home Improvement

August 18, 2019

Our driveway was in bad condition, cracked and uneven. It was 25+ years old and past time for a new one. Last week that’s exactly what happened!

Many large trucks and a small army of men turned up to work. They started by removing the old asphalt with a bulldozer:

Then dumping the gravel substrate:

Which was flattened by a roller:

Then came the new asphalt, edges first:

Then the main portion layed down by a machine:

And flattened again with a different roller:

Lastly a final liquid asphalt coat:

And after a total of about 2.5 hours, it was done:

We haven’t used it yet since it’s halfway through a weeklong drying/setting process, but it looks good 🙂

It was hellishly expensive, but what home improvement job isn’t? It should last longer than we are in this house though, and what more could we ask!

$1.38

August 10, 2019

Ever seen those penny-squasher devices? You put two quarters and a penny in, turn a crank, and out comes a penny that has been squashed in a press and now has a souvenir design on it.

Bernard’s got a collection:

He’s got 138 of them in total, from all over the world. Most of them are pennies but there’s a few euro cents, British pennies and even pressed blanks as well.

That’s a selection, showing pennies squashed in (from top left) England, Tokyo, Hawaii, Ireland, Australia and Scotland. Some of these Bernard did himself; the others came from me. In fact whenever I see a machine I always press him at least one.

That one I got him in Wales at the now closed Dr Who experience. I imagine it’s worth a lot of money now ;P

This one is a bit of a mystery. It’s a euro coin, which means either we (KLS and I) did it in Ireland or B got it in Germany back when we visited. But I’m not sure what it actually is? Any ideas?

Here’s a very rare double-sided penny that we pressed at – can you guess? – The London Eye. It’s got the usual souvenir picture on the front and this nice little impression on the back. This one must be a prize in his collection!

The pennies store in these nifty folders of which he has four. These guys are much rarer than the squashers themselves, so if you’re planning a collection of your own be sure to grab one when you see it!

And if you’re ever somewhere weird and see a squasher, why not press a penny yourself? Even if you don’t want it, you can send it to Bernard 🙂

Robot Claw