Ten Things We Saw At The Fair

  • August 31, 2019

We went to the Columbia County Fair today. We saw many things! Here’s a selection…

The rabbits were very cute; there were big ones and small ones and two mums with babies. I’d say there were about two dozen in total and many of them seemed to be owned by the same person!

Fairs always seem to have scarecrow contests and this year one of the entries was Grease themed. Danny seems to have fallen over…

There was a crafting pavilion with a lot of olde-timey crafts being demonstrated including a blacksmith, basketweaver and feltmaker. The turned-wooden bowls were beautiful but very expensive.

You’ve seen many photos of sheep-in-clothing before on this blog and as usual I was charmed by them again. We glimpsed one of these guys sans cape being groomed and his fur was ultra short and soft (and clean)!

This giant pumpkin was conveniently shaped like a chair, but I very much doubt they wanted anyone to sit on it!

Over on the midway they had the usual array of beautifully engineered rides (none of which I rode), including a short mini rollercoaster with spinning cars.

The sideshow games were staffed by the usual frightening carnies and featured a dazzling selection of desirable prizes…

Unusually – and the first time we’d seen this – they also had a section of coin-pushers using real quarters that paid out cash?!? Isn’t this illegal? I put exactly one quarter in and actually did knock some coins down but they didn’t come out the hopper so there were shenanigans going on!

This was my animal of the show: an inky black and supremely handsome rooster! KLS said his eyes had a ‘spark of intelligence’ 🙂

And just before we left she treated herself to a chocolate-mint milkshake. At this point I was overrun with exhaustion, possibly from heat? Maybe I should have eaten something.

Overall a fun time, as fairs always are. I think we’ll visit one more this season..

Ultraman [B Type]

  • August 27, 2019

The new Ultraman series on Netflix is fantastic. It adapts the recent manga which has updated the series for the modern era whilst not rejecting the past, and in my opinion succeeds tremendously.

When I first learned of it I was wary of one of the major aspects: the combat suits. Ultraman was no longer a being, but a human in a suit. However – and without giving anything away – by the end of the first season I loved the suits, and happily and eagerly picked up the two model kits recently put out by Bandai.

That’s the first one. It was a little pricey compared to a Gundam, but it’s a very high quality kit with a very nifty feature.

This is not a beginners kit. The metallic gray is painted on, which means cutting from the runners leaves white (the colour of the underlying plastic) edges that need to be cleaned up. There’s also a lot of tricky-to-remove tabs on the red pieces that require a lot of patience. Cleverly Bandai has designed the kit to hide almost all of these after assembly but I needed a silver paint pen to fix a few spots.

Secondly the kit has a lot of stickers that in some cases were fiddly to attach. I’m not a great fan of stickers, but found them particularly unusual in this case since they were the same colours as the runners. We’re this a higher-priced kit I suppose the stickers would have just been extra pieces, and I don’t know why the cheaper Dragonball kits can do this level of detail sans stickers but this one couldn’t?

That said – and despite occasionally interference from a fuzzy thief – assembly wasn’t difficult and it looked great once finished:

As usual I was happy with just the figure, but there’s a lot of Ultraman’s various energy (‘specium’ to be precise) weapons that can be assembled and attached. But even without any accessories this kit is special for an extra feature; a first for one of my kits:

He has lights! His eyes and chest light up, and the chest can be set to blue or red. It looks incredibly good, and the simplistic but effective interior design (with light pipes and a sticker-mirror running from an LED unit) is charming.

An amazing kit therefore. He looks and can be posed like a high-end action figure, but he was assembled from scratch. I can’t wait to make the other one 🙂

  • Posted in Crafts
  • Robert

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: