Clearoutageddon Part Four: The Toy Show Has a Lot to Answer For

When I was a kid, back when we only had two television channels, one of the TV highlights of the year was The Late Late Toy Show: a two and a half hour orgy of toys being paraded in front of you and even better, you got to stay up late to watch it. One of the definite lowlights though was when the host would make an impassioned plea to parents to not forget the gift of reading come Christmas time, before subjecting us to a good fifteen minutes of nerdy kids reviewing the dullest-sounding books imaginable. (That and those stage school brats singing and dancing every half hour; fuck that bullshit.) While my eyes might have been glazing over this segment, that obviously wasn't the case for some of my relatives.

Without fail, I'd get a bunch of books every year. And that was cool, until I turned about ten, after which point I never got one that wasn't educational in some way ever again. As you can imagine, in the face of video games and Lego and the like, educational Christmas gifts (once said relatives were safely away) got tossed to the side and never thought of again. Fast forward fifteen years and most of these were still cluttering up my parents' place, gathering dust. But no more, for the time of Clearoutageddon was at hand!



So, out of the numerous books I got over the years, this DK Encyclopaedia was the only one I ever wanted beforehand, and the last one I enjoyed or got any use out of. I got it for Christmas '95, just in time for a schools quiz I was taking part in a few weeks later. Unfortunately, the questions there turned out to be more about pop culture and current events than science and history, and the weeks I spent swotting up on various subjects from the encyclopaedia went entirely to waste. But I did get a free pen.

The illustrated bible I got another year. It's actually quite nice, but I can't say I was particularly thrilled to unwrap it at the time.



Engendering a similar lack of excitement was this this illustrated history book. Well, at least until I had a look inside, and discovered that...



THERE WERE BOOBS!

You know, I sometimes genuinely wonder how differently my life would have turned out if I focused more on the knowledge contained in this book than the nudity. :D



After I got to secondary school and started learning French, various European language books started showing up at Christmas. I remember getting one of these Usborne books in English when I was younger. I quite liked the art style and the hidden rubber ducks throughout, but even that couldn't get me to learn any French of my own free will, or German for that mater. It was tough enough getting to grips with a third language, I certainly didn't need to get started on a fourth.



Not that I could explain that to the gift-givers though.

Also, a Geography counterpart to the World History book that proved to be, sadly, boob-free.



This lot are a bit different, in that I bought most of them for myself. Hey, remember the Filofax? No? Me neither, but the bottom four books here all sought to cash in on that. They were designed to fit into a sort of Filofax for children: a "Fun Fax" if you will.

Possibly the dumbest idea ever.

Knowing nothing about faxes of any sort, I  picked these up on various school trips because I thought they looked promisingly funny/scary. Boy, did I get a lesson in judging a book by it's (detachable) cover.

At the time I leant the two horror ones to a buddy. I don't remember getting any feedback afterwards, but knowing him, there's no way on Earth he possibly enjoyed these, especially Burning Secret which I remember having a sappy friendship between two teenage girls at its core and a distinct lack of gratuitous gun violence.

While we're on the subject of horror, one book that did genuinely freak me out when I was younger was the one in the top right: a selection of (purportedly) real life tales of the supernatural that I bought at a school book fair in '96. Looking back now, I'm pretty sure everything in there was complete toss, but that didn't stop the story about the waxworks coming to life from scaring the shit out of me for weeks on end, and holy shit, that back cover...

Brrrrrr.

Purchased in the same one-off book fair by my brother was Into the 21st Century, a collection of short stories by viewers of The Den (in it's lame, post Zig and Zag incarnation). Hearing the shitty stories my classmates and I would come up for English class week in/week out, I think I made the right choice in steering clear of this.



Finally here, we have a novelization of the first Ninja Turtles movie - a nice little gift my dad picked up given my obsession with the cartoon at the time. As crazy as I was about that though, I've never actually seen the movie, or any of the Turtles movies. Not that I had any opportunity at the time mind. Cinema trips were never something we did, we didn't have a VCR until later and, as far as I know, none of those movies got shown on TV over here. Just think: I went through my entire childhood totally unaware of the Ninja Rap. As for the book itself, I don't remember a bit of it now. I think a Blu-ray purchase might be in order.

More after the jump...

Cooking: Cheese and Onion Soup with Cheese Bread

Having had a disgusting block of rubbery, Jameson-flavoured cheddar in the fridge for about two weeks, I finally decided to do something about it tonight. I was thinking macaroni and cheese at first, but this thing was so rank there's no way that wouldn't have been equally vile. No, what I really needed was some way cut down its sickly sweet faux whiskey flavour, and I thought hiding it away in a cheese bread might just do the trick.

After a quick search I landed on this recipe, which proved nice and easy and used up the vast majority of the stuff. I did still have a bit left over though, so with my bread in the oven, I decided that I'd mix the rest of it with some regular cheddar and try making a cheese and onion soup to go with it.

Aside from replacing three quarters of the milk with stock (I though all milk would make a bit too rich), I went with this recipe for the soup. Well, until I decided it wouldn't yield much soup at all and that I'd double the amount of stock and milk going in. That, of course, meant I didn't have enough flour in there for it to thicken so I ended up having to add a couple of tablespoons more (dissolved in water) before I could add the cheese.

Despite the last-minute alterations, the resulting soup was delicious - nice and creamy, with a tasty, well-balanced flavour, with only a hint of faux Jameson nastiness. Success! The bread, despite containing the vast majority of the cheese had even less of it. To be honest it was a bit bland; ideally I think you'd need to much stronger-flavoured cheese in there than cheddar. I did enjoy the crispiness it leant the outside crust though, and hey, it was fucking edible, which is more than I can say for the stuff that was sitting in my fridge a couple of hours previously. :D

Attic Attack

It's taken me a long time, but last Summer I finally wrangled my way into my parents' death trap of an attic; ostensibly to tidy up and hook up their satellite dish, but my real mission was to see if I could unearth any cool childhood treasures up there.

Now, I already knew that there was a box of stuffed toys there (that may or may not have rotted away in the last fifteen years), but everything else was largely a mystery. Especially mysterious was a box that came from my Granny's house, a box that I remember putting some stuff in before it went up; stuff that surely had to be significant in some way if I wanted it stored away for safe-keeping. Right?



Ah.

As one of the things closest to the opening, it didn't take me long to track down the box in question. Unfortunately, my contribution to it was mostly trash. Actual trash. Okay, it was genuinely cool to find an old painting of mine, but everything else went from here directly into the bin.



Let's see: On the right we've got some decrepit lumps of plasticine, and the remains of some of the paint tablets my uncle used to bring me. (Can't imagine my parents, or grandparents were thrilled at the mess those must have caused. :D)



On the left is a bristle-less paint brush (And they didn't fall off in the box. It was like this to begin with.) and this... thing, which on closer inspection proved to be an elastic band wrapped in a bit of a curtain material, wrapped in green wool. And there's a fly stuck to it, but I don't think that was an original fixture. What it's supposed to be, I have no idea. I did go through a phase of wanting to invent things though (with no knowledge of well, anything really), so there's a pretty good chance this is one of my "inventions". (And there's a lot more where that came from, Industry. Pay me money!)



And that's not all. Also saved for posterity were a button, the top off a Push Pop, an ice lolly stick and wrappers from a Fox's Glacier Mint and, I'm guessing, a Cadbury's Eclair.

Oh well, at least the actual contents of the box was pretty neat: a sizeable collection of old stamps my Granny had saved over the years. Nothing that valuable I'd imagine, but it's was interesting going through them nonetheless (perhaps coming to a Tumblr near you soon).

So the mystery box turned out to be a bust, but what else was up there?



Well, how about my first school bag? Yep, that's it. I didn't go to school in the 1950's though, my dad was just a little out of touch with 90's fashion.



Nothing inside it apart from a few marker stains, and yes, it smells just like you imagine it would.



There was a surprising revelation on the back of it though. As well as scrawling my name in huge letters, it looks like I wrote "sex" on it and crossed it out. :D

Enhance!

I'm going to have to pull out a Sideshow Bob-esque defence here and say that's how I though you spelled "six" at the time, a misspelling that seemed to amuse some of the older kids. Really not sure why I felt the need to put it on my bag though. Thank fuck the teacher never saw it. :D

And finally...



Boo! In the box with all the stuffed toys (which I'll get to later), I found these: a couple of sweet Halloween masks my brother and me got back in 1996. It still bums me out how little we do over here to mark Halloween, but things were even worse in the 90's. The only bit of spooky paraphernalia that was ever on sale where I was from was a selection of cheap, flimsy masks for kids. Imagine our surprise when these things showed up out of the blue.

Man, that was a pretty great Halloween. I remember my best friend came over; we wore these; had a bonfire; took a bunch of photos; ritualistic chanting may have been involved. And then it turned out that there was no film in the camera. Whooooo. Spooooky!

Well that's it, folks. And remember kids, Creepy Satan says "Rock on!".

deviantArt Updates 02/08/13

  

At last the the trilogy is complete! :D Up today is Paint Doodles 3, another collage of my finest MS Paint scribblings, and perhaps the last one now I've moved over to my phone for that kind of nonsense. Also new is Completely Bear, which much like your average Channel 4 documentary is a lot less titillating than it sounds...

 

I've also dumped quite a bit of old stuff from my dA folder into my Scrapbook today, including two alternate versions of both Infinity (Infinity-1, Infinity+Blue) and Throwing Shapes (Unfiltered, Unfiltered 'n' Blue), as well as Flamey Guy, a crappy bit of doodling I did with Peter Blaškovič's Flame program back in 2010.

Now back to looking for shelves in Argos.

deviantArt Updates 25/07/13

It's been over a year; must be time for another batch of questionable deviations. :D

 

Kicking things off today is something that may be scraping the bottom of the barrel, even by my standards: First!, while probably not the first thing I ever painted, is certainly the oldest surviving bit of artwork I have. As you can imagine, something I scrawled on a of bit of cardboard when I was about 7 isn't exactly the most spectacular of pieces.

 

Though really, Corporate - a fake, corporate desktop wallpaper I made last year - isn't a whole lot better. :D

  

That leaves it to Infinity alone to redeem this update - a cool little abstract wallpaper I whipped up back in February while messing around, as usual.

Spammy Snippets 11/07/13

Rock her hard on your first date

- Advice to live by.

COCKZILLA is the word

- It's got groove, it's got meaning.

I didn't know you were in porn :)

-Me neither. Shit, how did that happen?

Single Christians in your Area Are Looking For You

- But I didn't even do anything.

Katy Perry diet or scam?

- Uh, scam. Probably.

Why Wait - Have an Affair With a Cheating Wife Today

- Finally, the opportunity I've been waiting for.

Hot latinas banged by Germans

- Well, they are more efficient.

So hard you can break an egg

- I'm trying to wrap my head around the logistics that would be involved here, but I just can't.

"Obama grows great length through herbal supplements"

- Typical Obama.

This is not fables – the holy true is in our online medical shop!

- ....What?

(15) Sexual Predators In Your Area - VIEW NOW

- They wouldn't also happen to be single Christians, would they? This situation may be more dire than I'd previously been led to believe.

Clearoutageddon Part Three: Discpocalypse Now

I don't know if anyone remembers now, but ten years ago exactly we were now in the middle of an unrelenting free CD bombardment by every newspaper publisher in the UK and Ireland - the likes of probably hadn't been seen since AOL's heyday.

To begin with, this was actually pretty cool, especially for someone like me who had a very small collection of music, limited funds and a slow-ass internet connection. From the end of 2002 until around mid 2004, you could grab up to three random compilation CDs every weekend for the price of the (mostly) crappy newspapers they came bundled with, and have a new batch generally pretty decent 70's/80's/90's tracks to check out to for next to nothing.

A few relevant ads I found while digitising some VHS tapes. That 70's CD (from 2003) was pretty rad. A few years later though, the second and third ads were pretty much where things went.

By 2004 though, things were changing - the compilations became less frequent, the number of tracks decreased and increasingly they started being phased out in favour of shitty movies, single artist live CDs (for people with no taste), random CD-ROMs and the occasional BBC sitcom episode. Even though the frequency of these give-aways lessened over the next couple of years, for a family that bought a lot of newspapers and magazines anyway, this meant there was an ever-increasing pile of shitty free discs building up that no one could quite bring themselves to throw out.

After years of languishing in the cabinet under the TV, I finally decided the time had come to do something  about the sizeable disc pile in late 2011. Working under the assumption that, well, somebody has to want these, I decided I'd give them away (for just the cost of postage) on a local classifieds site. For my own convenience though, I decided not to offer them individually, but to pull a Best Buy and force bundles of them on people. Let's take a look at what was up for grabs:



In the movie bundle, and yes, the bundles were all themed, is a bunch of stuff I'd never watch, or use, including a hot new Vinnie Jones joint, a couple of DVD movie quizzes and promo discs for Spider Man 2 and Revenge of the Sith.



This lot I dubbed the Nature/Factual bundle. Up on top are a trio of BBC/National Geographic documentaries that I imagine are probably decent, but that kind of stuff just isn't my thing. The next four discs are all from the RTÉ Guide, Ireland's answer to the Radio Times or TV Guide (and a pretty poor excuse for a magazine overall). For wildlife enthusiasts we have not one, but two dawn chorus themed discs, as well as some kind of mammal-themed CD-ROM. And for lovers of terminally dull magazine shows is an episode of RTÉ's Nationwide on DVD, for some reason. In the bottom right are two audio "volumes" of Paul Williams Crime World - undoubtedly part of The Sunday World's ongoing effort to glorify, er, I mean expose Ireland's criminal underworld.



Also in the same bundle, but thrown in at the last minute, was this trio of even lamer, even less desirable stuff I found lying around - promo DVDs for eBay and the South East of Ireland and some kind of jewellery catalogue on CD-ROM from 2003. You know, factual stuff.



But wait, there's more! Even though I'd decided to keep this at one point, when the time came to dispatch this bundle (and I got a taker for it pretty much immediately. Goodness knows why.), I decided to bung it in there too. I barley even watched the last World Cup, when was I ever going to watch this?



The music bundle! I wouldn't go so far as to call this all dross (well, apart from the Westlife disc, obviously), because a. I never listened to most of it, and b. the two discs in the upper left are actually pretty decent, the Dave Fanning one especially; they were just duplicates of ones I already had. Notable also was the Anton Whatshisface dance DVD, not only for not being a DVD, but also for being the thinnest, most flimsy optical disc I've ever seen. If disc rot turns out to be a thing, I think I've found patient zero.