About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

D is for Dinosaurs - Ancient

Having looked at some modern 'minis' below, here are a few older 'mediums' from Timpo and Cherilea, all photographed on Adrian's table at Sandown Park toy fair in February. I only have the Timpo something-therium which is not a dinosaur, it's a giant mammal and it's in storage, so we'll look at it another day.

Tyrannosaurus Rex (The Tyrant King) from Timpo; or is it an Allosaurus (now renamed Alioramus?...no different periods and classes), the nameing of these beasts is not an exact science, like early hominids, each discovery gets a new name (for the 'name' or fame of the - human - finder), only to be found to be something else later, then another find leads to a whole class being excised, or several families being amalgamated...

Triceratops and Stegosaurus...among my favourites, with a Brontosaur or Diplodocus? One of them's gone now too; the Brontosaur is an Apatosaur apparently!

Cherilea, a little smaller, I know them as Brontosaur, Dimetrodon and Triceratops, and moulded in a marbled plastic which works quite well for little toys! Dimetrodon was my favourite as a kid, but the fact that the same few sauropods kept being modelled hints at which were everyone's favourites!

As big as you'll find a 'dinosaur' in this 'Green and Pleasant Land' these days, an Adder swimming across a flood-pool I shot near Fleet Pond (a lake) in Hampshire last July. It's a good 3-feet+ and I've seen bigger nearby. I was fascinated to see how it shot into the reed-bed in an almost dead-straight line - like an slightly crooked arrow!

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