Pound shop Transformers – there should be a society against this kind of cruelty

Another excursion to the pound shop, to buy this monstrosity -

I think it's meant to be some sort of Transformer.

This is less 'robots in disguise', more 'robots in terrible pain'. I'm pretty sure if this guy had a speech chip, he'd say “please god help me, kill me now, put me out of my misery.”

I have proof that the robot is meant to be hideously deformed -

Also, what kind of name is Knuckle breaker? That's far too Kray twins for my liking. What are his friends called – Kneecap Smasher and Eyeball Gouger?

He has a pet too -

A cat that I think he's meant to ride, but which is about the same size as his head, so it just looks like he's picking the cat up by his muscular thighs -

In case you're wondering, our friend transforms into some kind of plane. But the mister did it then undid it, and now I can't get him to be a plane again. Never mind, I'm sure you'll cope.

I don't think the cat has a name, so I'm going to call him Larry. Fuck it, I'm going to rename Knuckle Breaker too, because the poor guy deserves a chance in life. I'm going to call him Malcolm. Malcolm Smytheson.

SUPER VALOUR!

I was trawling through some kind of random discount shop in Bangor, when I came across this package of wonderment -

This playset is, I'm sure, at the top of every child's Christmas list this year. I can just hear their eager little voices now -

Kid - "Muuuuuuuuuuum, please can I have SUPER VALOUR SPECIALLY COMPETE STRIKE QUICKLY 4?"

Mum - "I think you should stop drinking so much fizzy pop."

I have no idea what the name is supposed to mean -

Also, the figures do not match the package art. The cardboard backing shows some kind of military special ops dudes, and what the package actually contains is a pair of traffic cops/strippergrams. Let's take a closer look at these guys -

Firstly we have a cop whose shoulders are as wide as his legs are long. I'm going to call him Jim -

Jim's partner - Bill Murray who can't stand up -

The guys have a bewildering array of guns, grenades and bondage gear -

Also from this angle, Bill Murray looks like Jim's small child rather than his partner.

And holy hell look at the size of Jim's gun, the guy sure is ripped to be able to carry that around -

But when these two are off fighting crime in my head, I like to imagine that it's Bill Murray who's the real hero. Jim might have the muscles, but Bill Murray uses his super intelligence or x-ray vision or something, and saves the day. I hate to think of him just being in the office, making the tea.

The best car boot haul ever - prepare for a pile of awesome

LOOK AT THIS!

I'll just give you a minute to take it all it. Maybe you'll want to go build a shrine to the picture, I don't know.
I got all this stuff for under 15 quid. Again, I'll give you a minute to take that in. Apart from Screwball Scramble, which I'm pretty sure is a newer version, all this stuff is from the 80s or very early 90s. And that makes me very happy, because now I own it all.
Regular readers will immediately spot one or two things that are destined to get their own posts, but for now I'm just going to dive into this barrel of smashingness. Look upon it, and if you don't weep, at least do the Macarena or something.

Board Games

Screwball Scramble, Dingbats and Atmosfear 2. I know Screwball Scramble isn't technically a board game, but I plan to play it when I'm bored so it counts. 

I've never played Screwball Scramble before, but I look forward to losing at it for years to come. I always loved Dingbats, the lateral thinking game, as a child, but was always too young and stupid to appreciate it properly. Now I am no longer young, so everything works out. I've also never played any of the Atmosfear games, but now I own the first and second so I look forward to a night of beer and shitting myself over those videos with the mister.

Snoopy flask

Complete with cup and internal lid, but thankfully not containing any 20 year old Um Bongo. I was brave enough to take a sniff inside, and it still has that plasticky smell that lunch boxes and flasks are supposed to have. I am not stupid enough, however, to actually attempt to drink out of it. I value my life.

She Ra figure

I've wanted a She Ra for years, but have always felt too guilty to buy one for full price on Ebay. So imagine my joy when I found her in a box of junk for 50p! Admittedly, she looks like she's had a wild night out followed by sex in a hedge, but I plan to straighten her hair out and give her boots and boobs a lick of paint, and return her to her former glory.

Roland Rat

Or "Rogul" as I used to call him. Roland was introduced to TV-AM the year I was born, so you could say we grew up together. I had this exact toy as a toddler and I don't know what happened to him. I like to think that this Roland is my long lost Roland, and now that we're together again we can go round the country spouting cockney vermin based puns at unsuspecting people.

Annuals

Bros annual 1989, Neighbours annual 1989, and a Home and Away 'special' from 1990. All three are stuffed with quizzes, pointless trivia and terrible photoshoots. I'm not sure what made me more excited when I got them home - finally getting to find out what the other one in Bros was called, remembering there was a character called Des in Neighbours, or finding a three page feature on Craig McLachlan of "Hey Mona" fame.

Pencil cases 

This is the find that really made me piss in my pants with excitement. They're all in excellent condition, but to be honest I would have bought them if they'd been ripped in half and covered in poo. I've numbered them for handy, cut out and keep reference -

1. 'Pencil Pouch' (this is generic but it's definitely old, because it comes with one of those round pencil sharpeners you don't get any more)

2. Transformers

3. Roland 'Rogul' Rat

4. A-Team

5. Bassett's Liquorice Allsorts

6. Munch Bunch yoghurts

7. Masters of the universe

8. Count Duckula

9. Generic Dracula pencil case, but from WOOLWORTHS if you please

10. A-Team

11. Hula Hoops

12. Wotsits

Now I'm going to go and bask in the glory of owning all these items. I'll probably stop short of getting naked and rolling around in them, but it will be a pretty close thing.

Thunder-punch He Man's Ebay selling tips

4 toys I always wanted but never owned

I’m continuing on with the nostalgia kick today, and looking back at how utterly spoiled I was as a child. I found a load of old photos starring me on various Christmas days, and in every one there I stood, with my bizarre child’s mullet, surrounded by various tributes from ‘Santa’.

Yet despite all this, there are a few toys that slipped through the net. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s these toys that have been etched into my memory the most firmly. Of course, as an adult with money and stuff, I could just buy them for myself now. But this is stupid for two reasons. One – it’s not the same unless you tear wrapping paper off it in a screaming, mullet haired frenzy. Two – shut up.

1. Tomy Tutor Play Computer

I used to resort to things like mugging other children to try and get this. Once we stayed in a hotel in Wales, and the son of the owner had a Tutor Computer. I demanded to have it, and tried to smuggle it out of the hotel. Who cared if I then had to leave my parents and go on the run? Fuck that, I had a real computer!

Obviously that plan didn’t work, and it wasn’t a real computer anyway. It was just a series of pictures you could flip round by pressing buttons. But to my four year old mind, it was the fucking Enigma Machine. Possibly the reason I never got this was that by the time I was begging my parents for it, they thought I was too old to be learning words like ‘cow’ and ‘plane’ in a fun way. Oh I’m sorry, I shall just take my four year old self off to recite some Socrates from memory then.

2. Baby changing unit (any brand)

My rich friend, who had every fucking toy ever, had one of these. Mind you, she also had bright orange eyebrows, so I win. I shared a room with my older sister around the time I wanted one of these, so I think there just wasn’t room for a full doll changing unit. Never mind, I improvised – I put my smallest baby doll in an empty Ferrero Rochers box, and let me tell you, that was just as ace.

3. Petite Typewriter

I remember exactly why I wanted one of these. At the time I used to read loads of Peanuts books, and I was always captivated by the strips where Snoopy would sit on the roof of his kennel, writing the first page of his great novel (“It was a dark and stormy night…”). I guess even back then I wanted to be able to write utter crap that no one in particular would read. As such, what I wanted more than anything was a proper, grown up looking typewriter of my very own. I would have loved that typewriter, I would have cherished it, I would have written about three sentences on it before I made a mistake and decided the whole idea was stupid, actually. Maybe my parents were sensible.

4. She-Ra Crystal Castle

This was the big one, the one I always dreamed of owning, throughout all my career as a child. It stood in pride of place in our local toyshop, priced at about £30. Quite a lot of money back then for what was essentially a lump of pink plastic. But I did have all the She-Ra figures, and it was my responsibility to make sure they weren’t homeless. I failed them in this, and they had to spend their lives living in makeshift hostels built from boxes and toilet roll tubes. It was a squalid life, full of disease and violence, and eventually some of the dolls turned to drugs and petty crime. Not She-Ra though – she got adopted by the Eternia royal family, so she turned out ok.

We play the Just Seventeen 'Kiss Chase' board game, and end up with dreamy hunks!

Ok, I know I tend to talk a lot about my boyfriend in these posts (ironically, it was my boyfriend who pointed this out). There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, I am a needy woman who calculates her worth by the number of people she tells about the fact she has a boyfriend, and secondly, I only really do any interesting stuff when he's around. The rest of the time, when I'm not at work, I sit around in my pants, criticising people on TV who are younger and thinner than me, and worrying that a plane will crash into the roof of my house.

Today, however, was one of the aforementioned days of doing interesting stuff. Admittedly, it's only interesting if you're me. I went to the car boot sale, and came back with the single greatest thing known to man. When I first spotted it, hiding among various bric a brac in a box marked 'everything 50p', I thought it would be a mildly funny passing diversion and nothing more. Not so. This item is so life changing and marvelous that it really deserves its own Nobel Prize. Or at the very least, a Blue Peter badge. Ladies and gentlemen and psychos of the internet, I present to you -
THE TOTALLY RADICAL JUST SEVENTEEN KISS CHASE BOARD GAME!

It's going to take me a while to write this post, since I keep getting all girly and excited, and having to do things like squeal and put glitter in my hair.

The JUST SEVENTEEN KISS CHASE BOARD GAME is a game for 2 or more moronic players who, for today's purposes, were going to be me and the mister. yes, the mister actually agreed to play this dross with me. He must really like going out with me, for some godforsaken reason.

The aim is to go round and round and round and round and round the board, collecting tokens, which you exchange for different tokens, which you then exchange for DREAM DATE CARDS! Here are the accepted token exchange rates -

1 kiss token = 1 kiss token
3 kiss tokens = 1 snog token
3 snog tokens = 1 date tokens
3 date tokens = 1 DATE CARD!

As you can see, the game goes on for fucking years.

There are three different date cards to collect, which determine where you go, how the date goes, and most importantly, who your outdated hunk from the 90s will be!

And now - the board!

As you can see, it's a bit like Monopoly, except there are no houses, no properties, no silver counters, no money, no banker, and no jail. In fact, it's hardly like Monopoly at all. But there are cards, which you get in Monopoly, so shut up.

The dream boy, dreamy date location and dream date cards should be pretty self explanatory, if you were paying attention earlier. The two other sets of cards are the question cards, which contain a question the player must answer to get a kiss token, and the UH-OH cards, which contain a dare! And, might I add, the shittest dares known to man. But more of that in a minute.

So, me and the mister went round the board, dutifully throwing threes and sixes and landing on inconsequential squares. Then we began to land on question and UH-OH squares! The questions were the kind of 90s tween drivel you might expect - what was the name of MN8's first single, which town are Boyzone from etc, and we answered up to some of them right. The UH-OH cards were much more entertaining. Among the dares we got got were the following, although I won't embarrass the mister by sharing which were his dares -

- do a belly dance while singing the theme tune to Coronation Street
- do an impression of a pot-bellied pig until it's your turn again
- do a flamenco dance until it's your turn again
- say your address really really fast (not sure how this is a dare, unless you're worried about identity theft)

There were two other kinds of uh-oh/fucking hell cards - on some you had to name three types of something or other in ten seconds, and on the rest you had standard, Monopoly-esque life challenges, such as "oh shit, your mum threw out your East-17 pants, miss a go!".

One other thing - there were a few squares on the game board containing various triumphs and dilemmas - one was something like "Ant and Dec are fighting over you, lose two kiss tokens", and "OMG, Gary Barlow dedicated a song to you, collect a kiss token!" The mister got especially excited when he landed on these squares.

As the game progressed we collected tokens, and soon (after about seven hours) we discovered who our dream dates were! At first I had Damon Albarn from Blur, and He had Paul Nicholls off of Eastenders, and off of Paul Nicholls' life and stuff. Luckily, we had the option to swap our dream dates.

My date was odd cap wearing, chisel faced cockney songwriter and friend of drug barons Tony Mortimer from East-17 -

The mister's date was lush but gay and sadly now deceased Boyzone singer Steven 'Steve' Gately -

Next, after much faffing, we exchanged tokens for dreamy date location cards, and discovered the following -

Tony Mortimer was going to take me to the football, which I was apparently going to have to put up with, as a girl (I would put up with it, as long as he didn't take me to see Millwall) -

The mister was luckier - he was going to be taken to Blackpool where, bizarrely, he is then ordered to be sick into Steven Gately's lap -

The tension is building now, and we're this close to having a full on row over who wins (clue - we're not really). After what seems like hours/days/weeks of dice rolling, the mister is finally victorious! He gets the date card first, so presumably he wins his dream date! I'm not going to tell you what his dream date actually involves, so let's just go with Steven Gately and some sick for now -

I fare a bit worse, and end up dumping the 'gorge' Tony Mortimer -

Although, in retrospect, maybe I really won...

Anyway, here is the mister celebrating his victory -

Other dates we could have won include -

- You take Seal to LegoLand, where you sneeze in his face

- Chesney Hawkes takes you to Wyndsors World Of Shoes, where you shove a sandal up his bum

- You Take Andy Crane to Pizza Hut and kick him in the balls

- Right Said Fred take you to Alton Towers, where you shit in their hats

Pages from the 1993 Argos Christmas catalogue!

Look what I've got! A while back, me and the mister decided to go mad spending more money than we could reasonably justify on Ebay, acquiring a shitload of old catalogue scans on CD-Rom. I'll just give you a minute to let that sink in. Yeah, you wish you were me.

First up we have the obligatory "generic crap" pages, featuring all the stuff you never knew you wanted, because you didn't. Who could have lived without some cheapo bubble bath featuring the head of one of the gladiators off of Gladiators? Or a teapot in the shape of what appears to be a Nazi bear? I do, however, covet the Sonic The Hedgehog quilt cover, rather badly, and also the Helix treasure chest cash box thing, just because.

Next up - the latest in cutting edge technology. Scotch video tapes anyone? Regular readers will know how much I love the Scotch brand, with its Derek Guyler voiced skellington mascot. You really can re-record and not fade away! Also of note is the boombox - beloved talisman of all rubbish thugs in 80s movies. Ok so it's not really a boombox, but come on, it is a bit.

Disney videos! All the classics are here, like The Jungle Book, and The Little Mermaid, and... oh wait. It's not The Little Mermaid, it's a crappy spinoff featuring "43 minutes" of non stop fun. I think I've seen one of these episodes before. Ariel catches crabs.

Ladies and gentlemen, feast your eyes upon the following pages. I have nothing remotely derogatory to say about them. Indeed, I love them like my own brothers.

And finally - Barbie! I definitely had the one at the top, where you paint stars onto her hair. I think I still have that frilly gold skirt thing somewhere too. But I don't ever remember having 'My big fat Gypsy wedding' Barbie. Also, on the other page, why has Sindy got her legs crossed like she needs a wee?

Have I made your day sufficiently awesome now? Good.

I don't remember an American Gladiator called facelift...

This dude -

Look at this dude, with his small head and his lovely blue bra. I found him the other day in a charity shop, 50p well spent I say. I know he's some kind of American Gladiator, or he was in a past life, but apart from that I'm rather stumped. Obviously his hands were made to hold a big phallic pugil stick, but I can't find a corresponding real gladiator to match him.

There are so many things I love about this dude, but I especially love the oversized arms that are bigger than his legs, the tiny head that may or may not be the head he was born with, the gelled back grey hair, and the manic grin plastered across his chops -

He looks like a smooth old man who's had extensive surgery, botox or similar. Further proof of this is the way his head is a different colour to his body.

I had to buy this dude because, as a child, I used to stay up late once a week to watch American Gladiators on ITV Nightshift. I'd tune in just in time to see the closing credits of The Equalizer, then a whole, heady hour of pugilistic fun. Although in reality it was probably more like eight minutes before I fell asleep with my face pressed up against the screen.

Since no one I've asked knows who his real life counterpart is, we've decided to call him Jesus.