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 Pills, thrills and bellyaches, originally uploaded by spinneyhead. One of yesterday’s buys was a tray of pill and trinket boxes. Every one of them was quite lovely. And there were a lot of them, this is just a sample. The boxes shall be going up for sale over the next week or so. Check out this page to see them. Link to this post! Another piece of history we’ve come across in amongst a load of other stuff in a lot. Having bought a lot of demi-johns last week I spotted the ammo tin which was bundled with them. These tins can be useful for storage and are worth a few pounds each. This one, however, had an interesting label on the side, proclaiming it to be from the Experimental Stores and contain 3 inert Merlin warheads for trials on a range near Glasgow. The Merlin 81mm smart mortar round was a weapon developed a little too late. It was a fire and forget homing round which would seek out tanks at the end of its trajectory and guide itself in for the kill. Teams could fire the projectile from 4 miles away and at the top of its flight it would start scanning for targets- moving tanks for preference, what might be stationary ones as second choice. It was intended to be fired at the masses of Soviet tanks expected to roll across Western Europe should the Cold War go hot, and be more accurate and effective than just lobbing bombs and hoping. The Merlin was considered superior to other guided or “smart” mortar bombs being developed at the same time if only because it would have been fired from a standard piece of kit rather than requiring its own dedicated launcher. Apart from the fall of the Berlin Wall rendering unlikely the conflict for which it was developed there were also issues with getting the electronics small and reliable enough. It only ever got to the testing stage, which is where this case is from. You can own this piece of military history, because the case is for sale in the Spinneyworld eBay shop. Information on the Merlin from here and here. Link to this post!  This document was issued to Warrant Officer W Papworth on November 5th 1945. The full text of the document reads- KNOW YE MEN THAT: We BORE, King of the Northpole and Warrant Officer Papworth. W. did in this year 1945 with Our permission cross the Souther Boundary of Our By virtue whereof, We Bore, call upon all our subjects – Laps, Eskimoes, Disobey under pain of Our Royal displeasure. BORE [There's a signature which has sadly faded] The certificate has been framed to be displayed (the hook is actually and old ring pull araldited to the back) and must have hung in some proud veteran’s home for many years before I found it in amongst an auction lot along with copies of The Arctic Times- the most Northerly English language newspaper in the world. It’s not a grand official document of the war, but tells us something about the humour of ordinary soldiers sent to serve in far flung corners of the world. This and other cool stuff can be found in the Spinneyworld shop. Link to this post!  Jive Bunny’s Chart Challenge, originally uploaded by spinneyhead. Chart hopping with Jive Bunny. Go on, you know you want it. Link to this post!  I really am too easily amused, originally uploaded by spinneyhead. "ANCOLAC" French Polish. One of many cool bottles in a lot I bought at an auction today. Link to this post!  U.M.I.S.T. 681678, originally uploaded by spinneyhead. It seems appropriate that a bunch of ex UMIST students should end up with a bit of the university in their workshop. It’s one of those metal drawer cabinets used for storing smaller components and is part of an ongoing effort to be tidy. It’s almost working. Link to this post!  Is the plural of stylus styli or styluses?, originally uploaded by spinneyhead. I use styli when I’m writing about them, but still find myself saying styluses when talking about them. I ought to settle on a word, I have got over 200 of them, after all. Harry and I have taken the next logical step with our bike recycling hobby cum business. We are now Handi bikes and we have a small business unit to operate out of. We also have an online shop at Spinneyworld.com. Spinneyworld has existed in other guises over the years. This one is a proper shop where the more interesting stuff Harry and I find whilst wombling. Stuff such as hundreds of vintage styli. The majority of them are from Goldring, but this box is full of ones from a company called Tonar. I’m photographing them and adding them slowly so, if you have an old gramophone by the likes of Garrard, Sonotone or Acos then bookmark Spinneyworld’s styli page and keep coming back. Link to this post!
Love it or hate it, graffiti is everywhere. So any modern image layout would be incomplete without some. Stencil art is a recent innovation in graffiti, using templates cut out of card to give sharp edges and repeatable icons. This set contains 13 stencil designs, each one repeated 12 times so the taggers can leave them all over town. They’re printed on clear transfer paper so they can be laid over any background. They will suit OO gauge as large stencils or O as smaller ones. Link to this post!       All of these designs, and more, are available on a variety of articles of clothing, mugs etc. from the Spinneyhead Cafe Press store. I haven’t added any new designs for a little while. I should change that soon. Link to this post! I’ve realised I’m slacking off from my self-promotional duties and some of you don’t know about all the products I have out there which you can buy. So I’m going to do a few posts telling you about the many cool things you can buy which will also support Spinneyhead. Let’s start with books.    Sounds of Soldiers, So Much To Answer For and Global Weirding are available in print through my store at Lulu.com. If you have a Kindle e-book reader (or computer, iPod,iPhone or iPad with the Kindle software), you can buy all three novellas, and some short stories, as Post and Publish.  Ruby Red is available as a download through Lulu or for the Kindle. When you buy any of these books, or if you’ve already sampled them, please leave a rating on the relevant site to tell others how much you enjoyed them. Thanks. Link to this post!
Each sheet of transfers has 30 crosses on it and sells for £2. Ideal for rat rods oand dark futures. Link to this post! Time for an update on my current projects- Venn I should have episode 1 of Venn edited and ready for release by the middle of next week. It will premiere on August 1st, because the first of the month is a good day for releases. If I can get organised we should be filming the last bits of footage for episodes 2 and 3 around then as well. Which should give us a buffer to film the next two or three episodes and look around for sponsorship and other funding. Episodes, and a couple of trailers if I can get them done, will be posted here and on venn.tv. Incidentally, I’d really like to find a camera operator and maybe someone to help me with editing and colour correction, because I’m not as good as I’d like at either. If you’re interested, get in touch. Shall We Take A Trip? For a long time I’ve wanted to do an erotic comic, if only because I’ve found so few that are any good. (For the record, I recommend Undertow and Retreat by Kiki Kjaer, or any of the works of Reed Waller Post Another comic project, which I’m thinking of doing as a combined web and phone comic. I’m writing backstory for it at the moment. It’s a virus apocalypse story with a difference. What if the virus wasn’t designed to kill, but rather to modify the victims’ DNA, sometimes for the better. As some of the plague victims go beyond human, what effect does it have? Spinneyworld More transfers and one or two downloadable items for modellers. I’m also thinking about a few white metal parts, such as modern image street furniture- parking meters, bins etc. These will allow me to hone my sculpting skills and then I’ll start making figures. I have a few planned- hoodies, women in hijabs, graffiti artists etc. Etsy I’m going to get an Etsy selling account soon (I need a credit card first) and I have a few products lined up and even some built. Link to this post! Link to this post! Ruby Red is still available at Lulu, but you can now buy it as a download direct from Spinneyworld. Link to this post! |
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.) Shall We Take A Trip? is sort of Nick Hornby meets Waller’s Omaha the Cat Dancer, only without the football or tails, respectively. Mark has written a film script set in Manchester in the early nineties and now it’s gone into production he’s on set to handle rewrites. And reminisce about his sex life. I’ve scripted 56 pages, but that’s likely to expand, and the ending is open to rewriting. We’ll see.
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