Monday, January 20, 2014

commerce is our goal

hi there

what can i say other than sorry for the lack of updates, and possibly drab and approaching dull nature of the ones i have done of late, dear reader! i am trying to keep my hand in, but things are very busy here. i can only trust you continue to indulge me!

today i was required to head into town owing to some matters at the bank not going as well as one would have hoped. hey ho, nothing that a signature could not fix. this provided me with the opportunity and grounds to go and do a bit of shopping, something you may well have guessed from the title of this post.

they seem somewhat fussier on this side of the equator about taking pictures in stores than they do on the other. that is, they really don't like you doing it. i did my best, but did not take many (two) as i went about my business. here is the first one, and it's a case of "oh dear" for those of you hoping a certain Welsh bass player and lyricist would move on to a lucrative publishing career.



the pink book you can see there is Nicky Wire's Death Of A Polaroid thing. if the price is not too clear, which i suspect it is not, that's £1.99 they are now asking for it. i think the published price was £30 some 3 or 4 years ago; i myself got it for my (considerably) better half when it went down to all of £10 (i think, might have been £18) not long after release. so if i had waited i could have got 5 - 9 copies of it for the same money.

is it any good? without doubt it is the best ever book to contain practically nothing but small blurry pictures ever created by a Welsh bass player and lyricist. a bold claim, i know, considering the range that covers. i would imagine that everyone who wants the book already has it, hence the low price. however, some Manics fans might be tempted to get a second or third (or tenth) copy of it at that price, just to cut it up a bit and make some class art coated in glitter. us Manics fans do things like that.

as to where a large part of my estate could so very nearly have gone today, and may well go in the not too distant future, behold this partial look at the front display of a store.



never mind all the class Star Wars stuff, look at the top! those are those class Alien action figures that were planned around the film's release but never made it to the shelves at the time. i did not dare look at the price, for whatever it was they probably would have been bought. so by not knowing i could just take it as a given that i could not afford them.

the shop is filled with all sorts of excellent and class things, and i suspect i will be back when funds allow it.

in another store, for those of you worried that i did not purchase class toys today, i did find a rather magnificent set of Star Wars characters for a mere £10. here is a look at the back of the box.



the actual toys / figures is what you want to see? no, sorry, can't do that. the boys have made them vanish somewhere, possibly and presumably to their room. to be honest, the way they attacked the box to get the toys out it is a small wonder that the back remained in such a state that i could present the picture above.

as for the set itself, i quite like how it says it is to "commemorate the release" of some sort of DVD, but also states on the box that the "DVD is not included". i think it refers to that super-rubbish first version of the Clone Wars cartoon; you know the one where the episodes were about 3 minutes long and did not make a great deal of sense. that, now i think, James keeps asking to see, so if they had put the DVD in that would have been rather handy.

as for practical shopping, well i got some jackets and stuff like that. i also decided that a priority was a new mug for me, since my mugs are currently, or at least hopefully soon, to face the same trial by treacherous sea as my boots.

after having a look around at some very, very impressive mugs, i went with this one. for the reasons that it was the cheapest and the most massive.



yes, a Batman mug. it says on the box that it is a 20 Oz mug. i am not sure what it means, but i think it means the size of one that an American would have for their first, small shot of Diet Root Beer at breakfast before the full American sized non-Diet Root Beer arrived with their muesli, grits, pancakes, cheeseburgers and assorted fried animals.

cost? £4 from that shop that the fella who owns the bar-codes does. me happily giving money over that might be spent (ahem) improving the squad of Newcastle may seem strange, but there's a logic to this. the owner has an unusual approach, as many will know. there is every likelihood that my pennies will be given straight to Joe Kinnear to do whatever the hell it is Joe Kinnear does rather than towards paying for some players.

other than the massive Batman logo, it also, rather conveniently or if you will handily, has 'Batman' written down the handle in case you missed who or what the logo referred to.



my choices were rather wide and varied, to be honest. i could have got a normal / regular mug featuring Bowie, The Who, Led Zeppelin or the Happy Mondays for £8. there was also a crappy grey outline of Boba Fett's helmet one, with the words "he's no good to me dead" written underneath. that was £12. so i think you can see why this £4 won, as impractical and unlikely to be used as it is.

to give a sense of perspective on how massive it is, well, observe.



yes. that big. it might get used as it would save me making a 2nd cup on a morning, wouldn't it. or i could make a 2nd cup of coffee and end up drinking 4 cups of coffee each morning, something that could be quite mental.

and that's about it really. well, i also bought a variation on a loaf of bread and some milk that was of a mostly conventional nature. nothing worth taking pictures of, really.

more exciting updates as and when i have them!



be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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