Yukk in the box

Anyone over forty remember gonks and other fluffy funfair creatures? Well, here's my Yukk (above right), as sold in a wonderful, now long-gone, souvenir, giftware and ceramic ornament store in the old Imperial Arcade in the Sydney CBD in the late 1960s.

Yukks were essentially balls of brightly coloured acrylic "fur" - the fabric was glued to very squat plastic legs, with bulbous "Mr Potato Head"-like eyes poked into the core. They also featured long, thin, leathery arms. My Yukk was blue, and I recently rediscovered him in a box in the garage. My brothers once had one each, too, in Dayglo orange (or green?) and crimson, if I remember correctly - and my youngest brother's Yukk actually sported an actual mismatched "Mr Potato Head" eye after an encounter with our pet dog.

A few years later, a cheaper version of such creatures, usually armless and with wiggly eyes, were very common, usually on the "every child wins a prize shelf" of carnival sideshows.

But a recent viewing of an old episode of "The Magic Circle Club" reminded me of where my childhood fascination for gonks and Yukks probably derived:


Gaspar, Oscar and Sir Jasper in the episode, "Claude Clumsy: A Smashing Time".



Mmmm. Oscar had a nose like a regular gonk. Yukks didn't have a visible nose.

Cowboys herding cats

Someone mentioned this video only a few days ago, and then I stumbled across it tonight on Facebook. Love it!

Rally ho!

Loving it!

Just back from Mr Kim, the framer! Three Patrick Owsley sketches of "The Impossibles" (from the Hanna-Barbera series, "Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles") and a Spanish gum card!

I saw the set of three paintings on eBay - the cartoonist has an online store - just a few days after my gum card of "Los Imposibles" (sic) arrived from a different "Buy it now" auction.

Rally ho!

Brrrrrm! Bye Bye Bathurst!

Miss Playtrek is still with Playtrekker Sammy in Bathurst, Australia, but her time with him is coming to an end. Since Sam did promise Miss Playtrek a chance to do some car racing at famous Mount Panorama, they headed there last Saturday... There were actual races going on, so her plan to "do a circuit" were nixed. But Sam did snap a quick pic:


"Bye Bye Bathurst!"

Intent on having some racing fun, Miss Playtrek took to the streets below The Mount to show what she can do behind the wheel of the "Playtrek Porsche". Unfortunately, Sam wasn't the only one watching:


Miss Playtrek meets Officer Ken.

Now that Brisbane's floodwaters have subsided, Miss Playtrek will be heading off to fellow Aussie John M, in Queensland... That is, provided she and Sammy have finished their ten hours of community service by next Wednesday!

Don't spook till you're spooken to

GodzillaGirl challenged me to dig out some more Fimo modeling compound and try making Shirley Shriek, an early Patti Peticolas "Kooky Spooky" design, who was morphed into the more commercial Mama Kaskit. (My housemate reckons Shirley looks a little too Ku Klux Klan.)



Bulbous-nosed General Gilghouly - note the newly-added bluebird perched on the more-suitable gun, as featured on Patti's sketches - and Shirley Shriek, with her skull necklace, using a length of silver neckchain I accidentally broke a few years ago. Waste not, want not.


Early Shirley Shriek sketch by Patti Peticolas, 1968.


Custom Kooky Spookys by Ian McLean.

Salting the herd

I bought my mother this funky cow family pepper, salt, milk jug and sugar bowl set in about 1975, and they survived three house moves, including interstate. When she returned to New South Wales last year, one of the calves had gone rogue and has never been seen again. I took a digital photo on a recent visit so I could more accurately search for a replacement. I was on a mission! And I can now report success.

After several close calls, I recently found a single second hand calf (pointing in the correct direction) on "Buy it now" eBay. There are so many variations on this style of ceramics, seemingly dating from the 50s, 60s and 70s, with very few having the bull as part of the set (the bull sugar bowl is what appealed to me so much in 1975), and many sets have dark purplish colours under the glaze, or any variety of painted details on the bells, collars and hooves. Similarly, prices for sets vary from a few dollars for lone pieces from broken sets to very large amounts if the sellers consider them to be "rare".

The horns and cow bell on this one were pale yellow (notice I've just enameled one horn metallic gold in the photo, as a test), and the blushes of hair colour are mauve on the replacement, rather than light brown - the brown-tinted sets do seem to be the rarity in my several months of looking, but adoptive bovine parents can't be fussy.

On the positive side, this little guy came in a random set of five single ceramic shakers, but still a good deal for the one calf I needed. I now have shakers resembling a red parrot, a Thanksgiving turkey, a weird duck and a dodo-like bird all looking for a shelf to warm.

Bye bye Betelgeuse?

"I shall stick my fins into my ears and go
'La la la la la la. Not listening!'"

According to adelaidenow.com.au, "one of the biggest stars in our galactic neighbourhood - Betelgeuse - is expected to go supernova 'soon'.

"The infamous red super-giant star in Orion’s nebula - Betelgeuse - is predicted to go gangbusters and the impending super-nova may reach Earth before 2012. The second biggest star in the Orion constellation is losing mass, a typical indication that a gravitation collapse is occurring.

"'When that happens, we'll get our second sun,' according to Dr Brad Carter, Senior Lecturer of Physics at the University of Southern Queensland."

Return to Monkeyhead Rock

Terry toweling bucket hats in 1973

My family recently had a nostalgic reunion holiday at Pearl Beach on NSW's Central Coast and we undertook a quest to find the elusive so-called "Monkeyhead Rock" (above), which we'd nicknamed way back in the 1960s.

At first, while searching on my own, I worried that Monkeyhead Rock may have dislodged itself, like so many other rocks on both of Pearl Beach's headlands:



But we were successful! I was looking on the wrong headland. It was on the way to neighbouring Flathead Beach, not Umina.

Here is our recreated pic, 38 years later. We had expected a lot would have changed, but perhaps more elements had altered than we'd anticipated:


Monkeyhead Rock, 2011

A thong for Australia Day

A bizarrely Aussie way to celebrate Australia Day...

I had just walked past the taxi rank, up and over the railway station, and was halfway along a looooong, lonely bitumen road, which was melting in 42 degree C heat, when one of my thongs had a blow out. The only way to walk home was to tie it to my foot with strands of buffalo grass and stalks of paspalum.

The strap on these Kenji flip flops is fabric and there was an almighty snap yesterday! Not sure the fashion will catch on, though. The new strap is rather scratchy, attracts stray cows, and requires mowing (or is that mooing)?

What made it all worse was that, while I was limping home in the heat, a stoic young guy in his late teens went striding by in bare feet, carrying his thongs in his hand. I swear I almost considered offering him cash for his footwear, especially since He Wasn't Using Them!


Happy Australia Day

Lion around

Lion Island, as seen from Paul Landa Park, Pearl Beach (2011).

And a recent trip with the school choir, into the recently-revamped Sydney Town Hall in the CBD, had me noticing these stone "lion head" gargoyles (below). I guess I'd always known they were there but I hadn't really examined them closely before, nor noticed that each one had a different expression!







Then, of course, there are two lions in the school library:


Alex from "Madagascar" and "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa"


Alex and friends

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Library lion

And, it's almost Chinese New Year!

Holy fine finny fiends, Batman!

Okay, I know they found a bullshark swimming in a flooded Brisbane street this week, but I found *this* in my garage yesterday! It took me a while to work out exactly what it was - but it's the interactive shark fin prop I made when Hoyts Cinema Centre in the Sydney CBD asked us to dress up and do a series of weekly "Rocky Horror Picture Show"-type events for the 60s' "Batman" movie revival in January 1987!

As Robin, I ran across the screen with this "fin on a stick" just before the famous "rubber shark scene". Ah, fame is so fleeting sometimes.

Ghosts of Christmases past presents

I raced around the house today with my iPhone, snapping pics of Christmas gifts I remember receiving over the decades.

I've dated this little woollen golliwog (above) as being from Christmas 1963. Not so PC in the 21st century, but I recall watching my grandmother make a similar one for my younger brother; it is a similar method to making pompons. The golliwog just gets tied off differently, and then is cut free from his cardboard frame. While looking around today for something to give a sense of scale to the photos, I remembered how we often used to beg for a spare paper patty case, when Mum was making cupcakes, so we could allow our golliwogs a little crossdressing freedom.



Predating the popular "Barrel of Monkeys" by at least a year, this wooden monkey (above) came to me at Christmas 1964. I remember seeing chains of them hanging from the shelves at an import gift and caneware shop in the Imperial Arcade in the Sydney CBD. Their curved hands and feet allowed them to be contected, just like the plastic game pieces in "Barrel of Monkeys". Some of the monkeys had long, curvy, cane tails (and mine does have a hole where a tail would have originally been inserted). My brother had a matching monkey, in a slightly darker colour of wood stain, but the elastic holding his monkey's limbs in place perished many decades ago. My grandfather repaired his, to an extent, with rubber bands.



A hand-knitted red and yellow gonk (above) from Christmas 1965. His name is Messy Hair and he has a few moth holes these days. My friend at school, Jean, had a sewn one, made of red, white and black satin fabric, and I pestered my Mum and paternal grandmother - for months! - for a gonk of my own. My brother received one in reverse colours to mine, and our younger brother received a similar, hand-knitted Humpty Dumpty. I think it must have been in the same pattern book. My grandmother knitted our gonks in secret (and sent them off to Santa to bring back on Christmas night).



This "monster" (above) was given to me at Christmas 1982 by a friend who'd heard I was "into The Lord of the Rings". She bought it in an Australian giftware shop and it carries a label underneath, "Made in Canada". It appears to be made of clay, and is studded with coloured "jewels", but it is actually carved from some kind of plant root, probably azelea (I have a carved wooden tiger which is definitely azalea root - and I just realized it seems to be the same texture). It's almost as light as cork; some sections are polished smooth, while other parts are the natural surface of the root. The plain corrugated cardboard box it came in was crudely labelled in felt pen: "Sauron".



"The Herculoids" was a classic animated series from 1967, but these very cool Toynami retro action figures are from 2003. You can bet they were brought to licensing life by some guy who loved and wanted such a set in 1967. I bought the "Zok the dragon with Zandor" boxed set (#1) new, and only ever saw one other of those sets in the shops. No locations near me ever imported the other two huge sets. I found all three sets, loose and second hand, in Brisbane at Christmas 2008 - and bought them all as a gift for myself. This gave me a spare Zok to take to the school library, where he continues to enthrall little kids, and a spare Zandor who may be useful customizing fodder some day. When you open up the blobs, Gloop and Gleep, there are unopened packets of a white, Pla-Doh like, compound so that one can emulate the creatures' stretching abilities during play.

Greeting Geisha Ghost

I finally found a tiny sketch of the Kooky Spooky design known as Geisha Ghost, who eventually evolved into Grandma Macreak. Since I still had an unbaked batch of the lemon/nightglow Fimo modelling compound, I figured I still had one more custom left in me.


Early "Kooky Spooky" designs (Geisha Ghost: middle of top row).

Created by Patti Peticolas (1968) for Hasbro. Baby Boo (became Baby Spook'em), Shirley Shriek with pendant (evolved into Mama Kaskit), Geisha Ghost with fans (evolved into Grandma Macreak), General Booregard with gun (eventually dropped), Gaston Ghost with foil and shield (became Daddy Cadava, then dropped), Teena Terror. Note: the banjo went to Vincent Van Ghost (who became Rigor Mortimer, and finally Brother Mortimer). Cousin Gilghouly evolved into Daddy Booregard.


Geisha Ghost from the back, and from the top.


A trio of customs: General Gilghouly, Geisha Ghost and Cousin Cadava


The whole gang!

Watchu tolkien 'bout?

Framed Middle-earth map in my school's new BER library.

Hahaha. A friend just compared me to the Valar of the JRR Tolkien books. Tolkien Gateway, the Tolkien wiki, says: "The Valar (like any of the Ainur) have no fixed shape."

Especially after Christmas, methinks.

I do like the sound of Irmo (aka Lórien), "Master of Dreams and Desires".

Something to keep in mind for the new year.