Islington Junk Tour.

We decided, as it was an absolutely vile day, to take a trip to Walthamstow and go on to somewhere else as a spur of the moment thing rather than plan anything at all.

After doing well we decided on the way back to look round Islington and Highbury as A. it was on the Victoria line and didn't have to change trains or even lines and B. It was somewhere I had never been before. 

Most of my Charity shop haul had at that point come from Oxfam in Walthamstow, some ace singles there including The Beloved Your love takes me Higher and Ongaku 3 (Pink Elln and Atom Heart) which are ace.
So we decided to exit the tube and see what delights Islington has in store. 

Short answer not much.

Longer answer as follows.

If you are remotely leftwing or a ponce that gets off on the whole organic, wholefood, sustainable wankery that is wrong with modern society then Islington is quite probably heaven to you but for me its kind of a living hell.  There are only so many bearded lefties one can take before you positively have to kill everyone in the room, and this was my tipping point.  As you come out of the station you will find a Marie Curie cancer research shop, not only is it massive but its the only charity shop you'll find for miles around.  They didn't have a bad selection at all, with a massive array of both CDs and records, we managed to find some old Guerilla records stuff including D.O.P. so was reasonably happy. 

We decided to trek down the high street and found out a few troubling things about Islington, their sole supermarkets are either Waitrose or Budgens (I had to google where my nearest Budgens was, because up until that point I'd never actually seen one in the flesh.)  After a trek past the 7th identical ethnic cafe, (although with no actual ethnic people there, I don't think I saw a black face once) we came to a token working class cafe called Workers Cafe, a name so weirdly marxist you may just stick up a sign saying, Here be Proles. 

On the plus side I did see Schram and Scheddle from the Michael Rosen poem of the same name, though it was on the other side of the street so didn't go in.  We went past a McDonalds and ended up in Angel which had a Cancer Research shop complete with a well stocked vinyl selection.  We got a Funkstorung album and I love Sourcelab 3 with Jean Jacques Perry and some early Black Strobe (I'm a sucker for electro and weirdness), before getting the tube back home.

Bubble Symphony Proto

Before we get onto the main moan of the week, I'd like to spend a bit of time discussing this which turned up in a box of old jamma boards. It as the title suggests is a proto version of Bubble symphony, which I first got to play on Taitos Arcade legends for PC, (PS2 not having this for somne reason).   Even though I much prefer the follow up Bubble Memories, this version actually looks the bomb being much closer to Bubble Bobble than the world spanning rework we eventually got.

Incidentally that was the high point of my day, mostly I've been wrestling with something ordered online, first up an Icydock Harddrive dock that spontaneously combusted for no good reason, yeah we got our money back on it as well, and a Video tape snaffler from Honestech.

Most of the time its been driving me nuts due to a combination of video and problems with the software, largely it not recording anything and when it accepts a stream its largely static.  Now I'm pretty sure there are other ways of using the hardware so it doesn't go through honestechs software, which on expert is remarkably informative, but so far have drawn a blank, we have another vcr to test and if push comes to shove I've already installed the software on my old PC to see if thats the problem.  If you do make it though, I have tapes worth of Porn memories to be loaded up onto youtube. 

Looking through I have a few animes Kishin Heidan and Gunbuster (few episodes missing).  A load of Pokemon lifted from Sky back in the 90's and a few It'll be alright on the nights as well as some junk kung fu and a something tedious from Hokushin.

Top something or other missing or long forgotten products.

A following list of obscure products either long dead or just failed in the UK.

If you are wondering why this came about then this should be all you need to know, I was looking at the cans in the 99p store and it struck me that we don't see Lilt around no more.  There are numerous tropical drinks now but Lilt along with Five alive were the original pineapple based drinks but now sold almost nowhere (they're both owned by Coca cola so are probably safe but damn they weren't half bad).  Here are some more stuff that 

Burtons Puffs.

Can barely remember these, they were cheap crisps that were sold from our schools tuck shop, (no we werent posh our school did have a tuck shop).  They cost 10p and you got loads of them in a packet, nice potato crisps.  There is a thread that has some info. Burtons makes biscuits only now it seems and there is no room for crisps and stuff.

Tab.

Actually this one isn't so lost as it being a total failure here.  Americans gating in here will say oh yeah Tabs still available in the states but I will say this.  The UK version was a flop, I remember this coming out in the last year of school and of one corner shop selling it, after a while it just disappeared and Coke pulled the plug along with Vanilla coke although that is thankfully back.

I don't even remember it being any good just the advert on TV which was sort of Xfiles SciFi pastiche with the tag line now everything becomes clear.  See also mountain dew and snapple for other American brands that have died on their arses in the UK.

54321. 

A chocolate bar I only really remember from the song and Advert. I never actually got to taste this one.

Hubba Bubba Gum.

This I think you can still get, it was bubble gum and I fucking loved bubble gum back then, would take this over chocolate back then.  It came in about a billion flavours such as, Cream soda and a variety of fruit flavours. Now I don't see them around along with the other novelty gums especially the one that was just an eyeball (Horror gum I don't know) maybe health and safety got them.

Marathon, Opal Fruits, Oil of Ulay, Jif liquid.

Basically renamed to oblivion often for the worse and often under the auspices of "homogenizing" the brand.

Mr Dog, Meow mix, Brekkies.

A rather pet centric mix of stuff that either does not exist anymore or has been renamed.

Meow mix you may remember from the advert that goes Miaow miaow Miaow and was basically cat food.
Brekkies were biscuits, that I think were either subsumed into Go cat or some other terrible product.
Mr Dog, is now better off known as Cesar for reasons that are never made clear at all.  Incidentally I also saw a DVD line in Ibiza in a record shop a long time ago but they specialized in "Welsh vices" rather than
Dog food.

Atlus, Mitchell and More

Hello its been quite a while since I've added a round up of stuff but there is so much to talk about that its unreal (bro). 

Cousins on facebook.

You may have heard me talk about my cousins here and that, often in exalted tones, that we share a lot in common and they're gifted, but that really is just the girls.  In reality my cousins had 4 kids each and the majority of them are sons.  I'm not saying that they are all unpromising dullards or junior thugs, if I'm going by facebook posts (and really you shouldn't go by facebook posts) then damn I thought we were smarter than this. 

It all stemmed from monday going through my pictures and finding some comments I'd missed by my cousins eldest.  He wasn't a mate so we did the honourable thing and sent a request, only for him to reply who are you are you gay?.  The rest descended into cavespeak / textspeak which I'm pretty sure is untranslatable.
So we gave him the heads up in words he could understand, i.e. your mum was my cousin, and your nan was my mums sister.   I got a request but with the words I still don't know who you are.   Thick cunt.

Freecorder.

For sheer completeness we have a video review now up on youtube, Short version for those with tiny attention spans, if you have an offline PC (say an old XP box you don't use) its still probably not worth the hassle of downloading.
You can watch it here in all its silent glory.

Double Wings.

Thanks to haze this bizarre little Raidenesque shmup is now (more) playable in MAME.  Why does this get a mention here, because it was one of the first things I ever played in a pub.  I was 17 and along with several 6th form mates we used to go out on a saturday night to the Director General pub.  After a few, we had some cash to play the few cabs they had there, including this with its toucan in a flying helmet  a gambling version of tetris and an Addams family pinball (the greatest pin of all time).  I'd long forgotten about it untill I saw it up on there in all its emulated glory.

Oh and finally in this highly schizophrenic post how about a list of all? the mobile phone game spin offs of the series.