Junk Tour Returns.

Junk tour returns with the boot sales starting up again, after the SARS II electric boogaloo break. 

It's the first boot sale of the year for me thanks to that little mix up and armed with my mask from work, it's time to venture out to see what I could find.

First of all the main boot sale I go to is out at the edge of Kent where it meets London. It's two buses there and back. Along the motorway and along the verges, noting the wild life. I've seen orchids in flower there one Sunday, a few years back. 

Even though I should get up earlier and not leave it to the last minute.

 As I say, leaving earlier, it's like the tide is coming in and everyone has to scurry to safety, This means I have about an hour before everyone packs up and leaves.

I did find a few things, a kids book about Basil Brush, and some British Knights Trainers thrown away, they seem decent, so will have to give them a clean up.

A couple of good doggos seen there too, including what looked like an acutal Greg Mitchell from Reeves and Mortimer (seriously he looked like a toy dog, very blonde and short haired) and the rare mega teckel a big brown version of a dachshund on stilt legs. 

I got to see a stand of Rosebay Willowherb almost going to seed along with some thistles, so expect to see fairies floating round pretty soon.

Holiday

You were supposed to get a post detailing my current hiatus before leaving for Spain.  

We went to Salou if you are wondering, a place called the Hotel Belvedere a charming 3 star place off of the main strip.  I had previously been to Salou in 2011 but this was sort of a return trip further down the coast.  What you really want to know is if its changed much and if there was any other weirdness to go with it.

1. The Russians have taken over, the women either homely sorts, dark haired slavs quite fit in the way or impossibly tall hard faced blondes, the guys tall with mullets and an odd dress sense or old fat guys in speedos. One of the best things I saw but regret taking a photo of was a little girl in a cat dress that had the immortal words Do you wanna fuck on it.  I'm guessing they do not know English enough to know how poor taste / bloody funny it was, but it had me laughing for a good 5 minutes.

2. They have a really nice open area for walking at the back of the hotel, next to the railway line. Its supposed to be for dog walkers and the like but if you like nature there was some cool stuff there.  I saw a trail of ants scavenging on the corpse of an Oil Beetle, and a load of rabbits.  It eventually led onto Port Aventura water park which looked really run down and hardly busy.  I don't much like rides and such so didn't go in.

3. The pinball arcades are still there and this time managed to get film of the little robots moving at the play park arcade.  The one with Furoko Wars seems to have closed down and have now idea where it was.  They still have Scared Stiff, Red and Teds Road trip with their creepy talking heads and Ripleys Believe it or not, and they've added Gottliebs Teed Off which was awesome and along with No Good Gofers is one of the pins I really wanted to play.

4. So many dogs and cats. They had stray kittens in the rocks up on the cliffs and regular moggies down by the harbour, we saw a big tabby being fed a sausage by an old German lady, his ginger friend was clearly unimpressed as he prefers ham.  Dog wise lots of little dogs, and a few surprising things.  A big German Shepherd type thing with a massive shaggy coat was the highlight along with a medium sized howl (Spaniel) lapping up some water from from a fountain.

5. Not so much racism here they still had their fair share of swastikas sprayed up but no little old ladies comparing their tans with the African guys selling watches and perfumes on the street.  On the other hand the bar hawkers are out of control including northern blokes and unknown foreign ladies flogging restaurants and bars.  Strangest of the lot was a guy who wanted to rate his advert for a boat party.

Stay tuned next time as I'll be detailing TV to you including the demise of UN1 Ukraine News 1.

POSTSCRIPT.

I was supposed to add this as well.  Mogura Kensei has been dumped and added to mame according to Haze.  I'm sure this came from an old arcade in Margate, as I saw this 9 years back on a trip there one bank holiday.  It was in pretty poor condition then (it looked like they took a lump hammer to the moles you bashed, as every Bison was totally fucked) but crucially still worked.

Polymusic.

Woolwich Poly Lower school ruins.

Here is something we really didn't expect to see, an LP of music from my old school.  Its called Polymusic and was made by the Woolwich Polytechnic School Concert band back in 1980.  Consisting of brass band standards including Dixieland Jamboree and a few marches it also contains some TV themes including Born Free and The Sweeny.   Although not a brass fan, this is actually quite relaxing and its competently done, but what you're dying to know is whether I'm one of the kids on the record.   Sadly no by the time I went there in 88 the band wasn't that much of a big deal, we still had music, but the band took less and less importance.  I can remember they came to our primary school sometime in the mid 80's possibly 86 and performed for us around Christmas time, but apart from that thats all I can remember.    

On a side note, my mate and I volunteered for choir practice they set up one christmas as we thought we could sing (we can't).  It was pretty cool and we had to wear uniform, but apart from singing Silent Night in German  I can remember nothing about it at all apart from it taking place in St Marys Church down at the back of Sainsburys in Woolwich.

Sadly both schools have moved into one now and they focus more on Technology rather than music.  The main campus is at the old Waterfield school in Thamesmead, you can read more here.   The upper school remains as flats though I don't have a photo of that yet. 

Ninja Edit.


The Sweeny from side A.

We didn't know that.

This is a brief collection of stuff that we didn't actually know about until quite recently.

1. Damilola Taylor is buried in Plumstead cemetery.

Damilola Taylor was a 10 year old kid who came to this country with his parents to seek a better life in Peckham (oh dear) but ended up losing his life, to a bunch of thugs.  This made national headlines and was extensively covered by the UK media.  Wikipaedia has a better write up of the whole case here. 

We always assumed that he was buried closer to home either in south London or in his home country of Nigeria.  However my parents like to walk, and  on one of their trips out through the cemetery at the top of our street, they stumbled across his grave.  We haven't confirmed it as such but, would figure as its a pretty big cemetery.

2. The DS has region locking.

OK, short version of this coming up. This is not the original DS or DS lite,  we are talking about the DSi and the DSi  LL/XL whatever you call it.  We picked up Solartorobo spiritual successor of Tail Concerto and amongst all the anti Piracy guff on the back of the packaging we have this. For use with the European region of DSi and DSXL only.

This seems to be only related to downloadable games and games that have DSi content on them, both the original and DS lite are Region free.  Indeed I have a few US games we regularly play and it doesn't affect it at all.  I don't have a DSi with its stupid camera or bigger screen, (indeed the similarly styled 3DS is of course region locked also).  So far we haven't found if there are ways to circumvent this illogical, anti gamer lock out, especially galling as it is coming from a hand held platform, and that with a poor battery life means I won't be getting one soon, unless both are considerably updated.    

Baku Baku Bonus bits.

One of the joys of emulation is that you're no longer need to bother with region coding or territorial lock out. Any game from anywhere can in theory be played so long as its supported by your emu.

Plus putting a disc in a PC can sometimes bring things up that are totally unexpected.

We bought a new Saturn game, its Baku Baku Animal and only cost a pound from Scope. We have SSF on our system so putting it into the drive to boot it up is a no brainer. However looking through the files is something quite bizarre. There are a series of textfiles, that do not amount to much but the last (titled readme) is pay dirt. In Japanese it lists some of the jobs such as designer and producer (we really can't read much due to poor Japanese skills) and a hyper ending. I'll attempt a dictionary translation but without 1337 Japanese skills it may lack coherence or even meaning.

In that there's a latin name (evident even in notepad) that links to a kind of parasitical flatworm
(Bipellium Fuscatum fact fans) so in actual fact they're not hyper at all just diseased.

So there you are Baku Baku Animal basically a game about worm riddled animals who can't stop eating.

File here for anyone who wants to look through and has a text editor capable of reading Japanese.