Tag Archives: in the collection

Rainbow Peephole – In the Collection

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As a toy, kaleidoscopes were fun for a little bit but they never really amounted to much. Depending on the type, they were fun to look through for a moment, and then they just went back in the drawer for me. So I don’t know if it’s worse or better that the Rainbow Peephole makes things cheaper by just being a plastic lens in a bit of cardboard.

I guess comparing it to a kaleidoscope is a bit much, even. It’s really just a diffraction lens and it doesn’t distort things. It makes weird outlines of rainbow colored light around them. They’re still for sale for about a quarter a piece (which almost seems a bit much) but God knows when mine was made by Rainbow Symphony, a 3D glasses (the old kind) company.

The reason for their existence is mostly of course to illustrate a scientific principal to children (while being cheap), and they do accomplish that goal in their chintzy glory.

Tree Tops – In the Collection

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We’ve all had the experience of the “classic” toys. Ones that only really entertain for the amount of time it takes to learn how to use them or ≈5 minutes. At least that was my experience with tops. I like them, but I couldn’t be entertained with them for long (even EDC tops, which are a thing according to some people). And anything like that really benefits in my mind from having a joke tacked on to it. In this case it’s “Tree Tops”, wooden spinning tops that look like the tops of pine trees (the nice, light wood they’re made out of).

Surprisingly enough, they’re made by a fairly competent company, Areaware, and it shows in their construction. Once you get the technique down they really are fairly decent spinning tops. The company makes loads of things, most of which are things I don’t find interesting, but in the section of “toys and games” they make the Cubebot (I think you’d put “the” in front of the name), an elastic band toy that made it into my local arty bookstore, and a deck of minimalist playing cards I’d seen several times around the internet, and had considered getting.

The designer of the tops, Karl Zahn, who is helpfully credited on the cloth carry-bag, seems mostly content to create strange wooden furniture pieces, and most of his other Areaware contributions are wooden animal-shaped boxes and brass rings. There’s nothing really in his résumé that would indicate he’d make such a silly joke toy, but in any case, he made a good wooden top, even if I wouldn’t really consider purchasing any of his other items.

And that’s that. There isn’t much to the tops themselves. They are for sale still at the time of my writing in packs of five, either natural wood color or different shades of “green” (one’s yellow) like mine for a price that’s a little on the high side but not too bad. And you get a posh (rustic, minimal, I can’t accurately describe it so I went for a joke) box (which I don’t have) and bag to go with it. So if you’re lookin’ for good tops and good jokes, look no further.

Russian “Space Battle” Battleship in Space Board Game – In the Collection (космический бой)

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I’ve got about as many board games as I would ever need (let’s see that stop me) including most of the classic ones that immediately come to mind when “board games” are mentioned, like: Life, Monopoly, Uno, Scrabble, and Battleship. Most of those are pretty common; though, even in the middle of southwest Texas you can find those and some “designer” board games like Catan and 7 Wonders, but one of the strangest things I’ve ever found out there in the middle of nowhere is a Russian re-implementation of Battleship called космический бой.

Typing that into Google Translate will get you “Space Battle” or “Space Combat”, which is pretty accurate as the game is Battleship with the titular water-based vessels replaced with spaceships. There are a few variations: the largest ship is only 4 spaces, and there are a few 1-space “fighters”. I don’t have instructions (I say squinting at the back of the box) and can’t read Russian anyway, so I don’t know if there are any rule changes to compensate for what seem to be some annoying additions. There are some rule changes/additions in other countries and regions (Russia included) that make the game in general more playable (less boring than totally random guessing), and hopefully they had the sense to implement them here.

But other than it being obviously Battleship with everything changed slightly (the case, the ships, the pegs) I can’t give you much information about it since I can’t read Russian (or any Cyrillic language). I did find a shop listing for the game after a little internet searching, and running it through the translator doesn’t produce much clarification, though it does acknowledge that the game is a variation on Battleship, making me wonder how the copyright for the game works there (or even here, I don’t really know much about its history), and it offers a vague “Ships on the need to touch each other, the minimum distance – a single cell” that could be an answer to my rules question above. But in any case, we know from the side of the box that anyone can enjoy the game… as long as they are less than 100 years old.

Soviet Leader Nesting Dolls – In the Collection

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There’s a pretty big collectors market out there for Russian Nesting (Babushka or Matryoshka) Dolls. And, if you search, a surprising number of them are various versions of a “Soviet Leaders” theme. I have no idea if this is a done in a mocking, jesting, or approving tone. Nor do I know why the particular public figures are chosen to be featured (in a fairly unflattering way). The previous owner of my set also told me that it was made in the Czech Republic (perhaps when there was also a “slovakia” attached), and any significance that has is lost on my American post-1990s brain.

The dolls themselves are fairly basic: the carving is unfinished (with a few burr,s here and there) on the inside and the paint is there but far from a masterpiece. I’m not quite sure who all of the people caricature-ized are, but after a little bit of research I believe from smallest to largest they are: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin (Who potentially breaks the pattern by being president of Russia and not a Soviet Premier {He does have a Russian Federation flag that would indicate it’s him though}). And if I’m correct, they’re all roughly in chronological order, and some pretty important figures for Russians (though I personally don’t know much about Khrushchev). My absolute favorite has to be little itty-bitty Lenin. And slightly-bigger Stalin is pretty funny too.

I like to think that this is some form of political slight. I certainly would take it as such if they made me part of a Babushka doll set. That’s a joke I could get behind, but I’m willing to bet it’s both something meant to insult and endear, like bobble-heads of American Presidents. And like those, who doesn’t want a traditional Russian toy of traditional Russians looking traditionally silly on their shelf?

Collet Tool System – In the Collection

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Of the things I collect, tools are probably the easiest to justify to myself, as they actually serve a purpose, and having a good tool has helped me out tremendously over the years. But, while I do appreciate quality, the usefulness or sturdiness of an object doesn’t always come into play when I find something fascinating. I’ve got several “clever” tool ideas in my collection that were cheaply produced in China and never caught on (perhaps rightfully so). The one I’m looking at this time is a nameless collet-based system for attaching different tools to a single handle.

The case says YPF/Maxus, which is/are an (depending on how you look at it) energy company that put their logo on a cheap Chinese product. The case is a terrible pleather that does such an unconvincing job I just want to call it plastic, with red nylon backing on the inside. Contained behind the flimsy zipper and loose elastic is an assortment of tools: and adjustable wrench, tiny pliers, a small slotted screwdriver, a colleted handle, and 6 attachments for said handle. The dedicated slotted screwdriver is the only thing vaguely usable in the whole package. The wrench is almost laughably weak, with the adjustment knob (worm screw) and jaw rattling even at their tightest. The pliers are cast out of a cheap pot metal that one can easily feel deforming in their hands. And while the slotted screwdriver is obviously cheap, at its size one likely wouldn’t be using it for anything more heavy duty than taking apart electronics or the like.

But the best part is the colleted driver. It uses the same handle material as the smaller driver but has a brass collet and tightening knob affixed to the tip. Its six attachments have “wings” at the base of their shafts that slot into the collet, allowing for more grip when it is tightened down (it’s still loose enough to wiggle at that stage, though). These attachments are: two additional sizes of slotted screwdriver, one Phillips driver, an “awl”, what I can only describe as a “screw awl” or “screw bore”, and most hilariously of all, a claw hammer. So that adds to the uselessness with a few wobbly drivers, a fairly blunt pokey thing, a thing that might be used to start or enlarge screw holes (I really don’t understand it), and a 1oz hammer that, if swung with enough force for it to be useful as a hammer, would quickly lead to something in the little device breaking.

It’s all such a strange and poorly implemented idea. If one uses tools with much frequency, they would know that there are a few standard ways to link various bits together that work just fine, and that integrating a hammer with any other tool isn’t the best idea. But still perhaps a nice little kit like this could be forgiven for having a proprietary system if it was high quality, and as it is I’d barely qualify them as play tools. I got my set essentially for free and basically unused, and it will unfortunately stay that way in my collection, not as a set of tools, but as an oddity.