My first philatelic passport from Japan

My fifth addition to my collection of philatelic passports this year arrived in the post today.  It's the first one in my collection from Japan. It's in absolutely pristine condition, considering it's 35 years old. I love the bright red cover.

The opening pages show you how to use the passport and the original owner followed the instructions!

Inside there is a unique collection of stamps from around the world. Here are some that caught my eye, including this graphic depiction of an atrocity commemorated on a stamp by Iran.

Mauritius paid tribute to the tragic dodo with a whimsical cartoon stamp and a commemorative cancellation postmark. 

Meanwhile, the USA post office was already in the Christmas spirit (in November!) and Santa Claus was in their special postmark.

I really enjoy collecting these passports. They are quirky and I never know exactly what I will find inside. 

More Action Force revival news

Last year I posted about both an official and unofficial revival of Action Force, with figures released in homage to my favourite toy line of the 1980s. This week I received three fresh new figures created by Black Major Nation, an independent toy manufacturer named after one of the villains of the original toy line. 

The figures are another version of Red Jackal, a Cobra style trooper in a Red Shadows style uniform and a Cobra Eel Trooper from the classic G.I.Joe line but done in the colour scheme of a Kraken from vintage Action Force.

Red Jackal is basically a repaint of "Destro", one of the key members of Cobra, the terrorist organisation that fought against G.I.Joe. Back in the 1980s, Destro had a repaint and was released as Red Jackal in the UK. This makes the toy very collectible now for American collectors who have all the G.I.Joe figures released in America. 

Unlike the Red Jackal I blogged about last year, this one is a multi-jointed "o-ring" figure, like the original one in the 80s. (It's called an o-ring figure because the legs are attached to the rest of the body using a rubber band inside the figure - that's the O.)

Red Jackal comes with two alternate heads - one would turn him into Red Laser and the other is a Cobra Commander hooded head with an anachronistic AF Enemy logo on his hood.

The Cobra Trooper is OK. It would fit in with some Enemy troops fine. 

The Kraken Eel is, well, crackin'. The colour scheme is perfect. 

I really like this figure although the accessories are a little bit fiddly. They don't fit together very securely and the peg on the back-pack is quite loose in the hole in the figures back where it's meant to attach. As a display piece it's great; as a play figure, bits would quickly get lost. 

Shortly after I blogged about the figures last year I acquired some figures from a different independent manufacturer, Lady Jaye Toys. They released some "Shadow Troopers" in a variety of weird colour schemes. I decided to just get the classic Red Shadows they released in tribute to the original range. 

Again, these are o-ring figures. They come with two different weapons - a reproduction of the bazooka that was shipped with the vintage figures, and a machine gun. 

If I had one criticism of these figures, it's that the heads are two small when compared with the vintage figures. However, they come with optional different heads, including one to create a Black Major if you want one.

I have acquired a few vintage Action Force items recently as well, so will share those on the blog at some point. 

My 1984 stocktake

I'm slightly envious of the guy who collected 1,984 copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and turned them into an art exhibit. It just feels like a really cool idea. As someone prone to collecting, and who had a meaningful number as a collecting target in the past, it's one of those ideas I wish I'd had.

But perhaps it's a good thing I didn't have the idea! I don't have space for 1,984 copies of the same book. But I do have a few different copies. 

This is my favourite cover. I didn't need to buy this when Penguin released it a few years ago, but come on... it's perfect.

You can see how the 'censorship' black-out strip is over an embossed title, so it can be read more clearly if the book is tilted slightly.

The write-up on the back is quite minimalist. Penguin were packaging George Orwell's work as "Great Orwell" at the time. 

Keeping to the minimalist theme, there is no introduction. There is a page of quotes by authors and reviewers though.

Here's an older copy that I acquired from my Grandma's house. I kept a few of her books. This cover feels very cluttered and chaotic, in keeping with the way the Party both demands order but pursues disruption.

The writing on the left continues round onto the spine and then the back of the book.

The back cover features a quote from Andrew Motion, who might have been poet laureate when this copy was published. (It doesn't give an issue date but the existence of an advert for Penguin Books's website implies it was published after 1999 when Motion took up the role.) There is a brief author bio in the front but no intro.

My other Penguin edition is my 'reading copy' and has an issue date of 2008. It also has a 4-page introduction by Peter Davison (the literary professor, not the actor who played Dr Who!)

The cover design by Shepard Fairey is quite striking and they designed covers for Animal Farm as well (as seen on the back).

The two endorsements on the back are from comic Jo Brand and author Margaret Atwood. They feel like an unlikely pairing.

I blogged two years ago that several companies have started printing Nineteen Eighty-Four because the copyright on the book has expired (as has the copyright on all of Orwell's writings) so it's been a bit of a publishing free for all. 

But, despite seeing lots of attractive copies I have resisted the temptation to fill out a shelf with them. However, I did buy this version in TK Maxx recently. It is published by Wordsworth Classics and I bought it because it had an interesting-looking long introduction and several other essays by Orwell included. 

Plus the cover designed by Becky Surridge was very cool. It has real Fritz Lang 'Metropolis' vibes. Given the opening line of the book, the man in the clock in the 8 is striking. It could be Winston. It could be whoever is spying on Winston.

The introduction by Sally Minogue, author and academic, is 30 pages long. And adding even more value to this edition is a selection of essays and other bits, like book reviews.

There are no endorsements on the back. The write-up lists all the words and terms coined by Orwell in this book - something I blogged about way back when in the early years of this blog.

The list of additional content looks intriguing. I'm interested in what he thought of Wells and Huxley, both of whom were authors of speculative fiction too. (I've categorised 'speculative fiction' previously.)

So, those are my copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four. I have two books about the book as well. I reviewed DJ Taylor's book On 1984 back in 2023. I also have a copy of The Ministry of Truth by Dorian Lynskey, which will hopefully make it off the reading pile and onto the blog at some point!

For now, it's sitting in my 1984 collection.

I succumbed to the lure of reduced football stickers

I said I wasn't going to buy any Euro 2024 football stickers. But then Lidl knocked 30% off a multipack and the temptation was too great!

The pack included a tin, which was a major contributory temptational factor. I can justify it as a place to put my swaps.

There were 9 packets in the tin. All of them had a 'shiny' as the first sticker. The first packet had a shiny of Arda Güler, who was a stand out young starlet for Turkey. 

The second sticker in the first pack was of two Cymru players! I was off to a good start.

Three of the nine shiny stickers were 'parallels' meaning they are rarer - I'm a bit annoyed by it because it leaves me with a conundrum of whether to stick them in the album or not. I probably won't. 

However I did get an ordinary shiny and the parallel version, which neatly shows what I mean.

Because of licensing issues, some players just have headshots where their kits aren't visible. They look a bit odd. Plus it makes the choice of headshot really important. 

Poor old Oliver Kahn deserved better!

More freebie football stickers

My friend Gawain, who normally sources me baseball cards, sent me some freebie packets of Topps official Euro 24 stickers that he had picked up at a trading card show. These are different to the free ones I got in M&S last month.

There were three stickers in each pack - with no shiny badges or rarer variations included. Fair enough, they were free after all.

The stickers themselves are interesting. Players for England and France have only their faces shown whereas players for other teams are shown in full kit. I suspect this is due to licensing as Panini are doing an England sticker collection, for example, so they might have exclusive rights to showing the kit.

The Germany players might also be "heads only" - but Bastian there was the only Germany player I got in the packets, and he is a "Legend", not a current player. There are three marked spaces for legend stickers on the Germany pages and Germany seems to be the only team to have them.

There are other stickers too, including illustrations of the stadium and the official ball designed just for this European championship. Every country has a double-sticker of landmarks and architecture representing it. I got both halves of the Slovakia picture.

The double stickers give a choice of lining up the design or the edges. I've made sure the red border lines up here which shows just how off centre the stickers are compared to each other. It's only about a millimetre, but it's very noticeable.

I am resisting the urge to start buying these stickers, especially as I really enjoyed opening these free packs. 

A little stamp collecting weirdness

These are some slides from a recent mini-presentation I did in the member's evening for the British Thematic Association (the stamp collecting group I've been in for 13 years now).

Earlier this year we finally got round to properly sorting through the accumulation of stamp stuff that my Dad left behind when he passed away. In the boxes of stuff were some old, very tatty and disintegrating, stamp albums. Here are a couple of the album covers on my first slide from the presentation.

The albums were beyond saving, but some of the stamps in them were salvageable. Cathy embarked on a mission to save as many as she could. In the middle of this project, she handed me this page because she knew I would be intrigued by it.

Basically, pages in these albums would have the names of countries printed on the top, along with a couple of images of stamps from those countries. What Cathy had noticed was that the image of the stamp printed on the header was the same as the stamp mounted underneath. (In this case a low value stamp from Rhodesia & Nyasaland, which were British colonies in southern Africa.)

Soon, Cathy found lots more examples - as shown on this slide.

That might not be readable, so here are the headers and stamps...

The last stamp shown is the odd one out because it's from Bolivia, rather than being from another British Commonwealth country.

We also had a near miss with a half-cent stamp from St Christopher, Nevis & Anguilla mounted instead of the 1 cent stamp that's printed on the header.

And to finish, two more annoying pages. On the left is a page for San Marino where the stamp that matches the header is over halfway down the page. And on the right is a page for Poland where the printed stamp in the header is a Poland stamp that features the Statue of Liberty - which is one of the main themes that I collect, but alas, the stamp is not present on the page.

However, that Poland page has inspired me to keep an eye out for more of these old albums to see if I can find a page that has a stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty printed on the header and mounted on the page. I like a collecting challenge and this one might prove to be quite tricky!

Kicking off my Women's World Cup sticker collection

After boycotting the World Cup sticker album for Qatar 2022, I've decided to start collecting the Women's World Cup stickers for this summer's competition in Australia and New Zealand.

I decided to start big, ordering the starter set and a box of 50 sticker packets directly off Panini.

However, before that arrived I bought a couple of multi-packs of stickers in the supermarket. 

The very first sticker in the very first packet from a multi-pack was a shiny one - the team badge for Canada.

In the 60 stickers in those multi-packs I didn't get a single England player. One of the host nations, Australia, was very well represented, though, with the badge and five players - ten per cent of the stickers!

There were six stickers inserted in the album when it arrived, including the first England player I stuck in - Beth Mead. However, Beth has had a cruciate injury since November so I don't know if she is going to make it to the World Cup.

However, it's the centre-pages that really grabbed my attention. Broadly speaking it's a "star players" section with action shots of the best players from each team on a shiny sticker. 

But what the designers have done is very cleverly photoshopped in an abstract background of different shapes that match the design printed on the pages. It produces a visual effect which I think is probably the best one I've seen ever done by Panini.

The lay out of the team pages is also nicely done, with the pages arranged in a variety of different formations instead of the usual straight rows of squad photos. The central feature pages then elevate the whole sticker book to a new level. 

I'm really pleased that such care and attention has been paid to the pinnacle competition in women's football.

The machines are listening

Earlier this month I had a long conversation with my friend Gawain. We met online as we both collect baseball cards and occasionally we have chats about the sport, collecting cards and the state of the world. During the conversation I showed Gawain the Lego minifigure that another friend, Connor gave me last year.

It's a customised printed figure wearing a retro San Diego Padres uniform. Connor designed it using a machine at a Lego Discovery Centre. Gawain and I discussed how if someone started printing these off there would probably be a decent collector's market for them. He also listened to me patiently talking some more about Lego and how it is increasingly geared towards adult collectors. 

We were chatting on the Messenger app, which is part of Meta, the same company as Facebook and WhatsApp. The next day he sent me these screen grabs for adverts that appeared on his Facebook feed.

We weren't typing messages to each other. We were talking. And the machines were listening. I get ads related to Lego on my Facebook feed all the time, which I always assumed was down to the groups I'm in. But some intelligent system recognised Gawain talking about Lego and offered him some highly specialised services in those ads - the kind of ads that would be of interest to people who are collecting Lego to invest or are thinking of printing designs on minifigures. 

My most popular blog post of 2022 was about how I realised an app I use to track going to football matches was shaping my choices through gamification. Seeing a conversation with a friend turned into marketing algorithms by eavesdropping machines seems another step towards the hybrid interconnected world that Douglas Coupland keeps writing about. 

Weirdly I was reading a book called The Age of Earthquakes that Douglas Coupland contributed to around the same time as all this happened and this page stood out. It feels like this happened to me!

I know the irony of feeding the online accumulation of a digital version of me (my cloudganger) by blogging all this. The machines will be able to connect the digital dots - if they are truly intelligent then over the next couple of days my social media feeds will be full of reassuring content about how the machines are benign and their intentions are pure. 

In addition to this blog, I write in an old fashioned analog journal most days. Now I'm starting to think a good reason to keep doing that is so some thoughts stay out of reach of the machines.