Category: damage control
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If You Win Second Place

You resent the person who won first place. The third-place winner detests you both. And the further you get away from the winner’s podium, the deeper the level of hate becomes. That is the nature of contests and competition – you win dislike along with the trophy and the set of dishes. Sometimes winning second…
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Finnish Brewster Buffalo – Part Three – 1945

Let us be delicate about this… In 1945 the Finns were on the winning side of a losing war. Actually several wars. They had fought the Soviet Union on their own behalf, as partners with nazi Germany, and then fought the Germans for their own territory as part of the Allies. It was a situation…
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The Really Good Kits

Go to someone else. We are left with the stuff that doesn’t sell. The wholesale trade has only a certain number of new releases each year and when these have been sent to the eastern state’s shops we get the dregs. And plastic dregs can be dreadful. I don’t think the makers started out to…
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The Opened Box

And the started model. I find that I can slumber, bored, in most horror or adventure movies. They are predictable, and I know that there will be creepy music, several minor characters will die, and the hero will be saved in the end. Ho Hum. No such thing with the scale model kit that falls…
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The Political Model Kit

Surprisingly, these last few years of international war ( as opposed to the internal sort practised in Africa and South America ) have yielded few scale model controversies and political arguments. I did not expect this. Of course there are bound to be restrictions on the supply of kits from warring nations, but the ones…
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The Transient Model

Some modellers are lucky. They get to keep their models as long as they want…whether in kit form or built-up. They have display space and protection for their work. Others have to watch their results given away, trashed, or lost. Their only consolation is that it makes more space to build again. Yet the impermanence…
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The Unaccounted

Every so often I see things in the hobby shops for which I can find no explanation. These can be on alien shelves – the gundam and anime models – the motion picture and comic book models. I see things that bear no relation to my life whatsoever. They may be good kits, and they…
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The Drive-By Scale Dumping

Someone, somewhere, is dumping 1:12 scale old mattresses on the verge outside dollhouse maker’s workshops. And someone is dumping their old scale models at our clubrooms. We are slowly pulling them out of our display cabinets and subjecting them to scale scrutiny. It’s not the quality of the building that is suspect – it ‘s…
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All Over The Shop

A song to the tune of ” One Day At A Time “. This time the lyrics deal with scale modellers that build 10 models at a time. They start something, bog down, and go on to the next box in the stash to start again. Their minds shift the first kit to the back…
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I Need A Secretary

Stop making those snorting noises – I really do. I write more than I can readily publish and the mechanics of translating these little pieces to the WordPress site and then sneaking them onto a Facebook page is taking up a great deal of time. They come off the ends of my fingers like literary…
