TV Cream Toys Lite. Steve Berry. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Steve Berry
Издательство: HarperCollins
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Юмор: прочее
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780007328512
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target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_2d4f4595-bb8b-5822-99ed-4bf4b374deee">1 Oh, and Terry’s Neapolitans fitted too, didn’t they? Want to know what happened to Terry’s, once the pride of York, now just a Dawn French-perpetuated brand extension of Kraft Foods Inc, Illinois? The corporate giant bought the 1000-worker-strong factory in 1993 and closed it down in 2005. York Fruits? Produced in Slovakia, mate. Chocolate Orange? Czekoladka pomarañczowy more like. Where’s Michael Moore when you need him, eh?

       Cascade

      Bouncy castle for ball-bearings

      Many board games–Othello springs to mind–usually bear a trite slogan on the side of the box along the lines of ‘A minute to learn, a lifetime to master’. Surely then, the motto for Cascade was ‘A lifetime to set up, a minute to play’. But what a minute it was!

      Made by mini-car kings Matchbox, Cascade was bizarrely addictive, totally pointless and definitively uncompetitive–one of those games where eventually no-one really played by the rules, a bit like just reading out the questions from Trivial Pursuit without the board.

      See also Crossfire, KerPlunk, Domino Rally

      So the set-up, then: an acid-yellow plastic mat had spaces marked out for the five pieces of Cascade furniture. At one end there was a towering Archimedes screw that sucked up ball-bearings and launched them off a short ski-ramp. Then came the bam-bam-bam bounce across three taut red timpani thingies, before the balls hit a mini-pinball table and fell into several scoring slots. Certain balls would be returned to the screw via a three-foot track for another go around the system. At least, that’s what was supposed to happen.

      Of course, lest the gradient tolerance of your bedroom carpet be suboptimal, the little metal buggers would scatter to either side and roll under your bunk bed (we imagine Barnes Wallis felt similarly disheartened in that bit from The Dam Busters). The best improvement via improper game play was to put the launch tower on top of your wardrobe and let the balls really bounce. Constructing little obstacles between the trampolines, such as piled-up Subbuteo team boxes, would assist in efforts to test how high the ball-bearings would really go. A Mars-Staedtler rubber under the edge of each trampoline thingy helped angle them perfectly for extra distance too.

      No-one had any idea what the scoring system was, but in the same way that someone can win ten grand on Better Homes without wielding so much as a staple gun, you could ‘win’ Cascade without any personal involvement whatsoever. And it was fun, so who cares?

       Chemistry Set

      Kitchen-based catalysis

      Common-or-garden chemistry set box lids always featured a boy with brown hair in the pudding-bowl style, wearing a white lab coat and peering intently at a few cubic centilitres of vaguely blue compound in a test tube. The over-serious look in his eyes said it all: Why won’t this explode?’

      See also Electronic Project, Magic Rocks, Tasco Telescope

      But at least the chemistry sets marketed by the likes of Salter and Merit made some affectation towards proper school lab learning. Dreary they may have seemed, but they didn’t patronise us youngsters like the modern-day National Curriculum-approved ‘yukky science’-type sets. Chemistry isn’t fun, no matter how much you dress it up with ‘slimy’ green food colouring and ‘funky’ fizzy sherbet. Write that down. On those earlier sets you’d find abundant warnings of the ‘adult supervision recommended’ kind in the instructions, even though every single kid in the land threw them away. If you couldn’t bang out a batch of stink bombs, then it was hardly worth the effort. The sole experiment conducted thereafter could be noted down thus: ‘Just bung a bit of everything in one test tube; then heat it up to see what happens’ (results: lame fizzing and stuff that glued itself to the kitchen table). As if we were hoping to drink the stuff and then transform, Dr Jekyll-style, into a horrible monster and eat our own parents. No, really…as if!

       Chic-a-boo

      Monkey-faced brown-noser

      If ever there was a warning about genetic experimentation, then it was Stephen Gallagher’s 1982 debut horror story, Chimera, a prophetic tale of a half-human, half-primate creature developed by scientists for use in slave labour and organ harvesting. In the end, the titular creature went crazy-ape bonkers in the Lake District and killed everyone.