1. Last month, a woman in her late 60s attempted to hold up a post office in Northenden, Manchester, UK, armed with a knife. Staff activated alarms. She walked off.
2. A trio of German pensioners aged between 64 and 73 known as the “Grandpa Gang” were jailed in 2005 for taking part in 14 bank robberies, stealing more than 1 million euros.
3 Australians David Davies, 81, and Florence Davies, 77, were convicted in 2004 for drug trafficking after police found 19kg of cannabis in a false ceiling.
4. An “Oliver Twist-style” training school was uncovered on a remote Siberian island in 2004 run by elderly criminals. Classes included “Dealing with police” and “How to win over your cell mates.”
5. Dottie Neeley, 87, from Kentucky was jailed in 2005 for selling her prescription painkillers and medication to addicts.
6. Wiliam Woolard from Worthing, Wes Sussex, is spending nine weeks in prison for claiming over £7,000 of benefits while working as a licensed scrape dealer.
7. A Lancashire pensioner, Harry Greaves, 70, was electronically tagged this year after being caught chauffeuring his drug-dealing wife around blackpool.
8. In 2000, wheelchair-bound Josie Daly - then 64 - was exposed as one of the UK’s premier madams. Her saunas in London made an estimated £7.5million in two years..
9. Retired accountant Roger Trotman was imprisoned by police in 2005 for ignoring his ASBO, gained for his fervent policing of parking on his Surrey road.
10. In 2004, Cumbrian resident Frank Benson was fined £100 for flashing a two-handed V-sign at speed cameras.
Grunge was massive during the 1990’s! As with any music scene it came with its own fashion that included:
Torn jeans,
Bulky shoes
Chequered flannel shirts (we already covered this here)
Chain wallets
Ripped Cardigans
Basketball caps (preferably worn backward)
Long hair
Grunge musicians tried to be just themselves without all the bullshit of glam rock
Whilst this naturalistic fashion worked well for some of the more attractive elements of society (e.g.Kurt Cobain), it did not work so well for the ugly fuckers.
So lets see the worst of these grungy uggers:
10: L7
Whilst L7’s name might be a reference to the “69″ sex position, this LA grunge band ain’t much to look at. Singer Donna Sparks nailed the final nail in her ugger coffin when she removed her used tampon and threw it into the crowd at Reading Festival 92. If they had been a bit more attractive, people might have enjoyed Donna revealing her pubic area during the live UK tv show - “the word.”
9. Sound Garden
OK so these boys ain’t that bad to look at but its what inside that counts! This Seattle band where plagued with critics calling them neo-Cons when they refused to get involved with the politics of “grunge.” At techy wank we love rumors and we also hate neo-cons so Sound Garden are at number 9.
8. Alice in chains
Another Seattle band that look like utter dog shit. These bad boys mix geek with long hair that cumulates in a look that just plain don’t work.
7. Neds Atomic Dusbin
This British pseudo grunge band took their name from an episode of The Goons which is particularly fitting seeing as they look like some of the biggest goons in the music business.
6. MudHoney
Whilst highly influential in the Seattle grunge scene and especially Kurt Cobain, its a real shame that MudHoney members looked like Geeky pedophiles.
5. Tad
Tad were one of first “grunge” bands out of Seattle but failed to gain real monetary success from the mainstream grunge era. One reason for this failure could be the fact they where led by an ex-butcher Tad Doyle and each one of them was clinically obese.
4. Babes in Toy Land
This Minnesota grunge band where anything but what their name suggests. The front women - Bjelland reportedly hated her ex-band mate Courtney Love arguing that she had stole her style! One wonders about the sanity of the both of them.
3. Pearl Jam
They did a great cover of the Neil Young song “Keep on rocking in the free world” but Christ what an ugly crew!
2. Dinosaur Jr
A mix between Gandalf the White and a perverted monkey this band had a very strange look.
1. Courtney Love
I truly apologize for this photo, I hope no one is eating and viewing this. How Kurt Cobain put up for with her for so long, I have no idea! Who would think that uggliness could cause others to commit suicide?
The 1990’s was a time of great space exploration but mankind also left a few things behind. Here I have listed the top 10 strangest types of space pollution.
1. A glove
During the first US space walk in 1965, astronaut Edward White lost a spare glove. For a month, the item orbited space at 17,389mph before re-entering the atmosphere.
2. A Spatula
In July 2005, space-walker Piers Sellers admitted that, bizarrely, he’d lost a spatula on a spacewalk. It was nicknamed “spatsat” by junk watchers.
3. Rubbish
Bin liners full of rubbish were jettisoned by the Soviet Mir cosmonauts on board the space station. Later, an Indonesian satellite was struck by urine and fecal matter.
4. A camera
A camera became a satellite after the device cam undone during a seven hour spacewalk in 1996
5. A toothbrush
The cabinet that held astronaut Michael Foale’s toothbrush was ripped of the Mir space station after a collision with an unmanned vehicle. He sent a message urgently requesting a new one.
6. Pliers
During a two-and-a-half hour mission to repair solar panels, Dr Scott Parazynski, managed to lose his specially designed pliers. They’re now being tracked by NASA.
7. Nuclear fuel
Old Soviet nuclear-powered spy satellites are losing coolant into space that is congealing into balls about one-inch in diameter and causing problems for other satellites.
8. A rocket
A mysterious object labelled “J002ER” drifted into Earth’s orbit in 2002 - scientists were baffled. It turned out to be a rocket from the Apollo 12 mission from 1969.
9. A pen
Pedro Duue kept all loose items on bits of string. But his method proved flawed after his ballpoint pen was torn off during a space walk in 2003.
10. Bolts
More careless construction work on board the International Space Station. This time, two separate Astro-mechanics lost bolts to the eternal void in 1996.
1. Tooty Frooties
Fruit chews in five flavors:lemon, apple, orange, blackcurrant and strawberry. The green ones were always that last to go.
2. Flumps
Not just a kids tv programme, also a soft marshmallow rope-like sweet that could be picked up in a similar manner to oakum in hard labour camps.
3. Wham Bars
Long, pink and sticky interspersed with fizzy specks. The wrappers were a nightmare to peel off, but the cement effect on your teeth was worse.
4. Highland Chews
The first taste was glorious, but they were so chewy you could be stuck with the same mouthful for 30 minutes. Hard work at parties.
5. Sherbet Dip Dab
The red lollipop was a child-friendly strawberry, and consequently, was crunched well before the sherbet was used up. Cue the trustworthy wet finger…
6. KP Chocolate Dips
The refined choice. Although the chocolate spread had to be rationed, as any confectionery connoisseur will tell you, as there is little to enjoy in dry crispy sticks.
7. Chocolate cigarettes
Cheap milk chocolate wrapped in rice paper that came in a faux-fag packet resulting in a whole generation entering, adulthood au fait with handling ciggies.
8. Rainbow Drops
Matlow’s pastel-coloured sweetened puffed rice. What’s not to like? Not a lot until after you realised you were still starving after eating them.
9. Fizz Wiz
Bought almost entirely for the sensation of having strawberry crystals pop on your tongue. Even better when left out in the rain…
10. Flying Saucers
You had to leave these in your mouth until the rice paper went soft and the bust of sour, wince-inducing sherbet was released.
This drug was first created by Fritz Hander in 1891 but sadly no actual human got to try it until 1959. It was in the early 1990s that the drug started to gain recreational popularity as part of the rave culture in the UK and Europe. The drug led to evolution of dance music with acid house, trance and techno. Whilst the raves of the 1990s have decreased (thank you Tony Blair and the criminal justice act), ecstasy has moved from a drug of choice of the subculture to mainstream usage. Ecstasy is now one of the four main drugs used worldwide!
2. The Macerana
For the non-drug using taking population there was only one type of dance that you could away with during the 1990s. The Macarena’ was realeased in 1995 and quickly became popular in every western nation. It achieved the second longest running number 1 best selling debut single of all time (a bit of a mouthful!)
What distinguished the Macarena’ from other shitty pop songs was the inane dance that went with it. If you where stuck in a bunker during the 90s then check out this video of an absolute chump performing it: DANCING TO THE MACARENA
Whilst the 1990s subculture was expressing individuality, the drone class were all dancing the same moves to the beat of the Macerena. The Macerena still has sway today and you will often see pissed middle aged fools “pulling a Macerna” at a Wedding reception near you.
3. Beanie Babies
First released in 1993 by toy company Ty, these toys became a phenomenon during the 1990s. The craze was similar to the tulip mania of the 17th Century. Due to Ty retiring certain designs, people assumed that they would increase in value. During the peak of the Beanie Baby craze one design was sold on ebay for $24,000. As with every commercial fad, many fake Beanie Babies were made made and many can still be found on ebay today.
4. Alchopops
With ecstasy prevalent in all the clubs of the 1990s the amount of young people drinking declined sharply. The big brewers knew they needed something big to win back the youth of the day so they created Alchopops. In 1993 two dogs, Hoopers Hooch and Zima were released. Hooch became the most popular with around 70% market share and at its peak managed to shift around 2.5million bottles per week. Many Alchopops took a lot of stick due to their edgy advertising that some argued was aimed at underage drinkers. Now a days most alchopops are only drank by girls and southern nonces.
5. Pogs
The game of Pogs actually originated from the 1920s when Hawaii school kids would play with fruit juice bottle tops. Pogs was commercialized in 1991 and quickly became the main game of every school child in the land. Due to the fact that winners got to keep the other players Pogs, some school defined it as gambling and many started to ban the game in the mid 90s. With Pogs banned in school it quickly lost favor with the kids and we all moved on to the next fad.
6. Power Rangers
Might morphin power rangers was a hit show for many kids during the 1990s. The show was originally a Japanese production called “Super Sentai Series” but the Americans re-shot it with American actors. Similar to many super heroes before, individuals could morph into a spandex clad kung fu fighter. During its peak, Power Ranger toys where as rare as turbo man in the Schwarzenegger blockbuster “Jingle all the way”.
7. Gangsta Rap
After Ice-T and NWA created the genre in the late 80’s, Gangsta rap peaked in the 1990s. Dr Dre an ex member of NWA created Death Row Records. Death Row records had many west coast rappers on its books including Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg with both selling millions fo records. On the east coast, Puff Daddy and B.I.G had set up bad boy records and had also managed to gain dominance of the charts during the mid 90’s. When Tupac and Notorious B.I.G where killed, rumours circulated that it was due to an on-going feud between east and west coast. After the killings, Gangsta rap declined in popularity and has never again reached the dizzy heights of the 1990s.
8. Teletubbies
Anyone who was a student during the 1990s knows who tinkywinky, Dipsy, Lala and Po are. Otherwise known as The Teletubbies, this tv show was aimed at young children but generated mass appeal around the world. The Teletubbies did not speak english but instead spoke in a gurgling baby language similar to its target audience. Like many of the popular tv shows during the 90’s there was a lot of merchandise released off the back of the show. Controversy was sparked when the media thought that one teletubby - Tinkywinky was a homosexual. Recently the teletubbies celebrated their 10th Birthday and a site was created (
Take the the Teletubbies test) where users can try to be the 5th teletubby!
In the early 1990s, Nirvana and grunge were invading the British music chart. A number of British bands decided to combat this with Brit Pop. Brit Pop referenced 60s and 70s British guitar bands and the most famous brit pop bands included Oasis, Blur and Pulp. The advent of lads culture was an integral part of Brit pop popularity which also led to the Oasis vs Blur battle. However like all good things, brit pop declined in 1997 with the heavily criticized release of Oasis’s album “be here now.”
10. The Internet
You could argue this fad is still alive and kicking and I would have to agree with you. However in the 1990s the Internet was plagued by low bandwidth modems and annoying pop-ups. Thankfully the Internet of the 1990s is largely indistinguishable from the broadband-multi communication platform that we have now.
Music and fashion were important to many during the 1990’s but for the more geekier elements of society it was video games that set the scene.
1. Super Mario Bros 3 : NES
The fact that this is the single biggest selling game of all time says a lot more than i can say here. This game managed to net $500 million dollars for Nintendo and is still selling well on many of the retro gaming sites. This version of Mario saw the inclusion of Bowser as well as being a larger game overall. Like the other games in the Mario series, saving the princess was still the main aim of the game.
2. Syndicate
As one reviewer said:“…it’s bloody, it requires you to be ruthless, and some people may take issue with the use of drugs to control your agents. But it’s a ball to play.”
This game had a real dark element that fitted the modern society emerging during the early 1990’s. You played the Marketing Director of a large corporation and your job was to “control” the competition. Your character used far more direct techniques than billboard advertising with most missions requiring the total eradication of all human life. The dark sci-fi setting matched with a detailed RPG engine means this game easily makes it to my top 5 games of the 1990’s.
3. Sim City 2000
This game first appeared in 1993. I had already played the original version but this game was a real major improvement. I argue some of the best video games are those that do not require an end goal with Sim City being the most famous. You could literally spend hours just getting your initial design right. I don’t like to think about how many hours I have put into this game.
4. Duke Nukem 3D
This first person shooter was the first decent FPS that I played since doom 2 and it came out in 1996. When I first saw this game it was not the game play that impressed me but the fact that it had strippers! I had never seen any game that allowed you to pay strippers to see their breasts - nipples and all! Duke Nukem’s graphical engine was also a major step forward over previous shooter games with mouse aiming being a major breakthrough. I argue any game that has porn shops and an electric chair level has to be in any top video game list.
5. Baldurs Gate
Released in 1998, this game singlehandly made RPG’s games popular again! You play the character of an adopted child who has to survive in a strange world when you are forced to leave your home after watching your step father die. One of the reasons I love this game is due to the amount of freedom you are given. Once you leave your beloved Candlekeep you have total control on what you do next - no other game had ever given me that freedom and been so fun! Please play this if you missed it the first time round, it will change your life!
Whilst this blog is really aimed at looking at our favorite toys of the 1990’s, we mustn’t forget our ghastly fashion mistakes. I have gone through the family album and pulled out some of the greatest fashion mistakes of the 1990’s:
1. Padded “lumber jack shirt”
Every young male in 1990’s had at least on of these bad boys. I had a red, blue and even one the rarer green varieties. They were warm but needless to say they where hideous and many of us are glad to see the back of it.
2. The bowl cut
Whilst not exactly a piece of clothing, this hair cut defined the 90’s for many us. Barbers no longer needed to spend time and effort getting the right cut when all was needed was a good sized mixing bowl and a razor.
3. The Fleece
Whilst every young male has the lumberjack jacket, everyone else had the fleece. From your great grandmother down to a new born baby everyone had to have it. This led to the fleece now being placed in fashion room 101 for all except middle aged mid-life crisis victims.
4. John Lennon sun glasses
These glasses where what the aviators used to be a year or two ago. John Lennon’s could be seen in the worlds parks,shops,bars and even in the ecstasy fueled raves that the decade was so famous for.
5. Baseball Caps
Ok i know people still wear baseball caps but not like they did in the 1990’s! We wore them everywhere and anywhere. It was not just the chav/pike class that wore them back in the day! It was cool to wear a cap in a bar/club rather than a statement that you wanted to beat the shit out everyone. New anti-cap rules have led to a real reduction in baseball caps but mainly their downfall was due to people realizing they looked like chumps.
Ask anyone who’s admired the aesthetics of a multicolored, vanilla scented Play-Doh ashtray and you may begin to wonder how children ever survived the days of the dreary off-white and finger-numbing pliability of conventional clay. What’s good for pottery is not necessarily good for play!
What few people know is that Play-Doh is actually the offspring of Chinese American tenacity.
In the late 1950s, a Chinese American biochemist named Tin Liu spent countless hours at a makeshift lab in Cincinnati with one single purpose - to make a softer clay for children to play with. Sounds simple, but it was “a problem as big as the Pacific Ocean” according to the late Dr. Liu. The right consistency and texture of reusable toy clay was not so simple to create.
Liu, “a Confucian philosopher and a practical scientist,” took on Play-Doh as a job assignment in 1957 when he met Joseph McVicker, the son of a soap and cleaning product manufacturer in Ohio. McVicker was pondering how to help his sister-in-law, a nursery school teacher who felt that conventional clay was too hard for her students’ little fingers. McVicker hired Liu to solve the problem.
Thru the years of Liu’s dedication, Play-Doh was invented and reinvented. It received an array of different colors and accessories including that distinct vanilla scent that delights tiny digits and noses everywhere.
Dr. Liu is gone now, but his legacy, if measured in a two-inch thick rope of all the Play-Doh ever sold, would cover a distance farther than a round trip to the moon. And that, is an accomplishment few scientists can match.
Webster defines the yo-yo as being a spool-like toy with a string attached to the pin holding its two halves together, and in the twenty-five hundred years that it has been around, it hasn’t changed much. The first yo-yos were originated in ancient China. In ancient Greece, they were more than likely a children’s toy, and made of wood, metal, and terra cotta. The two halves of the yo-yo were decorated with pictures of gods. Upon reaching adolescence, young Greeks would offer up ceramic discs, exact replics of their real childhood toy, to their favorite gods. On a vase dated back to 500 B.C., a child is seen using a yo-yo.
In 1790, the yo-yo was introduced to Europe from the Orient. It was very popular among the aristocratic societies of Britain and France. The British often called the yo-yo a bandalore, quiz, or the Prince of Wales toy. The French also had there own names for the yo-yo including the incroyable and l’emigrette. Although many of the aristocratic European children were good at the yo-yo, the art was perfected in the Philippines.
During the 1500s, Filipino jungle fighters used crude yo-yos with thick twenty foot ropes, as weapons to stun their prey and enemies. As the yo-yos evolved as toys, the Filipino natives became experts at making and using them. In 1929, the yo-yo was introduced to the United States from the Philippines.
Now i like to think I am decent at playing with my Yo-Yo but check this guy out:
![Beanie Babies [photo]](http://1990toys.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/beanies-babies.jpg)
![1990’s versus 2008 [image]](http://1990toys.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/1990s-versus-2008.jpg)
![Play Doh [photo]](http://1990toys.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/play-doh.jpg)
