I do have a few minutes to spare here though so I thought I would use it to introduce one of my more interesting Famicom ephemera additions - a pack of Mach Rider playing cards.
These are pretty neat, they seem to have been issued by Nintendo back in the 1980s. I am not sure how many different games they released packs of cards for, but I have also seen Spartan X ones out there. They come in a nice plastic Family Computer case that is blue on the bottom with the Nintendo logo in the middle:
Open it up and you have a deck of cards ready to play poker or whatever:
If your pack is new like this one it will also come with a special stamp on it:
There used to be a tax levied on playing cards and these stamps, issued by the government, had to be applied to all decks of playing cards as proof that the "Trump Tax" had been paid. You don't see playing cards in stores with these stamps anymore so I assume the tax was abolished at some point, but I think it adds a layer of interest to these cards.
I will try to start updating the blog a bit more regularly from now on but we will see how that goes.....