Newark is a strange beast. They care a nice intersection of Digikey and Mouser parts. The strange thing is, there are always "sale" items that are marked with a P. They isn't much rhyme or reason to it, for example the 1.00K resistors of a certain line may be heavily discounted, or a cable gland for a large multipart Amphenol assembly. I've never seen "sale" items at Mouser or Digikey...
The neon lamps are a little trick I'm playing with to help ease the large turn on voltage that tubes see on start due to plate CCSes.. the idea is if you have two tubes connected together, and the first tube has a plate CCS, if it is not warmed up, all the current is forced into the second tubes grid until the first tube warms up... the bulb is placed across the grid / cathode of the second tube. It seems to work pretty well, the neon bulb is on at start-up then turns off as the plate CCS comes up. I'm going to try and play with a few different strike voltages and see if I can optimize things some more.