📖 💡 Pap's Almanac

[pap]

#C

Camping

1. A stressful way to return to prehistoric living conditions, usually at festivals.
   Everyone is so in tents.

2. The practice of staying hidden in one place in a competitive video game, nonchalantly sniping everyone that moves by.
   Universally loathed — especially by the people who just got shot.

Festival camping

Festival camping is a specialised form of camping that involves losing even more of life’s comforts — such as running water, soap, and dignity — in exchange for being near a speaker playing Mr Brightside at 3am.

Attendees are encouraged to embrace such wonders as trench foot, overpriced falafel, and the infamous “long drops” at Glastonbury: pit latrines so foul they have their own zip code.

Legend has it that one year, a man in full scuba gear was seen snorkelling in the filth.
No one knows if he escaped — or if he lies entombed at the bottom, crushed to death by impacted festival faecal matter.

Camping by festival toilets

A final word to the wise. Though camping close to the toilets seems genius:

1. Your bladder will thank you at 4am.
2. Your nose will ignore the smell pretty soon — that’s how sewer workers do their jobs.

…you run the serious risk of being woken up at 4:30am by a loud Mancunian, off his tits on MDMA, explaining that Nickelback are actually a lot heavier than many other bands.

It turns out the toilets are the go-to hangout spot for anyone still wired in the early hours of the morning.

Ear plugs are more important than nose plugs.

[lifeintheslowlane]

Camping in a tent is for wimps.

1969 IoW Festival, (The Bobsy one) I slept in a ditch under a piece of polythene and I was fuckin’ grateful, you soft pampered bastards.

[PhilippineSaint]

@lifeintheslowlane

1969 IoW Festiva

The Islanders have never recovered.

[pap]

Cannon Fodder (Amiga)

Like the first Mortal Kombat, Cannon Fodder is one of those games that, when viewed through the prism of the early 21st century, makes you wonder how it ever caused such a fuss at the time.

After all, we now live in an age where people happily monetise the First World War and beyond — in glorious and rather worrying high definition.

The original complaints about Cannon Fodder being disrespectful to the fallen seem quaint in the age of Call of Duty, and particularly Battlefield I.

It also didn’t help that the game’s creators, Sensible Software, went famously against their own name and made a lot of very silly things.

And it really didn’t help public perception when the marketing campaign used the poppy — a symbol of remembrance — in its artwork. The Royal British Legion were, as one might expect, not amused.

But that decision may have helped the game’s legacy. There had been games more violent than Cannon Fodder long before its release.

Capcom’s Commando is a perfect example. A typical Cannon Fodder mission might see you kill eight, maybe ten enemies, all placed strategically. You’d kill more than that in just the final screen of a Commando level.

The issue wasn’t the level of violence — it was tying that violence to the real world.

And yet, Cannon Fodder was a far more poignant and thought-provoking affair than many of its modern-day counterparts.

The main menu featured a quiet hillside that gradually filled with gravestones — a permanent, visible reminder of the comrades you’d lost in battle.

Far from being disrespectful, this game made death matter. It didn’t mock it — it marked it.

You felt it in the mechanics too. A soldier you’d grown attached to — who could now shoot accurately across the entire screen — might die in a random flash of chaos. Not because you were careless, but because war is unpredictable.

Cannon Fodder is the most sensible thing Sensible Software ever had to say.

[pap]

Capitalism

Capitalism, in its purest form, is the practice of people with money making more money from people with no money — to make as much money as is humanly possible.

The pursuit of profit has led to the market becoming the de facto guardian of all kinds of things it is not fit to babysit.

In the US, medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy, while medical and pharmaceutical firms are raking it in. Life-saving drugs are routinely denied to people who can’t afford the patent fee.

Most citizens on this planet who aren’t born rich will end up being exploited by those who are. You’ll spend most of your life paying off some kind of credit or mortgage. That’s not a conspiracy — that’s the system working exactly as designed.

Capitalism was once treated as synonymous with freedom, especially during the Cold War. It was the system that wasn’t starving or imprisoning people, so it must be the good one, right?

But is it really freedom?

Try not paying your bills and see how free you feel.

Left unchecked, capitalism leads to child labour, slave labour, and mass inequality — and all three still exist in the 21st century.

The very principles of capitalism deserve far more scrutiny. If someone told you that for most people, it’s just a more stylish form of slavery with better branding, they wouldn’t be far off the mark.

[pap]

Capri, Ford

We don’t have a lot of space on many of our roads in the UK. Most of our cities were conceived and lived in well before the invention of the automobile. A tiny and interesting minority of named streets are really just alleyways that someone got carried away naming.

A good percentage of the roads are simply too pokey to be driving a big old American muscle car around, and US manufacturers realised this — so they designed cars small enough to cope with European roads.

The Ford Capri was the best Mustang Ford could offer in these times. Short back, long bonnet, and a cramped interior. It didn’t drive especially well, but it undoubtedly looked cool.

The Mk I version actually came in a 3-litre configuration in the UK, with the sound of one parking up bearing more than a passing resemblance to a Chinook helicopter. The Mk II swapped out the aggressive double headlights for the square lanterns of the Mustang, while the Mk III came in two main flavours: the 2.0 Laser and the 2.8 Injection.

Like the Mustang that inspired it, the Capri was a triumph of form over function. Sometimes, people just want an ostentatious dick-shaped car on the cheap.

The Ford Capri was that car.

You don’t see many of them about today, but I always get a rise when I do.

[lifeintheslowlane]

@pap

You don’t see many of them about today, but I always get a rise when I do.

Nurse…the screens!!

My 1969 Mk.1 2000GT XLR with triple air horns.

[Polski_Filip]

To be really cool it needed a black vinyl roof

[pap]

Cash

Cash has taken something of a battering in recent years. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic was probably the turning point. People would look at you like you’d grown a second head if you so much as sneezed, so it was only natural that wireless electronic funds transfer became the norm. Or EFTPOS, as it was known in G.C.S.E. Computer Studies.

One of my fellow students couldn’t remember what EFTPOS stood for. When asked in the final exam, he guessed:

Electronic Frisbee Throwing Positioned On Stilts

Now, this may be an absurdist almanac — not everything you read here is 100% true — but this is. He got an F.

These days, asking “Do you take cards?” is like asking if they have electricity. If you do ask, you’ll be treated with the same suspicion normally reserved for time travellers or off-grid survivalists.

The only people still dealing in cash are those involved in clandestine transactions — your local drug dealer, or the fella flogging bin bags full of knock-off meat and dishwasher tablets out the back of a Ford Galaxy.

[scotty]

@pap

The only people still dealing in cash are those involved in clandestine transactions — your local drug dealer, or the fella flogging bin bags full of knock-off meat and dishwasher tablets out the back of a Ford Galaxy

…and most of the elderly, but they don’t matter.

[scotty]

@Polski_Filip

To be really cool it needed a black vinyl roof

[PhilippineSaint]

@Polski_Filip

To be really cool it needed a black vinyl roof

Like this

[lifeintheslowlane]

Rubbish…mine had something way cooler. A rare Webasto full length sun roof.

[scotty]

Did you use AI, or Photoshop? It looks so real.

[PhilippineSaint]

That’s how all Ford vinyl roofs looked after 3 years in the British weather

[Polski_Filip]

The black vinyl leather look a like seats never lasted 3 years.

How bad / unreliable was my Capri?

I swapped it for

[lifeintheslowlane]

You WHAT? FFS say something intelligent.

[Lets-B-Drinking]

@pap

One of my fellow students couldn’t remember what EFTPOS stood for. When asked in the final exam, he guessed:

Electronic Frisbee Throwing Positioned On Stilts

Wasn’t he wrong? What was the right answer?

[Polski_Filip]

I was commuting Mon-Friday to student digs in Hill Head.
I had the only car in the house of 4, we drove daily to Gosport Ferry to go to College in skatesville

The Capri broke down in Southampton traffic every time. Cooling Alternator etc

After yet another £200 wuote for repair my Dad found a collector and sold it eith no shsme.

I took Mum’s car, she upgraded to a Marina Estate.

The Allegro was a car that made me stand out. People always asked why I had plasti bags in the footweels at the front.
For when it rains I would reply.

[lifeintheslowlane]

I had my Capri for 10 years and it never let me down. It didn’t have an alternator, just an old fashioned dynamo…perfect.