📖 💡 Pap's Almanac

Monkey Tennis
101

…much like yourself.

102

Would I be condescending to suggest all good things come in small packages. Reading that again I think it also carries unrivalled opportunities for innuendos. :grinning:

103

Back in the day (early 80’s), the tapes that games came in weren’t sealed units, they were screwed together. So my mate and I used to buy a game and a C15 blank cassette, unscrew the casings, swap over the spools and take the game one back saying it was blank and claim a new one. Flog the ‘copy’ at school and still have the game. Worked a treat for about 12 months and we earned enough to get a tape to tape machine which then made pirating easier and also generated a fair chunk towards a new spectrum! It was quite an illegal racket for a pair of 11 year old kids! :joy:

104

Capitalist. :rage:

1 Like
105

My little bro started his record collection that way

When I was 18 I blew my first three pay checks on a technics separates system - it was the absolute mutts

Anyway, my 12 yr old brother started taping my record collection and selling them for a quid a go at school. He then used the proceeds to buy the latest releases and sell the copies on - I don’t think he paid for a single record for years until I moved out

I also only found out about this three or four years ago - the devious little shit

106

You think that was bad. When we were 13 we used to pay the kids in the “remedial” class to nick top shelf mags from the newsagents. 20p a mag which we’d flog on for 50p or a quid for a best of mayfair. Made a few quid that way too, until Jason fucking Howe got caught looking at one in French and we got busted.
Thinking about it, i was proper little cunt. :grinning:

107

Amateur bad behaviour. My mate was Catholic and had to sit at the back of the class in RI as it was a c of e school.
He cracked one off during a lesson,it was a mixed school but the girls weren’t in on the escapade. :rofl:

108

I bet they’re glad they weren’t!

109

On Tuesday I had to trek an hour and 10 minutes across Krakow by Bus & Tram to collect Mrs P_F from some Med Tests & a general knocck out drop (meh)

2 stops from the end of the route a maybe 50 ish Pap sized short grey haired dude in work trousers & white shirt gets on the Tram.

He is wearing old fashioned headphones with an aluminium type strip between them connecct to?
A bright red almost new looking?
Sony Walkman
WITH A CASSETTE TAPE IN IT
I battled long and hard but deccided taking a photo of some random Polish guy’s arse may not be conducive to my 12 uid a week pension payments

A WALKMAN?

1 Like
110

Mine was fluorescent blue

111

Maxell recently released a new one. :dizzy_face::+1:

There were a few available on eBay last week, but it’s now sold out. It’ll be interesting to see whether production continues, as far as I’m concerned the next step on the return to sanity is for Sony to bring back the Minidisc.

112

It was bound to happen… Nostalgia makes money.

ÂŁ40 for an LP so you can listen to scratchy music :woman_shrugging:t2:

113

Ive got a draw full of this old toot - the ayatollah’s walkman is going for over £150 on ebay as is her discman

Early ipods, shuffles, minis - about 50 old nokias, a palm pilot

114

And anyone who has got a bought a record player (having forgotten why they got rid of one in the first place) will give you a load of flannel about preferring the warmth of the sound from an LP to justify to themselves that they haven’t made a fucking stupid investment decision

115

Birmingham, UK

Birmingham, despite its importance to the country, doesn’t really get talked about positively. People mock the accent, say there’s not much to do in the city; it generally plays second fiddle to much sexier cities like Manchester, Liverpool, and London. Even Brighton has caught more buzz than Brum in recent decades.

And yet, this city is the birthplace of heavy metal and was once known as the workshop of the world. It has an international airport that’ll get you to most places, concert venues that attract the biggest acts in the world. It is not overburdened with quality football teams, that much is true, but even so, the reputation of England’s second city is undeserved.

Not that you’d hear a Brummie complaining about it. Perhaps the most endearing thing about Birmingham people is that they take all this, plus the godawful pronunciation of their city by American tourists:

Bir-ming-HAM!

They just get on with it. It’s a quality to be admired.

Birmingham doesn’t need your approval. It had Ozzy Osbourne and Spaghetti Junction before you were born.

116

Very true, but for me that kind of misses the point. In every tangible and logical way, modern streamable music is better. It’s faster to access, leaves the supplier in near perfect audio, arrives into a device you already own, and costs next to nothing. There’s no physical media to store and little or no effort involved locating it, and there’s a huge library of it more vast than you could listen to in a lifetime available at the click of a screen.

But for me, that results in a disengagement from the process in a way I can’t really explain. There was something about it providing an interest, not only in the music but the equipment, it’s setup and maintenance, or even just going to Subway Records or Henry’s and chatting with others about what you were buying or looking at. You were somehow invested in it in a way that doesn’t happen anymore. I use Spotify myself, it’s great. But I find I have to force myself not to listen to half of the first track on an album before deciding it’s not for me and abandoning it. It takes zero time, money or effort to move onto the next, right? Then I remember how many albums I dismissed on the first hearing but persevered with because I’d spent a lot of time and money deciding which one to buy that week, and discovered on repeat listening that I loved them. I’ll bet that most of us can remember the first record we ever bought, where we got it, what we paid for it and how much of our weekly wage that represented. How many are going to remember the first song we ever heard on a stream? :thinking::grin:

So yes mate, it’s nostalgia. And there’s nothing wrong with that :smile:

3 Likes
117

Factor in an age related decline in hearing and the subtleties between the various sources quickly gets lost. What’s the point in spending a fortune on separates when you have to filter it through electronic hearing aids.
I still have original vinyl up in the loft and I have no intention to sell it…weird I know.

2 Likes
118

You’re the exception that proves the rule, someone genuinely enthusiastic about music for its own sake. But I bet you could still tell me every detail about your favourite hi-fi setup, watts per channel, speaker impedance and power handling, cartridge brand and tracking weight… :smile:

119

I have over 13000 paper back books and some hard backs, going back to when I was a child and I am keeping them all until I pass and then the kids can do what they like with them.

1 Like
120

Congratulations! You’re wrong. :rofl: