Today in pulp... "Breaker one-nine for a copy. You got your ears on?" Ah the halcyon days of CB radio!
And let's look back at one phenomenon that swept the CB world in the 1970s - the eyeball card!
What's that good buddy? What's an eyeball? Well here's the 20...
QSL is the radio Q code meaning can you acknowledge receipt. Amateur radio enthusiasts would often send an (often humorous) home made QSL card to fellow hams on request. It was a way of building camaraderie off air.
And as CB radio began to spread more widely in the 1970s, users began making and sending their own QSL cards to people they met on air. It was the classy thing to do!
And often these CB QSL cards were given out in person at meet-ups, hence the name 'eyeball cards.'
An eyeball card normally showed your handle, your twenty, and the main channel you sandbagged. Very few showed your wrapper.
Eyeball card collecting was a huge pastime for many good buddies, and people spent a lot of time and money having them designed and printed.
A number of artists specialised in designing QSL cards, and there were plenty of customers willing to pay too dollar for a distinctive design.
Handles were varied and creative in CB, so some artistic licence was needed when creating an appropriate eyeball card.
Many couples had shared QSL cards, as CB was a family-friendly hobby. That's affirmatory!
If you're interested In (or simply nostalgic about) QSL eyeball cards you can see a huge range online here: myqsl.org
More CB another time good buddy: 3s and 8s to y'all, 10-10 'til we do it again!
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Today in pulp I look back at the world of Soviet women's fashion!
It's not all berets, but it mostly is...
Now you may think that fashion and the Soviet Union go together like Groucho Marx and Friedrich Engels. However that is to misunderstand the nature of the Commad Economy: if she commands it, you'd better buy it for her!
So there is a rich history of fashion and fun (along with the tractor factories and endless ballet performances) in the old USSR. Let's take a sashay along it...
Today in pulp... the searing, evocative power of a well crafted opening sentence!
For this thread I will draw my examples from the greatest writer in the English language (based on synonym use): the Reverand Lionel Fanthorpe.
On death:
"Bellenger was dead when they found him. That Bellenger was dead was probably the understatement of the year. Bellenger was horribly, violently dead!"
On introducing characters:
"The alien was a strange looking beast. Even by the broad standards of the Galactic recognition code it was definitely non-U. [...] The alien's name was Khgnjsdag, which didn't really matter except to the alien."
DATELINE: MARCH 1981. Shakin' Stevens is top of the charts, Tom Baker is leaving Doctor Who and Clive Sinclair is bringing computers to the masses. Britain is finally moving into a new age, and one object above all heralds its arrival.
This is the story of the ZX81...
Like many electronics companies Sinclair Radionics had been beaten up by the 1970s calculator wars: cut-price LCD products from Japan, plus aggressive price cuts from Hewlett Packard made Sinclair's LED calculators unprofitable. The company was in trouble.
The British government bailed out Sinclair in the 1970s, and wanted it to focus on instrument manufacturing - the only profitable part of its business. In 1979 Clive Sinclair resigned in disgust from the company he had founded.