If you use news websites then you will already be familiar with the 12 step process for reading a news article online. If not, I've summarised them below.
Please follow all steps carefully and don't skip any...
Step 1: accept cookies.
Step 2: close the window thanking you for accepting cookies.
Step 3: wait for text and images to load as if it was 1998 and you were on dial-up.
Step 4: close pop-up videos that you never wanted in the first place.
Step 5: close news notification pop-ups, as your phone already pings nineteen times a minute due to Twitter notifications.
Step 6: close requests to install apps as you have no memory left on your phone after your last WhatsApp update installed itself.
Step 7: close window notifying you that you are reading the article for free. You didn't come here for a guilt trip.
Step 8: close window requesting you to register to read more articles. You haven't the mental stamina to remember any more passwords.
Step 9: close window opened by accidentally clicking on sponsored content when closing other windows.
Step 10: close breaking news pop-up, as three other pre-installed apps you can't delete have already told you the same thing.
Step 11: carefully scroll through other sponsored content links that have pushed paragraph two of the news story halfway down the page (take care to avoid step 9 again).
Step 12: when you've finished reading delete all browser cookies, meaning you have to go through all these steps again when you read another article.
News costs, and pop-ups are the price you pay for information.
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As Ceefax is trending today let's take a quick look back at the 1970s analogue internet on your telly!
Just waiting for the right page...
Teletext is a way of sending text and very blocky graphics alongside a traditional TV signal, to be decoded and displayed by a suitably equipped telly.
Rumbelows can sort you out with a Ferguson or ITT set if you need one...
And on 23 September 1974 the first teletext service started in the UK: Ceefax on BBC, and Oracle on ITV!*
(*assuming your parents let you watch ITV. Not all did.)
Lockdowns are mentally tiring, so you may not be in the mood to finish all those classic novels you started to read. Fortunately I have an alternative for you: Classics Illustrated!
Let's take a look at a few...
Homer eroticism: The Odyssey. Classics Illustrated, 1951.
Wrestling with issues of state: The Life of Abraham Lincoln. Classics Illustrated, 1958.
Today in pulp I'm looking back at a very popular (and collectable) form of art: micro leyendas covers!
Micro Leyendas (mini legends) are a Mexican form of fumetto, small graphic novels normally pitting the everyday hero against the weird, the occult and the unfathomable.
The art of micro leyendas is bold, macabre and very funny. The books often tell a cautionary tale of revenge or humiliation, much like a modern folk tale.
It was a food revolution with a shelf life measured in years, changing how Britain cooked as well as what we ate. The staple diet of a generation, whose very name could conjure up the flavours of the faraway east.
Today in pulp I look back at Vesta ready meals...
Batchelors Foods had been in business since Victorian times and specialised in dried produce and soups. And by 1959, inspired by the American 'TV dinner', they decided to bring the idea of ready meals to the UK.
There was a problem however: in 1959 only 13% of UK households had a fridge, compared to 96% in the US. The American frozen TV dinner wouldn't work in Britain.