the pointless weblog

Physics in Technology was a bimonthly Physics journal. These covers are all from 1979.

I don’t really have much to say about these, I’m just finishing up the last of the junk in my father’s big box of science magazines from the 70s. At least one of them has CEEFAX on the cover. Teletext is the most beautiful of all things. Soon it will be dead and I think I might cry.

There were also a couple of copies of Science Journal from the 60s in the box, with strangely lovely covers.

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This is a gallery of 36 New Scientist magazine covers from 1976 and 1977 (and also one cover from 1981). Its not a  complete years worth of covers as some issues are missing, but this is all I have. My meagre legacy.

These are more of my dad’s old science magazines. Some of the covers are really brilliant. I think the entirety of The City Of Lost Children might well have based on that image of the baby. As with all things that have never died, it appears the New Scientist was much better before I was born.

There are more covers in the gallery below, including a pretty exciting one featuring a group of engineers standing in front of their machinery. Those are always my favourite.

The orangutan one fills me with inexplicable nostalgia for the Tom-Mix loading screen on their Dragon 32 games. Well, pretty much everything fills me with inexplicable nostalgia but this does especially.

It’d slowly be drawn in line by line as it loaded, presumably adding an extra five minutes to the loading time  of the game, but it was worth it, always.

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These World Cup Top Trumps were published in 1991 or so, so the information on them is all correct up to and including Italia 90. Sometimes I think about making a new set, all comprehensive and up-to-date and beautiful, but I never do.

I remember obsessing about all the statistics on these cards. I think I still know most of them off by heart. Pointless brain. I was always amazed how many goals Hungary had scored, and how few England had, given how many games they’d played. Later I discovered that England were the most boring team in the world, and I understood everything perfectly.

And poor Wales were almost the worst card of all, which always made me a bit upset. They couldn’t even be bothered to get a photo from when they actually played there, either.

All the rest of the cards are below. The teams, in order, are Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Northern Ireland, Paraguay, Republic of Ireland, Romania, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, Uruguay, the USA, the USSR, Wales, and Yugoslavia.

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This was a comic strip in the 1985 Smash Hits Yearbook, the very best yearbook of all. It was drawn by Kipper Williams, and features a delightful cast of 80s pop stars.

I’ve got a couple of other Smash Hits yearbooks (and No.1 Yearbooks, which were basically exactly the same, but somehow less exciting) which had a few cartoons and caricatures in them. They are all terrifying.

Lenny Henry’s Well-Hard Paperback was published in 1989 by Virgin Books. It was written by Lenny Henry, Stan Hey, Andrew Nickolds and Kim Fuller (you can see the full credits on the image below if you want).

I would have bee about 11 or 12 when I had this book, and I was completely obsessed by it. Even now after 20 years of trying to erase the shame I can still remember almost all of it word for word. The best bits of it were the two comic strips, Leroy of the Rovers and Captain Crucial.

This book was also the first place I ever saw the “Ian Fleming” joke, which is the best of all jokes.