Tag: games

“Good-bye, dead-wide Dick!”

“Good-bye, dead-wide Dick!”

ADOXOBLOG

HotspurDeadWideDick The Hotspur, October 1944. “GOOD-BYE, DEAD-WIDE DICK!”

Two accidental forays into surrealism by British boys’ paper The Hotspur, which amazingly lasted until 1981. I say amazingly, although on the other hand there were lots of British colonial era things that inexplicably carried on into the 1980s and beyond. Not to mention that The Hotspur‘s first issue had on its cover a plane-sized eagle attacking an actual aeroplane, and came with a free “Black Cloth mask” for no immediately apparent reason, so they definitely started as they meant to go on.

The cover above is almost certainly not referring to the fact that this football player has a feature likely to make him popular with the ladies and about 10% of the gentlemen, but instead that he scores goals by kicking unexpectedly wide. As for how and why somebody decided to counter this tactic by installing a gung ho…

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Buck becomes Master, and Master becomes Frog

Buck becomes Master, and Master becomes Frog

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The next few posts will be a miscellany of items from one of my most cherished and precious books, Cassell’s Book of Sports and Pastimes from 1896. It’s dedicated to “moderate indulgence” in “athletic and other manly exercises”. These include not just manly (again) games and exercises but also “minor out-door games”, lawn games, games of skill, recreative science, the workshop, and home pets. Yes, you heard me: keeping canaries and building miniature steam engines are both officially manly exercises.

Incidentally, will anyone cherish a DRMed file of a 2013 ebook in a hundred years time? I seriously doubt they’ll be able to even if they might want to.

It’s time to get manly, fill the various offices and ask the male friend you’re straddling “Buck, Buck, how many fingers do I hold up?” No, stop, I said offices.

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