21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff)

21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff)

Steve Stack

Language: English

Pages: 224

ISBN: 1906321736

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


A fond farewell to the many inanimate objects, cultural icons and general stuff around us that find themselves on the verge of extinction.

We’ve all heard of the list of endangered animals, but no one has ever pulled together a list of endangered inanimate objects.

Until now, that is.

Steve Stack has catalogued well over one hundred objects, traditions, cultural icons and, well, other stuff that is at risk of extinction.

Some of them have vanished already.

Cassette tapes, rotary dial phones, half-day closing, milk bottle deliveries, Concorde, handwritten letters, typewriters, countries that no longer exist, white dog poo…

…all these and many more are big a fond farewell in this nostalgic, and sometimes irreverent, trip down memory lane.

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Bannockburn 1314: Robert Bruce's great victory

Look Back in Anger: The Miners' Strike in Nottinghamshire 30 Years on

The Road Not Taken: How Britain Narrowly Missed a Revolution 1381-1926

A Collection of Ranter Writings: Spiritual Liberty and Sexual Freedom in the English Revolution

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These bands, at least during the ’70s and ’80s, got their first play on his show by sending in a demo tape. Former Communist countries were able to listen to Western music via tapes recorded from the radio or smuggled in from outside (their small size much easier to hide than 12” records). Outlawed political and religious movements used cassettes to spread the word. Audiobooks, already a popular format in their own right, became more freely available, and finally brought the joy of books to many.

Massive black window. And then there was the rolling blackboard, the slightly more portable version. Usually on wheels, it was more portrait than landscape, and had a reel of coated material stretched across it so that it could be rolled down as it was used, a bit like a revolving hand towel in a public toilet. It meant the teacher could move on to a fresh, blank area when he or she had used up the space in front of them, but also allowed for a big reveal. The name of a special project, or the.

Show in 1977 drew in 21.4 million, more than the others ever achieved. There are other oddities. The FA Cup Final replay between Chelsea and Leeds in 1970 was watched by more people (28.49 million) than any other sporting event in history, apart from England’s World Cup Final victory in 1966 (32.3 million). And back in the days before dedicated film channels, a big premiere on terrestrial could really pull in the punters. The first showing of Live and Let Die on ITV in 1980 saw 23.5 million.

Globe – they were selling in their hundreds of millions every year. Smith-Corona sold 12 million machines in the last quarter of 1953 alone. But by the 21st century, global sales had fallen to less than half a million a year. Despite modern technology and the swanky world of word processing, many writers still insist on typing their work on an old-fashioned typewriter. Bestselling novelists such as John Irving and Paul Auster are famous for their reliance on clunky old keyboards. Auster even.

Dominance of the minidisc! Dodo Rating: Minidiscs Such is the fast moving nature of technology that some inventions seem to die out within a short time of being born. This was the case with the minidisc. Sony launched it in 1992 as the future of home recording, and it was intended as a high-quality alternative to analogue cassettes. With music lovers converting their album collections to compact disc, it made sense that they would want similar quality for the stuff they recorded at.

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