Weird Headlines, Click-bait and Nordmende

"The world is still a weird place, despite my efforts to make clear and perfect sense of it." - Hunter S. Thompson

Song of the Blog:
"Let's make the headlines loud and true
Let's make the headlines - cause I'm giving it all
Yeah, I'm giving it all to you."
- The Spice Girls

1980 - Electric Dreams

For as long as I can remember I have had a fascination with printed matter. Books, magazines, newspapers - you name it. There are plenty of them in my collection and this includes the boxes of magazine and newspaper clippings. Have fun sorting through all of that once I am gone, my loved ones! Meh, who am I kidding - most of it will just end up in the rubbish. So, why keep it all - especially these days when everything is so readily available online. YEARS of news papers are there to look through in certain online archives, many magazine are digitally there to browse through.

 

I guess it's the feeling of nostalgia, going through one of those old archive boxes every once in a while brings back the memories of the fun things in our lives. One thing I came across was an old Nordmende TV/Audio equipment catalogue from 1980/81, that I re-purposed in the early 80s to keep weird and amazing newspaper articles. The ones that are now known as click-bait... Like "Jesus died of a heart-attack", "Japan will ban sex-tourism"  or "Man(85) coughs up bullet". All of them of course in Dutch - but, they still create a fun peek into the sensational stories that papers used to fill spaces.

The fun part is not only the articles have been all stuck in to fit a nice patterned design (something that would eventually become my job!), nor that I used Typex to whiten the areas in between and add the handwritten dates around them, but - the fact that it IS an old catalogue with "ancient" technology and because of some of the personal dramas around 1983 the project seems to have halted around that time. This leaves two-thirds of the catalogue EMPTY from news paper clippings. yet FULL of all the retro technology from the start of the 80s.



Who didn't dream of having a mini-combo TV/radio/tape-recorder/clock !!! Or your own home-studio VHS system or - WOW - a TV that could show you what the weather would be like... Oh,wait, ... nearly 40 years later now and all of that (and more) is in my mobile phone.  But, not this old catalogue, with roughly cut out headlines, stuck together by a 15 year old.. it's still sitting in a box to hold and cherish and I am giving it all to you, my loved ones!