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Yet Another Balls-Up

By Jim Mitchell

Once again the dreary annual semi-pornographic prattlings of an ill-educated "intelligensia" has been hawked around the Wellington area—most of the proceeds to charity.

Once again we have been left wondering if this is the end result of an expensive tertiary education, an education whose coal has been questioned by several politicians to the enormous resentment of the students concerned. Is this really the best that our students can produce?

Every year I hope, perpetually in vain, it seems, that at least one of our universities will produce a capping book whose connection with higher learning will be indicated in some other way than by the mere inclusion of a list of graduates.

Where is all the satire, wit, humour, artistic and literary that should be an almost inevitable part of the educational process?

Children scrawl dirty little pictures and rhymes on lavatory walls: some members of our university society never, it is sadly apparent, progress beyond this stage. Instead, it is painfully obvious, they post their little bon mots of necrophilia to the Capping Book Editor.

Some cannot even be original in their contributions. The "jokes" they send in may not have been heard in the cradle, but they have certainly progressed through many other capping books before coming to rest in the turgid pages of the Wellington production.

Technically, the capping book is no improvement on past years. The collection of badly re-screened photographs presumably V.U.W. has no efficient photographers of its own—reveal their sources in their painful inadequacy.

The cartoons would look better, certainly more natural, on a grot door. The choice of type suggests chronic astigmatism on the part of the sub-editor.

Perhaps, as an end to all this carping criticism, I could congratulate those concerned in the production of the 1969 Capping Book on having achieved one thing. They have convinced me that Mr Muldoon was right.

If this is the best our students can produce, we might as well become a technical institute tomorrow. We would find it hard to go much lower than we now are, anyway.

• The editor of Cappicade, Mr. D. Smith, would like to point out that this review was written three weeks before the publication date of Cappicade.