Carnival of Sound was subsequently bootlegged and has now finally been released – as a limited edition by Rhino Handmade.

After Jan and Dean were effectively over Dean Torrence became a designer and created a number of well-known album covers. He was asked to do the cover for this release and, to some people’s surprise, agreed. So here it is.

He has managed to create a cover that looks contemporary (that is, of its supposed time) without looking nostalgic. It looks like the cover that Jan and Dean might have wanted if the album had come out when it was supposed to.

It uses the same lettering style that he was beginning to use on tour brochures and posters in 1966 which, incidentally, places him in the vanguard of Californian designers creating the baroque psychedlic styles popularised by Mouse and Kelley.

Now all I have to do is actually get the album to replace the very crappy bootleg copy I have owned for ten years or so.

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The shop was inside the concourse of Rautatientori Metro in Helsinki, the metro station in the centre that leads to Stockmann, Mannerheimintie and the main railway station.

It was one of Helsinki’s best independent record shops, and I visited it regularly from the time I arrived in Helsinki to the time a couple of years ago when my music-buying became almost exclusively digital. It had copious stocks of Funkadelic, King Cromson, alt country and obscure retrospectives.

Perhaps eMusic and I are partly to blame for its demise, although I suspect a year or more of major redevelopments in and around the station have a lot more to do with it. These have closed, moved and resized a lot of shops, and are still doing so.

I will miss Tunnelin Levy though. I always dropped in when I passed, and often made an impulse purchase. It was a small city landmark that meant something to me.

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There were ten entries which were whittled down to three for a grand “superfinal”, otherwise known as a cheap ploy to double the income from phone voting.

First was Nina Lassander who sang a song called Cider Hill. The lyrics were in a slightly odd English but the song was a Bonnie Tyler style power ballad which could easily have been a minor international hit.

The second song was Eläkeläiset (which translates as Pensioners) singing Hulluna humpasta HQ. This is the video:

The third song was a dull “folk song” that involved two blonde sisters, some earnest finnish lyrics and an accordian. The band was Kuunkuiskaajat (which translates as Moon Whispers), and the song was Työlki ellää. It might as well have been called Null Point City!

After all three had performed, Marco Bjurstöm was invited to pass remarks on them, to help the viewers make up their minds. He took great pains to dismiss Eläkeläiset as an in-joke that would fail to translate internationally and leave Finland embarrassed.

According to Helsingin Sanomat today:

When it comes to Eläkeläiset, the opinions on the band’s performance polarised the audience.
Many people said that the comedy humppa band might give a bad impression of Finland, and expressed some relief when the final outcome of the vote was revealed.

People said exactly the same thing about Lordi after they were chosen. There was a huge public outcry with many arguing that Finns would be the laughing stock of Europe, and even priest joining in asking for them to be withdrawn.

We all thought it would be one of the first two. We wanted Eläkeläiset to win, because we actually thought they might produce another surprise in Oslo, and would in any case be post-ironically memorable. We were almost resigned though to Nina Lassander producing a worthy but slightly dull performance.

The entry that was chosen could have represented any country quite creditably at any contest during the mid to late 1950s. To call it wholesome would make it sound a lot less sacharine than it actually is.

I blame Marco Bjurstöm, and I bet Jaana Pelkonen does too!

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Over the last several years, we here at Metaplace Inc. have been working very hard to create an open platform allowing anyone to come to a website and create a virtual world of their own.

Unfortunately, over the last few months it has become apparent that Metaplace as a consumer UGC service is not gaining enough traction to be a viable product, requiring a strategic shift for our company.

We’re sorry to announce today that Metaplace.com will be closing to the public at 11:59pm on January 1st, 2010.

There goes the neighbourhood.

Metaplace was founded by Raph Koster, who was “the lead designer of Ultima Online and the creative director behind Star Wars Galaxies”, according to Wikipedia. When he founded Metaplace he intended it to “make online world elements… part of the standard code which drives the web” This quote is from an interview Koster gave in 2007 with GigaOm, just before he officially introduced Metaplace at Techcrunch. He said that

Up to now, most MMOs have been “walled gardens”, requiring an extensive client install. Metaplace, by contrast, is “A Web browser with virtual world capability.” And it’s a browser that comes with its own tool kit, for people who want to build worlds, and a community/marketplace where developers can give away or sell their templates, scripts, and so on, hosted on the Areae network.

Thanks to the underlying HTML-style code by which Metaplace defines each individual world served by its network, you can literally copy and paste attributes like graphic appearance and user interface from one Metaplace world to another. In the demo, Raph showed me a Habbo Hotel-style living room (Metaplace will launch with this 2D isometric graphics view as standard), but Raph and his team expect the variety of worlds to grow with their tools, eventually accommodating hardcore MMOs like World of Warcraft—or even a new Second Life.

So instead of a single contiguous world, someone visiting the Metaplace web site gets presented with a YouTube-style home page (see photo of Metaplaces Beta log-in page). Instead of videos, however, you have a variety of worlds to choose from, with ratings in terms of popularity, genre, and other categories. This prevents users looking for different worlds with different audiences and genre expectations getting their experiences crossed. (Or as Koster calls it: “Oh no, you got my Cartoon Network in my Suicide Girls!”)

Was he wrong? I don’t think so. Was he right? Obviously not. Back to the drawing board, Batman!

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On Sept. 9, 2009 I experienced something that I still am having trouble believing happened to me. I came into the possession of a cassette tape containing a Beatles album that was never released. In fact, not only was it never released but it was recorded many years after they broke up (and no I’m not talking about Klaatu).

Now this is where the story becomes slightly more unbelievable and it is almost embarrassing to attempt to explain the incident to you for fear of viewing me as completely absurd. I must assure you, I am not insane or on drugs, and hopefully the audio from this tape will be enough proof that there is more than we think out there…

I live in Livermore California but on Sept 9 I was driving home from Turlock after visiting a friend for a few days. I had my dog with me and I didn’t have any plans for the day so I decided to take a drive through a place called Del Puerto Canyon just west of Turlock. There is a scenic road that is a fun drive and actually goes through to Livermore. I hadn’t taken a cruise through it for a while so I thought i would take this way home. It was about 2pm.

A ways into the canyon my dog starting acting like she needed to use the restroom. So I pulled over to the first available parking area to the side of the road and let her out while I stretched. At first I didn’t notice, but then I heard the barking from 30 yards away…my dog was chasing a rabbit. Now my dog is a pretty good dog but if she is chasing something then there is no stopping her so the only thing I could do was become part of the chase.

They already had about a 40 yard head start so I had to really book it. The uneven ground and soft dirt patches made it difficult to run and it wasn’t very far into the chase I had stepped in a rabbit hole, fell and knocked myself unconscious.

When I woke up I was in a room with some furniture and electronics in it. I was taken care of with a bandage on my head but I still felt uneasy about the situation because where I fell and hit my head was in a very rural unpopulated area with no houses, and outside the window of the room I was in I could hear traffic.

He has kindly posted a downloadable zip file of the album, which is called Everyday Chemistry on the Beatles Never Broke Up site, which should silence at least some of the sceptics.

There is also a fan group established in Facebook, with a lively discussion about whether the story is true or not, and where the album (which is really very good) came from.

Cliff Brunker, a Facebook member who has signed on as a fan, has submitted an image of the original cover of the eight-track cartridge, which he found in his basement. I have taken the liberty of reproducing it here.

According to some comments, the Beatles apparently released at least one more album called Everest, in another dimension, although no audio evidence of this claim has yet been made available.

The story seems unlikely on the face of it, but that is why I believe it. What possible reason could anybody have for making up such a story – unless every single word was true? Doubtless some people will argue that it is a hoax – indeed some people are already doing precisely that – but I prefer to see it as another manifestation of the many-worlds theory proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957.

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The honor for producing the first working GUI goes to Doug Englebart – at the time an employee of Stanford Research Institute. Englebart and colleagues created a program called the oNLine System in 1965-‘68. This program used the first mouse, a windowing system, and hypertext, and was based on a description of a system called “memex” proposed by Vannevar Bush in 1945. The name “mouse” comes from this period. The mouse used in oNLine had three buttons on one end and the line coming out the other end. Apparently, the buttons for eyes and nose, plus a cord for a tail, reminded the users of a mouse and the name stuck.

Years later, still in a time when nobody knew what the future of computers was to be, Xerox put together a team of researchers who did nothing more than put ideas together to see what they produced. The team, located at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, was convinced that Englebart’s model would work on computers available for individual work stations, and they produced two working models, the Alto and the Star. The Star was made available to the public, mouse and all, in 1981. But it was very expensive, and they sold only 25 thousand of them. But this was the first GUI-based OS available to the public.

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To my surprise I discovered today that smileys have a definite inventor – or at least a definite location at which they were invented, and someone who was either the inventor or a leading co-inventor.

At the Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Department, Scott Falhman has posted a page about the smiley in which he says that

A lot of people have asked me about this, so I thought I’d put the information here, linked under my home page: Yes, I am the inventor of the sideways “smiley face” (sometimes called an “emoticon”) that is commonly used in E-mail, chat, and newsgroup posts. Or at least I’m one of the inventors.

By the early 1980’s, the Computer Science community at Carnegie Mellon was making heavy use of online bulletin boards or “bboards”. These were a precursor of today’s newsgroups, and they were an important social mechanism in the department – a place where faculty, staff, and students could discuss the weighty matters of the day on an equal footing.

If you want to know more about the man who invented the smiley, then Scott E Fahlman has his own page too!

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I’m fascinated by the way people believe the irrational. When we lived in America … a book that sold millions of copies was In Search Of Excellence: Lessons From America’s Best-Run Companies. It analysed 35 of the biggest and most successful companies, and extrapolated the reasons why they were doing so well. No wonder so many ambitious businesspersons bought it.

Now a new book, The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig, actually looks at all those companies, and finds that they are doing surprisingly badly. Only 13 of the 35 are actually doing better, measured by shareholder return. By profit performance, all but five have fallen back. The same applies to another huge bestseller, Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. Just five of the 17 visionary companies improved their performance. In other words, the lessons of these books were pretty well valueless. It was a classic circular argument. The authors looked at the companies that did well, discovered their strategies, and decided that’s why they did well. Or as the Romans wisely pointed out, post hoc non ergo propter hoc . Arguments disappeared up their own backsides. If a successful company diversified, diversification had to be good. If it stuck rigidly to its core business, that was the philosopher’s stone. If they had expanded fast, that demonstrated management flair. If they expanded slowly, that showed admirable caution. If Hewlett-Packard had given every employee a rose on their wedding anniversary, or Boeing had made everyone dress in clown suits on Fridays, that too would have been a top management secret.

As human beings, we are capable of giving credence to almost anything that suits what we believe, whether our religion or the cause of climate change. Books like The Halo Effect are a refreshing corrective.

I note this at length because paraphrasing it seems pointless, and the information might be in need of later retrieval.

I should also add that Phil Rosenzweig has a website called The Halo Effect, that is “dedicated to clear thinking about business and management”. In his words:

It’s the companion to my book, The Halo Effect … and the Eight Other Business Delusions that Deceive Managers, published in February 2007 by Free Press. It’s also a site where managers, researchers, consultants, and journalists can download study guides, articles and book reviews, find further reading, and post their views about popular delusions and misconceptions in the business world.

The blog contains some interesting entries, and the section on The Book contains synopses of the main arguments as well as a set of study guides.

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This set me wondering whether or not the Wagon Train was on an actual journey (from a specified starting point to a specified destination) or whether, like the Ancient Mariner, it was trapped on a perpetual voyage to nowhere at all.

Faced with this dilemma I googled and found Candace Rich‘s site FiftiesWeb. It told me a lot about the series, and I shall certainly return to it soon to pursue some more eccentric research. However, it didn’t answer my question so I emailed Candace.

Today I got her reply, which I will quote in full:

They mostly skirted any details. After all, Ward Bond died and on the show, Major Adams just vanishes without so much as a word.

In two stories, they do deal with the end of the trail – in San Francisco. Although it is implied that some wagons went other places at the end, which would have been accurate. They wouldn’t have been mostly city dwellers.

The train always started in St. Joseph MO. And there are maybe 2 or 3 stories dealing with the formation of the train.

Most episodes centered around a single person and took place en route. The episodes were named after the passenger such as “The Colter Craven Story” and this was usually played by the big name guest star. Unlike Star Trek, the original idea was that the stories would not center on the permanent cast and rather give the bulk of the screen time to the guest star. This is one way in which they lured movie people to the show. As time passed the permanent cast became better known and popular and they got a fair amount of screen time too and often they were the lead in the story.

One thing they shared was travelling into the unknown. While there were fixed routes West, changes were often necessary. A watering hole goes dry in a drought year, or two much rain washes out a pass. And then of course there were the Klingons, I mean Indians!

That is an extraordinarily detailed reply, for which I am very grateful. I can see that the inevitable next step will involve me hunting the series down on DVD. Actually, a quick look round Amazon suggests that the series is not available as a box set. But this is:

Classic T.V. Western Collection

Five-disc set includes episodes from the series “The Rifleman,” “Bat Masterson,” “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Wagon Train,” “The Roy Rogers Show,” “The Deputy,” “Shotgun Slade,” “Bonanza,” “Sugarfoot,” “The Gabby Hayes Show,” “The Cisco Kid,” “Annie Oakley,” “Judge Roy Bean,” “Range Rider,” “Buffalo Bill Jr.,” and “The Adventures of Kit Carson.”

And it is only $14.99 from Movies Unlimited.

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Real People, the real-life weekly magazine, was hit by a PR disaster today after a production error in its scratchcard competition led to every reader winning a £5,000 jackpot.

The magazine was today forced to convert the competition into a prize draw after readers flooded it with telephone calls, thinking they had £5,000 extra spending money for Christmas.

This reminded me of the Hoover disaster (not surprisingly, since the Guardian made a brief reference to it at the end of the story). I googled and, lo and behold, there was an article in Wikipedia about it.

The Great Hoover Disaster took place in 1992. Every customer was offered a free flight for every £100 they spent. Unfortunately Hoover had miscalculated and thousands of people realised that it was worth their while to buy several Hoovers and then throw them out, give them away, or sell them second-hand in order to get the flights. The tickets were worth considerably more than the cost of the vaccuum cleaners.

The result was that the promotion cost Hoover an estimated FORTY EIGHT million pounds, and completely killed the entire vacuum cleaner retail market for several months, as Britain was flooded with unused Hoovers that people were literally giving away.

Court cases rumbled on for seven years as people doggedly (but successfully) sued to get their free flights, and finally Hoover UK was sold by Maytag, its American owners, to the Italian manufacturer Candy.

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