Tuesday 19 September 2023

Speak Your Brain! Part 62. Internet rabbit holes.

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon
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The Steve Does Comics Megaphone
Image by Tumisu
from Pixabay
Can it really be that time of month again?

The one where I totally run out of things to talk about and have to ask you The Reader to come up with a suitable topic?

Yes.

It can.

Therefore, feel free to make your suggestion below - and we'll see just what kind of mayhemic maelstrom of marauding chit-chat is generated.

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

Have you ever fallen down an internet rabbit hole? As I wrote yesterday, I started falling down one maybe 3 years ago that went from Yorkshire flat caps to Yorkshire dog thieves to Brits living in Normandy to Pork Pies…. Let’s hear some of yours!

Anonymous said...

Certain things I've that I've forgotten, I want to remember: France's indigenous internet, that's now defunct; the name of those personal machines, whereby you could send e-mails, without an internet subscription (also defunct); my first pocket calculator's name & number, etc. I rediscovered these things, then bookmarked them. However, I think I exceeded my bookmark limit, as they're not on it. Thus, I must search for them again!

Phillip

Steve W. said...

Charlie (I assume). I fall down an internet rabbit hole every night. Tonight, on YouTube, I've somehow managed to work my way from a video about Peter Cushing's greatest movies to a pyramidal baseball stadium that's planned in some American town or other, via a discussion about why British cities are cities, with myriad videos in between.

Phillip, I too used to be able to recall the name of my first calculator and can no longer recall it.

Anonymous said...

Phillip - I assume you mean France’s Minitel? Clever bit of work that and seemingly quite ahead of the internet in its way! I still have my HP3C with RPN (reverse Polish notation) from school. Just cant conceive of chucking it out…

Steve - not sure where in the world a pyramid baseball stadium would go except Lost Wages Nevada??? They may be getting a professional team for baseball. Gee! I should research this and fall down a rabbit hole! Lol!

Anonymous said...

Anonymous Charlie - Yes, Minitel - that's the word!

Steve - The annoying thing about my first calculator is I found it, after a discussion either here, or on Back in the Bronze Age, but now have forgotten it again!

Phillip

Anonymous said...

Uk dudes - was the series UFO from the Uk worth a look?

Ch47

Colin Jones said...

UFO never appealed to me, Charlie - I much preferred its' successor Space: 1999 (Season 1 anyway).

I didn't know France had its' own internet!

I mostly go down YouTube rabbit holes because of the recommended clickbait. Just a few days ago I found myself watching a YouTube documentary about the Carry On star Charles Hawtrey which I definitely hadn't set out to do!

dangermash said...

I saw five minutes of UFO the other day. Futuristic car, futuristic hairdos, futuristic everything really. They really went to town. Except that the office building they worked in on Earth was the ugliest, most 1970s building you could ever see, The sort of building people drive past every das and say I can't wait until hey finally pull that ugly f***er down. Maybe buildings like that were seen as the exciting future of urban archaeology at the time.

Steve W. said...

Phillip, I think that was the same reason I discovered the identity of my first calculator.

Dangermash, I believe that HQ in UFO is the TV studio where the show was made. It's also used as the hospital exterior in Holby City.

Charlie, I love UFO. It has some ridiculous juvenile elements, like military personnel in purple wigs but it's often surprisingly hard-nosed and, in its later episodes, become very surreal, seemingly inlfuenced by things like The Prisoner.

Apparently, the baseball park will be in St Petersburg - which, it seems, is in Florida - and it's only the roof that's in the form of a pyramid.

Anonymous said...

Saint Petersburg, huh? Oddly enough, the Tampa bay devil ray baseball team plays in Saint Petersburg, not Tampa IIRC. They actually want a New Stadium now.

Three decades ago, the Chicago White Sox threaten to move to Tampa. If they were to announce that now, I think most of us would applaud. The ownership of the White Sox is as well received now as the ownership of Manchester United or Everton.

And, FWYW, the same group that owns the White Sox own the Chicago Bulls. If they had not drafted Michael Jordan 30 years ago, they really would seem like a bunch of sad sack losers.

Anonymous said...


And, thanks for the info on UFO. I almost fell down that rabbit hole yesterday, whilst looking at Facebook, lol

Charlie.

Colin Jones said...

This morning I bought a book of 10 first-class stamps from Tesco and I was rather amazed that they still have the Queen's head on them. Isn't it about time they put King Charlie's head on the stamps? But the stamps I bought also had the new barcode feature too and that's actually the most important bit.

Anonymous said...

I fall down internet rabbit-holes ALL THE DAMN TIME. I literally spend hours at sites like ISFDB, IMDB, GCD, YouTube and of course Wikipedia. Most of the stuff I learn that way is practically useless, most of it forgotten almost instantly, but all those trivial trails seem irresistible in the moment.

Betcha didn’t know that acclaimed Horror Novelist and pioneer Comics Historian Les Daniels was the grandson of Leslie Daniels Jr., who wrote Big Little Books, including one based on a JACK ARMSTRONG radio script written by Talbot Mundy author of KING OF THE KHYBER RIFLES.

Or that the Sex Pistols recorded NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS at the same studio where Queen was recording NEWS OF THE WORLD and that John Lydon snuck into the recording booth while Freddie Mercury was laying down some piano tracks, crawled underneath said piano, stuck his head out between Freddie’s legs, said “H’lo Freddie” and squirmed back out the room.

Fascinating, right?

b.t.

McSCOTTY said...

I really liked UFO at the time, no doubt helped by the female SHADO members but it's certainly worth watching at least one episode at least for the kitsch elelement. The show also had an excellently illustrated comic strip in the old Countdown comic.

I regularly go down rabbit holes on Spotify clicking on "You may like. " links which can lead to some strange music.

Steve W. said...

Bt, I certainly didn't know about that epic meeting between Freddie Mercury and John Lydon. It opens up a whole potential parallel world where the Sex Pistols and Queen made a record together in the same way that Queen and David Bowie later did.

Colin Jones said...

Never Mind The Bohemian Rhapsody - Here's The Sex Pistols & Queen.

I hadn't heard that story either but I did hear about another time when Sid Vicious supposedly asked Freddie Mercury if Bohemian Rhapsody was intended to make opera popular with the masses and Freddie replied "We try, darling, we try".

Matthew McKinnon said...

I do it a lot - looking up a band or artist on Wikipedia and then listening to their music on YouTube, and then heading off on tangents from that. It can eat up a lot of time.