h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm completely unable to find the cable to connect my old cassette deck to the PC so that I can digitise some stuff, so I started going through some boxes I haven't looked into for ages and found a couple of old newspapers I'd... well, I hadn't forgot that I had them, but I hadn't looked at them for a while.

On the day Thatcher resigned I made a point of going out to get an Evening Standard because of the unbounded and unbridled joy it brought, and the next day my copy of The Independent dropped through the letterbox. I made a point to keep both, and here's the Standard's front page http://i.imgur.com/EPAqdeC.jpg

Seven years later there was another joyous day - the day Labour got back into power after 18 years of Tory misrule. Oh how much better things were going to be, we all thought. It took about as long for that idea to dissolve as an ice cream melting in the summer sun http://i.imgur.com/ar03sHb.jpg

And then, a few years later, one of the saddest possible days, on a par with the the day DNA dropped off the twig - the day that John Peel died http://i.imgur.com/O008qPV.jpg

Oh, and thanks to parrferris for sending me the John Peel paper

During my home renovations I found a few things from the past. One thing I was actually hoping to find was a patch I earned playing Atari (I'm a Megamaniac http://www.2600connection.com/faq/activision_patches/patches_megamania.jpg )

I also found an old high school newspaper. I must have had some photo credits. I haven't taken a good look at it yet though.

I also found a giant pencil with a plastic dolphin on top. This brought back memories. In the 70's Galveston had a fairly decent aquarium/water park called Sea-Arama. By the early 80's it was deteriorating quickly and it closed by the time I graduated high school.

When I was a kid there were two bumper stickers on EVERY car in the county, one for Sea-Arama and the other for Mickey Gilley's bar (yes, the one in Urban Cowboy.) Both places had the same tactic. When you went there if you didn't put down your visor they took that as consent to plaster your bumper with their sticker if it didn't already have one.


However, what I DIDN'T find that I was really hoping to was the negatives I'd selected for scanning from my trip to London in 1985. I pulled them out and carried them to and from work (where I have access to real light tables) but set them aside for months and haven't been able to find the good negatives since. I still have the culls and there are some good pictures there too, but not my favorite ones. The one of the council flat kids grinning ear to ear with the Battersea Power Station in the back ground, or the one of the two young women (they were on my tour) leaning out of their hotel windows in Bath tossing window sill flowers at each other. In all I probably lost 20-30 images, including at least 5 of my favorite shots. There's still a small chance I might still find them, but I'm starting to suspect that I may have dropped them on my way home from work (possibly sitting at the bar).

Oh, well.

Don't give up - I recently found a watercolour a friend painted for me before I came to Austin which I thought I'd lost forever. One thing I haven't found though is a silver bracelet a girlfriend gave me for Christmas one year. I think I might have put it in the box of stuff I mailed to myself when I was going to Scotland and which never showed up, although it doesn't seem like the sort of thing I would have put in there. The only other thing I remember for sure that was in there was a sweater my mother knitted when I was 16, and still in good nick after... it would have been 35 years I reckon

Admittedly, by then it was a bit short in the arms. And the body. And tight around the chest But it still kept me warm in the winter. At least I still have the tea cosy she knitted around the same time

Ha, I also found a bunch of PATA hard drives, one of which has something else I thought I'd lost forever - Tom Waits Storytellers on DVD

A 6GB drive. Can you even buy those any more?

And I found a bunch of old h2g2 stuff on another, including this which was obviously meant to celebrate the 9000th post in some long forgotten conversation

Oh look. Installers for Mozilla 1.3, Firefox 2.0, WinAmp 3.0, Opera 6.05, and something called r1p-bbc-en-setup.

I thought I'd expunged everything Real Player from my PC and hard drives

I have now

And in amongst the text files...


A man in a hot air balloon realised he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The woman below replied, "You're in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between latitude 40 and 41 degrees north and between longitude 59 and 60 degrees west ."

"You must be an engineer," said the balloonist. "I am," replied the woman, "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is, technically correct, but I've no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help at all. If anything, you've delayed my trip."

The woman below responded, "You must be in management." "I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well," said the woman, "you don't know where you are or where you're going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you've no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."

Classic.

I still haven't found the cable I was looking for but as well all that other stuff I also found several pictures of Dewey and Flossie that I thought were long dissolved into random magnetism