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

I can still remember the first ad I ever saw for the Sony Walkman. It was in the NME and it was a banner ad, across the top of two pages, probably a quarter or a fifth of the page. On the left hand page there was a picture of a cassette case with the caption "Introducing the Sony Walkman" or some very similar copy. On the right hand page was a Walkman *and* the cassette case with a caption along the lines of "Sorry, the cassette was in front of it".

I didn't pay it much attention at the time. I didn't really grasp what an innovation it was and how it was going to revolutionise the way people (some people) listen to music. I didn't really get that until I found myself sitting next to people on the bus or the train with that tinny "tss tss tss tss" leaking out of their headphones and annoying everyone else.

Either way, I never felt the need to own one, and I never have owned one, or a personal stereo of any kind. Not until now, anyway.

One of the things I do to dissuade the crazies and the nutters from talking to me on the bus is to wear a pair of earbuds (nearly said headphones there - showing my age )so that it looks like I'm listing to something. In fact, the jack is tucked into my shirt pocket along with nothing else but but my spectacles. It's a ruse

But yesterday the former Mrs Gosho gave me her old iPod because I'd been talking about how I might have to start taking a longer bus journey soon (my bus ride to the Drafthouse was all of ten minutes), and how it'd be handy to have one for listening to some BBC radio podcasts, or some programmes I've recorded and turned into mp3s. I'll probably put a little prog rock on there too

And she left some pictures and videos of Dewey and Flossie on it

I was thinking about how labour-intensive my early teenage music listening was. It usually went something like this:

1) request album from library.
2) wait for anything up to a month or two for a postcard saying they've got it in.
3) go to library the next evening and get it.
4) go to hardware shop for cheap blank cassettes.
5) copy album
6) painstakingly fill in the card insert with song titles, adding band logo and stylised band name in appropriate font
7) spend the next couple of weeks listening with notebook and pen, writing lyrics, frequently stopping, re-winding and replaying to decipher certain lines and words
8) return album to library and order next one.

Nowadays, it would be

1) download album within two minutes including cover art, lyrics etc
2) err, that's it.

Perhaps it's a good thing. The amount of extra free time that the modern method would have given 13-year-old me would have been enough to get me into all sorts of trouble.

In the... however many years it is that I've been here... half a mo, I think I might have just missed an anniversary

Yes, I did just miss it and it's 14 years. Any road up... In all that time, that post gave me a bigger Proustian rush than just about any other in all that time

I remember the ends we had to go to in them days to music, and to find out the lyrics if the artiste hadn't put them on the album cover or inner sleeve. And the ends we had to go to do pretty much everything we take for granted these days, mostly to get information, whether it be movie times, the phone number and opening hours of a restaurant, an address, a bus schedule, who was in that film.. you know, the one with Michael Bentine... just a minute I'll look up his IMDb list... The Sandwich Man!

See what I mean?

And our parents told us we didn't know we were born

You're ahead of me. I still haven't switched over to mp3s in any significant sense. I do have a few albums on mp3, mostly because Amazon gives them to you when you buy CDs from them. I also have the latest Radiohead albums that they offered online for name your own price to stick it to the big labels. I do occassionally stream music from Pandora, but that's more like listening to radio. I don't know of a good reason not to go to mp3s besides the quality issue. I'd probably be a lot better off mentally if I spent more time building a digital library and listening to music more often rather than listening to NPR news and reading news on teh interwebs.

I try to restrict MP3 listening to just from my MP3 player when I'm travelling on my own... just helps pass the time the quality is so distracting I can't handle listneing to it, much at home, on my HiFi <h - heck, I'm still quite unconvinced by the quality of CDS VS vinyl but, as yet, I've failed to find reliable portible p personal turntables, or wax-cilender players on EBay

we have no amp so we can't use our record player (as I'm not sure which blog I'm in I'll not use the smiley that resembles deep unhappiness)

Making mixed tapes and writing all the details, designing a cover... the endless discussions about using C60s and having a lot of space to fill when you recorded an LP vs using a C45 and probably fitting an LP on one side, but then risking drag if your batteries were running low. Oh my. It's all coming flooding back.

I do believe, somewhere, probably in the loft, probably in a box, I have some 'mix tapes' I made, when I was a kid! - heck, I@m pretty sure I've even got an old yamaha seperates casette deck lurking about in the loft too the odd thing is, I still think, I've a couple albums on CD and vinyl now, that, when I listen to them; I still 'hear' the missing 'stop half way through the song', where, on my origional pirated casette copy, the first side of the casette ended

I recall having a couple of Sony walkmen (casette ones), when I was younger; I think my older, and more hip and trendy (and I assume wealthy), cousin gave them to me, as she replaced them with soemthing better/newer I briefly had a CD walkman, in the late 90s, but I think I broke that
NOw I've a very old littel Creative Zenstone, which is very usable and funcitonal and certainly holds enough to give some choice for any trip; I tend to just randomly throw on stuff to it, just before I travel.... Mind, I've also got a million albums or several hundred, anyhow, on my phone thesedays, but I rarely use that to listen to them on, as I try preserve the battery for more important things, like twitter, E-Mails, SMS, and, just very occasionally actually using the phone for phonecalls Mind, I only get two people who call my mobile., my Brother, and Tarquin, my friend in India, who sporadically wants to talk to me about solar pannels, PPI, or questionaires I'm going to have to get some kind of adaptor for my amp, on the hifi, I think, so I can plug the wax cilender into it, when I have it here

yup all of the above, my novel way of ripping music was connecting/jacking the redifusion box (http://www.rediffusion.info/1928-1978/) connecting it up to the reel to reel tape recorder managed to get
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/jimi_hendrix_wreaks_havoc_on_the_lulu_show_gets_banned_from_bbc.html
now yes can find on utube, wonder if our generation will see hologram players come into general use....

I wish I still had a reel-to-reel deck, or rather, I wish I still had all my old reel-to-reel tapes, or rather, I wish I still had all the content from my old reel-to-reel tapes

I had a pretty decent deck for a while. I wouldn't go as far as to call it semi-pro, maybe a quarter-pro. It took full-size 10" reels, it'd run at up to 15 inches per second, and it had proper backlit VU meters

But the stuff on some the tapes was pure gold.

I did a job for someone, probably around the turn of the 90s, taking their belongings from London to a house out in the wilds of Oxfordshire. After we'd unloaded the van and had a cuppa she mentioned there was some stuff in an outhouse that she wanted to get rid of, including some boxes of tapes, so I took them home.

It turned out they were old BBC tapes and must have been there a while, or somehow ended up there, because one of them had a couple of demo versions of the 'new' Match of the Day theme from 20 years previously. This one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZSU7bdSGVU Note the date on that video - 1970. Before that, this was the MOTD theme http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYXEIaLKiKo (hearing that again makes me think I'm about to hear this next http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eB8g4B-1ns ).

I have no idea what happened to them or what else was on the others. I did have a bunch of my own tapes too, though, from when I'd first discovered this thing called 'line in', meaning you could record straight from the radiogram and get the full quality Anything and everything was game as far as I was concerned. And then I discovered the joy that could be had from an editing block and razor blades