> > I was having lunch with a beautiful woman the other day and in walked
> another
> > woman who looked just like my date. I started asking them questions and
> found
> > out that both women were born on the same day, same month, same year, and
> they
> > had the same mother, but they were not twins. How could this be?
> >
>
> No guesses?

So what is it finally ? Triplets ?

"And we admire your 'Coupling', too."

Like the court said, those tapes were poor quality and blurred! It was unable to prove it was me! So whoever passed the 'coupling' video on to you is heading for trouble! No sheep were hurt in the making of that tape. Ermmm....ahem... Or so I'm led to believe...

Seriously though. 2 others to watch out for are 'Father Ted' and 'The Royle Family'. You may not get the chance to see these, or even like them, but as fans of RD, I think you would appreciate them.

---

> So what is it finally ? Triplets ?

See the answer in Incoherent Musings.

---

I'm 50-50 on Father Ted. My range is somewhere between Mulberry and The Young Ones.

$250?? Oh, man - now I've gotta find a job!

We had a little party for a local fixture who just turned 75. He's a robust and curmudgeonly geezer who has worked his whole life outdoors and looks good.
As we were toasting him with tiny plastic cups of cheap white rum (palitos de ron blanco) his favorite drink-
He says, "Ahhhm awright- but what pisses me off's now I gotta 75 year old dick!"

The issue with aging is that it will eventually take you all night long to do what you used to all night long.

Red Dwarf, Monty Python, Benny Hill, Space 1999, UFO, MI-5 (originally called "Spooks" I believe, but that's a racial slur here), Doctor Who, Black Adder, Fawlty Towers, The Eastenders, The Avengers. These are just shows that immediately leap to mind. Many, many shows have made the leap across the pond, and not all of them just on PBS. Red Dwarf in particular was a favorite of mine. "Smoke me a kipper. I'll be back for breakfast."

---

> Yeah, the British will never know how popular their shows are here I'm sure.
> Doctor Who and Benny Hill were also obsessions of mine.
>

We know we do Honest(smiley)
It's vice versa, you have given us star trek,(DS9,Voyager,TNG,Enterprise.)
Star Gate SG1, Babylon 5, X-files, all great programs.

The list goes on...............................

CR: Here's an interesting thing. That first TRS-80, as I wrote, was 2MHz Z80 with 4k (64k after an upgrade) and cost me $2000. I bought another in 1983, a Model 4 with 64k and a 4MHz Z80A CPU for $1650 (128k after an upgrade, and I had a really good job in high school to pay for all this, by the way). Fast forward to when I went back to college in 1998. My coursework required a graphing calculator. I bought a TI-86 which had a Z80B 8MHz and 96k of memory (has to be split between mass storage and main memory, but whatever) which cost $130.

Speeker: Back in the early and mid 70s, science fiction in the US in particular wasn't very good until Star Wars put the genre back on the map. At the time all that we had besides reruns of Star Trek and Lost in Space were half-hearted attempts like Planet of the Apes and Logan's Run (purists may say I'm ignoring shows like the Six Million Dollar Man, so I guess I should acknowledge that there was SOME Hollywood sort-of scifi that was somewhat decent). British imports (Space:1999 et al) were really the only interesting new shows on TV for a scifi nut like me.

For the main subject of this thread: A favorite Steven Wright'ism-
I installed a skylight in my place the other day. The upstairs neighbors are furious.

---

> I'm always amazed to hear of air crash victims so badly mutilated that they
> have to be identified by their dental records. What I can't understand is, if
> they don't know who you are, how do they know who your dentist is?
>
It's not like they have to search through thosands of records
if 250 people die then 250 dental records if they were kept
it would be up to the family to provide them. Now we have DNA
as simple as a hair from a hair brush///

---

Wow! UFO.... I remember that. I even had the toy. Wonder what that would be worth now?

I grew up with Space 1999, Blakes 7, and so on. Happy days.

Anyone else remember the old Dr Who intro with the swirly tunnel and weird music? Used to scare the pants off me! Dunno why, just creepy!


......"I'm so gorgeous, there's a six month waiting list for birds to suddenly appear, every time I am near!"

---

I had the Dinky Toys diecast metal Moonbase Interceptor, Passenger Eagle (never understood why the cockpit area and landing pods were painted green), and Cargo Eagle. Cost quite a bit for a grade school kid to buy here in the US. I think they're still in the attic at my parents' place. And the Dr Who intro was awesome BECAUSE it was spooky. Very memorable.

For the ridiculous (true story): One of the things I keep in a photo album is a newspaper clipping from when I lived in Mississippi. It was an ad in a local newspaper that said "Learn to Read" and gave the dates, times, and logo of the TV station. Call me crazy, but I think those ad dollars may have been more effectively spent elsewhere.

>
> "It's not like they have to search through thosands of records
> if 250 people die then 250 dental records if they were kept
> it would be up to the family to provide them. Now we have DNA
> as simple as a hair from a hair brush."
>
> I know!
>
> Maybe the humour of the post past you by? Whooosh...there it goes again.
> ;o)
>
> The title of the thread might give you a clue.

BTW I am not blonde
>
>
Sorry bout that I still don't know if he was playing a joke or he's for
real freaky...

Oh I see the humor and the irony///

Timmy

---

i always knew we would have computers this fast and star trek (cellphone) communicators...i just didn't think it would take this long for the technology to advance...i'm still waiting for humans to attempt manned interplanetary expeditions...we are way behind in space exploration...at least according to my expectation...sometmes i feel i am from the future and am just sitting here waiting for my ride home to be invented.

> I read your profile, Cool !
> The first computer I learned programing on was a TRS-80 back in high school.
> That was fun, Think my calculator has more computing power than it had.
> Back then I never imagined we would have computers this powerful either, in
> fact
> I never thought anybody would have use for them accept for in a work place
> environment.
> Never thought we would have Star Trek communicators (Cell phones) Either ;)
> Yeah, the British will never know how popular their shows are here I'm sure.
> Doctor Who and Benny Hill were also obsessions of mine.
>

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PROUD TO BE TFFE!

Repair crews reopened a lane of traffic in each direction yesterday on Interstate 70 near Glenwood Springs, Colo., a day after a rock slide sent more that three dozen boulders, some as big as vans, crashing onto the road. Some were embedded 6 feet deep into the roadway. Workmen toiled through the night in snowy conditions, but it could take months before the stretch is fixed, said Colorado Department of Transportation spokeswoman Stacey Stegman. Officials closed a 24-mile section of the main east-west artery through Colorado, and rerouted Thanksgiving Day traffic along an almost 220-mile detour to the north. Transportation officials estimated that there was $1 million in damage. No one was hurt.

Doctor Who - The Original Theme


Delia Derbyshire, with assistant Dick Mills, created the original version of the theme in August 1963 using techniques, described here, that applied for years, whether the sound sources were electronic or concrete.

In 1963, when the job of producing the Doctor Who theme landed at Delia's feet, there were no synthesisers. The sound for electronic music came either from pure electronic sources, or from recordings of actual live sounds - the precursor of what we now term "sampling". But sampling now is easy: capture a sound, assign it to a range of notes on a keyboard, and play. But musique concrete was not so easy forty years ago.

There being no "synthesisers", the Workshop needed a source of electronic sound. They found this in a bank of twelve high-quality test tone generators, the usual function of which was to output various tones (square waves, sine waves) for passing through electronic circuits for testing gain, distortion and so on. They also had a couple of high-quality equalisers (again, test equipment - equalisers, or "tone controls", were not that easy to come by at the time) and a few other gadgets including a "wobbulator" (a low frequency oscillator) and a white noise generator.

Each sound in the Doctor Who theme was individually created using these instruments, and recorded to magnetic tape. By "each individual sound" I mean just that - each note was individually hand-crafted. The swooping sounds were created by manually adjusting the pitch of the oscillator to a carefully-timed pattern. The rhythmic hissing sounds were created by filtering white noise to "colour" it, as were the "bubbles" and "clouds". Examination of the original makeup tapes suggests that one of the two bass lines alone is a "concrete" sound, a plucked string sample.

Once each sound had been created, it was modified. Some sounds were created at all the required pitches direct from the oscillators, others had to be repitched later. This was done by taking the piece of tape with the sound on and looping it. The loop was placed on a tape machine and its playback speed varied until the pitch was correct, then the sound was rerecorded onto another machine. This process continued until every sound was available at all the required pitches. To create dynamics, the notes were rerecorded at slightly different levels.

Now the fun really started. They had all the sounds, all the notes, and now had to create the music. So each individual note was trimmed to length by cutting the tape, and stuck together in the right order. This was done for each "line" in the music - the main plucked bass, the bass slides (an organ-like tone emphasising the grace notes), the hisses, the swoops, the melody, a second melody line (a high organ-like tone used for emphasis), and the bubbles and clouds. This done, they ended up with a number of lengths of cut tape with the individual parts on. Most of these individual bits of tape, complete with edits every inch, still survive.

This done, the music had to be "mixed". There were no multitrack tape machines, so rudimentary multitrack techniques were invented: each length of tape was placed on a separate tape machine and all the machines were started simultaneously and the outputs mixed together. If the machines didn't stay in sync, they started again, maybe cutting tapes slightly here and there to help. In fact, a number of "submixes" were made to ease the process - a combined bass track, combined melody track, bubble track, and hisses. Eventually, the piece was finished.

The result is an astonishing piece of work with a magically organic quality to it that belies the many hours of patient work it took to create. As I said at the start, it is a "pure" electronic work - there is no element of "performance" at all, yet it still sounds alive. Even more extraordinary is that you can listen to the Doctor Who theme now, nearly 40 years later, and still not work out exactly how it was done. It must be one of the most timeless recordings ever - still fresh and modern when later versions sound dated and stale.

Delia Derbyshire recalls that Ron Grainer was delighted with the result and, realising that the music worked perfectly well as it stood, abandoned his original plan of overdubbing a small instrumental ensemble (as in Giants of Steam). Recognising Delia's immense contribution, he also suggested splitting his performance royalty income with her, but BBC bureaucracy meant that this was not possible.



I forget the code to insert a link, otherwise I would have for the original theme tune!

"We're in the stickiest situation since Sticky the Stick Insect got stuck on a sticky bun."

---

> If the left side of your brain controls the right side of your body-

My all time favorite bumper sticker:

Nothing RIGHT with my LEFT Brain
Nothing LEFT of my RIGHT Brain

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<img src="http://boinc.mundayweb.com/seti2/stats.php?userID=27&amp;trans=off">

IN BRIEF / NEW JERSEY
Man's Attempt to Teach Teen a Lesson Backfire

A Newark father's attempt to teach his daughter a lesson about drinking led to his arrest.
Kevin Winston, 46, called police after his 16-year-old daughter came home drunk and unruly. When police arrived, she told them her father stored drugs and weapons in the home.
She led officers to a crawl space where they found four semiautomatic guns and more than 600 vials of cocaine.

From L.A. Times Wire Reports

The original Dr. Who theme creeped me out as a kid. I love the theme song, but watching it? [shudder]