? and the Mysterions...

Hi All,

Are both groups up and running still? Just in case fab-ufo does another
dirty on us, I'm posting this to both lists. Sorry if some of you get this
email twice...

In a fit of nostalgia (trying to recover my lost youth perhaps?? :-) I was
looking at what music was playing in the late 60ies and early 70ies and
came upon something a bit puzzling. Alternatively: a coincidence.
On the site
http://www.sixtiespop.freeserve.co.uk/1966.htm
is a single listed as
"? and the Mysterions" = artist name; the song title (or name of the
single) is listed as "96 Tears"
I don't have a clue whether the "? and the Mysterions" was a name of a
group or whether the "?" in the name means the author of the webpage wasn't
sure of the name... Could "?" stand for Captain Scarlet?... in which case
the Mysterions should be the Mysterons, I believe. Only that show is listed
as being made in 1967, not 66, so there may be no relation between this pop
group and the Gerry Anderson series at all.

And another single, also on that page (therefore also 1966... unless I'm
mistaken, the Thunderbirds GA series was 68):
Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds - Out of Time
So how is that for a coincidence huh?

I tried finding a top 40 or whatever (top 10, top 20) for the music of that
year, but couldn't find one - so far. The earliest hitparade list I could
find was one of 1971, the German top 20. If someone knows of a site going
further back, let me know and I'll go look.

BTW, on
http://classictv.about.com/tvradio/classictv/
there are listings for old TV shows and links to episode guides of said
shows. Glad to see that UFO is represented - there is a link to Marc's site.

BTW 2 - I just saw a movie, American-made (or at least the actors were
Americans) where someone was smoking in space (or rather a vehicle moving
about in space), so don't blame Commander Straker for doing so on Moonbase.
(Movie was "Trapped in Space", aired by the BBC, who after dropping Star
Trek TOS from their programming are still showing sci-fi, such as the X-Files)
This seems to belie our one-time conversations about smoking on UFO being a
British thing and terribly out of fashion and a do-not in the States
nowadays, the movie was made in 1995.

CU

Lieve (whose theory is that smoking is healthy, since smoked meat preserves
longer :-)

P.S. Our government's no-smoking campaign is VERY effective indeed.
Statistics show that more people smoke now than a few years ago!
Col. Lieve Peten, Commander MarsBase - Mailto:[hidden email]

"That's what life is all about, I guess - The things we never say."
Cmdr. Ed Straker, UFO Series, Subsmash episode.

SHADO/UFO pages : http://shado.simplenet.com/aspects
MarsBase/UFO: http://shado.iwarp.com

Lieve <[hidden email]> werote:-
Coincidence. The "?" needn't have stood for anything except itself. People put
all sorts of weird gimmicks into names of pop music groups. I twice came
across a pop group or something of that sort called "!!?!". I heard of a pop
group called "The The". Etc etc etc.

> And another single, also on that page (therefore also 1966... unless I'm
> mistaken, the Thunderbirds GA series was 68):
> Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds - Out of Time
> So how is that for a coincidence huh?

Not much. The word "thunderbird" has been used for various things down the
years. It started as a mythological bird that some Red Indians believed in.
Palaeontologists have used it for the extinct South American phororachoid
giant flightless predatory birds such as Diatryma and Phororachus: the biggest
looks as if it could have swallowed a birdwatcher whole. I vaguely remember
coming across the name used for a real type of jet fighter.

Lieve wrote

> BTW 2 - I just saw a movie, American-made (or at least the actors were
> Americans) where someone was smoking in space (or rather a vehicle moving
> about in space), so don't blame Commander Straker for doing so on Moonbase.
> (Movie was "Trapped in Space", aired by the BBC, who after dropping Star
> Trek TOS from their programming are still showing sci-fi, such as the X-Files)
> This seems to belie our one-time conversations about smoking on UFO being a
> British thing and terribly out of fashion and a do-not in the States
> nowadays, the movie was made in 1995.

That movie was based on a story by Arthur C. Clarke (yes, Yuchtar
Mr. 2001 <g>). A guy smoking on a ship that has lost it's oxygen
reserves after an asteroid strike, was used to good effect to
illustrate his particular psyche, don't you think? I'd guess Clarke
probably wrote it in the 60's, whilst he was still in good ol' smokey
England. I can't be certain, but I think it was a short story.

PS, just lost a 13GB hard disk which was 75% full of UFO clips
and 3d renderings :(.. Fortunately I only use that drive for
temporary storage (mainly for video capture & as a TV digital video
recorder), but the animated 3d renderings (mainly using Don
Showalters meshes) on it took *hundreds* of hours of processor time
and months to make (each frame is rendered as a 250k TIFF) :-/
Guess what - that's the only drive on my systems that is never
backed-up, as the content changes so much... Phooey!

--
Rob

"Rob Hemmings" <[hidden email]> wrote:-
> PS, just lost a 13GB hard disk which was 75% full of UFO clips
> and 3d renderings :(.. Fortunately I only use that drive for
> temporary storage (mainly for video capture & as a TV digital video
> recorder), but the animated 3d renderings (mainly using Don
> Showalters meshes) on it took *hundreds* of hours of processor time
> and months to make (each frame is rendered as a 250k TIFF) :-/
> Guess what - that's the only drive on my systems that is never
> backed-up, as the content changes so much... Phooey!

My PC at work has 2 hard disks, each 6 Gbytes, and I use one as a backup for
the other.
What software is available that can back-up one disk to another, only
copying new or changed files?
I am sorry to hear about your loss. What was the damage? I have heard of
data recovery firms that are skilled at recovering what they can from damaged
hard disks. What events did the animated renderings show? If they had been
uploaded for public access, then the people that downloaded copies of them
could have sent copies back. Once I helped the SHADO Library to recover copies
of some text stories that it had lost, because I had copies of them.
For anyone making UFO renderings, there is a Poser model of an alien in a
spacesuit on http://www.buckrogers.demon.co.uk/3d/alienga.zip . His head is
the standard Poser 3/4 male head, if you want to apply a head morph target to
give him any particular real man's face.

Anthony wrote:

> My PC at work has 2 hard disks, each 6 Gbytes, and I use one as a backup for
> the other.
> What software is available that can back-up one disk to another, only
> copying new or changed files?

Actually, xcopy can do that using command-line switches. Type
xcopy /?
at a command prompt or in a dos-box to see what switches are
available.

> I am sorry to hear about your loss. What was the damage? I have heard of
> data recovery firms that are skilled at recovering what they can from damaged
> hard disks. What events did the animated renderings show? If they had been
> uploaded for public access, then the people that downloaded copies of them
> could have sent copies back. Once I helped the SHADO Library to recover copies
> of some text stories that it had lost, because I had copies of them.

The animations were, in some cases, CGI versions of UFO 'stock
footage' to be used in future projects, and in other cases were
completely new stuff along the lines of the UFO vs SHADOW mpeg
that's on my site. It's not a complete disaster as the project files
are held on other drives, so the animations will be re-created when
needed or when I'm otherwise occupied (in the garden if/when summer
arrives!) The dead drive is on my home system, so a data-recovery
firm is out of the question (would cost several hundred pounds).
The drive will be replaced under the manufacturers 5 year warranty,
so no cost other than carriage is involved there, at least.

Best,
--
Rob

At 08:26 AM 7/17/00 +0200, you wrote:
Oh, man, I'm scared!!! That song is playing this very minute on DMX!!! 8-0



"Ninety percent of science-fiction is crud. That's because
ninety percent of everything is crud."
Theodore Sturgeon

Dave Walsh
Harlington-Straker Sound Productions
[hidden email]
http://home.earthlink.net/~darqnyt/