Way back when, when I was a little Lachling, my parents and I would go to Otsego County every summer. One of the highlights of the trip for years was a visit to Busch Gardens in Cooperstown, overlooking Otsego Lake. I know we went there; I’ve asked my mom. She remembers it well. There’s absolutely no mention of it anywhere on the internet. Maybe it wasn’t called Busch Gardens, but it was definitely a permanent amusement park on the grounds of the Busch family’s huge estates.
As a freshman in college, I bought a terrific compilation cassette called “Attack of the Killer B’s (Vol. 1).” A couple of people I knew owned it as well. It had the B-sides of singles by groups like The Ramones, Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, Morris Day & The Time … a whole lot of cool stuff. Currently, I can only find this reference; I’d love to buy it again, but no go.
Anyone else have anything that they simply cannot find on the internet?
I’ve had surprisingly-good luck lately. I found Reparata, I found Do Make Say Think, I found the Red Books (The Children’s Hour, a series of anthologies of kids’ stories from the fifties that we had when I was small), and I found my best friend from university.
There’s a small amusement park in Cooperstown called, reasonably, Cooperstown Fun Park. But also the location of Glimmerglass Opera, at the far end of the lake from Cooperstown village, is the Alice Busch Opera Center, on a spacious grounds overlooking the lake. Possible confusion of amusement park with Busch family garden/grounds (converted to Opera Center in 1975, apparently)?
I just spent a few minutes looking again, and still can’t find anything. (This time I didn’t bother finding collector sites and spending far too much time going through their contents.)
Well, maybe it wasn’t an amusement park on the level of the current Busch Gardens out there, but it was more than just a garden, if you know what I mean. You had to drive past the Farmers’ Museum on Highway 80 to get to it, and it was on the left-hand side of the road and the lake was to your right. There was a little train that ran all over it, there were rides, there were concessions (IIRC). It’s just odd – there are whole websites devoted to now-defunct amusement parks, and I can literally find nothing out there. I’ll have to check with my exterior memory cache (Mom) to see what year we stopped going there. It may have been the mid-70’s, sure.
Sunspace, nice catch! I’ve done a lot of searches, but that Amazon page didn’t come up. Now if I can just find the cassette, and NOT for $64 …
I’ve run into a couple of things. Currently I am trying to find information on the research and development of the CAT scan.
I suspect that I was a guinea pig for the use of this machine as one was used on me while my husband was in the military in 1970 but all information tells me that they were not available commercially until 1972. Our town got its first much later than that and when I saw it in the paper I remarked that it wasn’t such a new thing and that I had had a CAT scan long before.
I can find no information on who the first test subjects were or where the research was done.
Another thing I’ve been trying to find information on and I’m sure it’s available but I don’t know how to search for it: A castle in Europe which was rigged with secret waterworks to trick visitors.
The internet has gotten more content over the years, so many of the things I was unable to find earlier have re-appeared.
One thing I’ve never been able to find is anything more than a fleeting reference to The Game Room. This was a novelty shop in Washington DC that in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s put out a hilarious catalog of their products. How we got on their mailing list, I have no idea. The stuff ranged from mild to silly to racy, but it was the product descriptions that were hilarious.
When I first encountered a Spencer’s Gifts, they had precisely the same items in their bins, with precisely the same pictures that were in the Game Room catalog. I don’t know if The Game Room morphed into Spencer’s (which also started as a mail-order place) or was acquired by them. In any event, the style of the Spencer’s stores changed from well-lit to dark and hippy-ish, and through the years they moved towards a younger demographic, with more rock stuff and more racy (and racier) products.
I’ve been looking up bands that play Country and Irish but sung in the Irish language. Although some of these acts have CDs (some of which I’ve since purchased) it is very hard to find out anything about any of them online. I found out more info talking to a guy in a music store in Galway for five minutes than I could find online.
I’ve been searching on and off for a long time for any information on a 1911 Hudson Arms, side-by-side double barrel 12 gauge shotgun, with absolutely no luck.
Heehee. No. Worse than that I think. I remember reading that there was a huge stone table and benches outside where the nobleman would seat his luncheon guests. Then upon a signal from him water would shoot up from the seats and they would have all their finery sopping wet.
There were other hidden water jets scattered around the castle. Not sure which century. Seventeenth or Eighteenth I’m supposing.
This is featured in the James Burke TV series Connections. You can either look for copies of the show on DVD, or check out the companion volume (I’ve got a copy at home). That ought to tell you which castle it is. Or you can search on the internet for episodes of the series, and you might find it that way.
There is a whole era of technology that falls into a gap that predates that WWW, never acquired a fan base to make web pages about it, but doesn’t have old engineers creating web pages about their past glories. That, and old web sites that predated the Internet Archive.
For instance, there was a home theater product called the Frox. It was based on a Sun Sparc 20 (I believe), had a great interface designed by Andy Hertzfeld - it was a brilliant, way ahead of it’s time device. And it apparently never existed. I’d like to make a Wikipedia page about it, but it is very difficult to find information about it, and there are essentially no screenshots.
When my boyfriend started up his camera shop he asked me to paint a sign in the window. I am no artist by any means and had no idea how to paint a sign. I figured it would be online - no, absolutely not. NOTHING. No Instructables, no nothing.
The closest thing I found anywhere were some pictures of a master glass sign painter doing some restoration work, from which I invented a method and painted a seriously kick-ass sign. Unfortunately, I didn’t think about taking pictures of my process and putting it online for others!
And now they’re moving. Sad face. You can’t really take a front window with you.
Only when I’m doing research. If I want to find kittens doing funny crap, it’s everywhere. When I want to find studies about animal testing, I can’t find the original source but there’s 8 million un-citable blog posts with identical information.
A friend of mine from high school was supposedly murdered by his girlfriend in the early 80s, around 1982 or so, in San Francisco. This was several years after we graduated, so I had lost touch with him by that point, and I only found out about his death many years later.
For a long time I’ve been wanting to find some newspaper article that talks about this case, so I can learn what really happened to him. But I’ve never been able to find anything on the Internet (or anywhere else, for that matter).
