A long time ago, in the SDMB, I used to find many items in Google to answer questions, Google was God.
But, there were items that did escape my biggest efforts, nothing more mundane like in the occasion a poster reported it could not find a sound clip from the classic Altered Beast video game.
You know, the one that had Zeus with an Elmer fudd voice saying: “waise fwom youw gwave” No matter what I did in Google, it never appeared. But, recently I remembered that futile search and behold:
3 years later I found it!
Lets see your epic tales of futile Google quests, or the successful ones that needed time. Who knows, maybe the object of your futile search will appear here!
I’d been trying to figure out what songs the band Stone Temple Pilots played during their (sole?) Saturday Night Live appearance - specifically, which was the one sung through a small bullhorn/megaphone. I’ve tried a few times but no joy.
According to this episode guide it’s either “Creep” or “Naked Sunday”. See if you can find either of those on Amazon as 30-second clips and see if either sounds familiar.
Many moons ago before I was hooked up to the net (1988), I was exposed to a piece of poetry called “Five Denials on Merlin’s Grave.” Spoken / sung by Robin Williamson. I have been searching every day since then for a transcript of it, but to no avail.
Probably because it’s almost fourteen minutes of spoken word!
You can get it in book form, but it’s out of print and hard to find.
Title: Five denials on Merlin’s grave :
a poem with annotations /
Author(s): Williamson, Robin, 1943-
Publication: Los Angeles : Pig’s Whisker Music,
Year: 1979
Description: 31, [4] p. : ill. ; 28 cm.
Language: English
Standard No: ISBN: 096028740X LCCN: 79-65468
You can try to get it through interlibrary loan, there are seven libraries in the US that have the book. The OCLC accession number is 5707901.
I Googled around trying to find what knots the Mounties used on their lanyards. No luck. I did find the Official Mountie Website and asked them. A nice lady who works there looked at some old pictures of Mounties with lanyrds and told me “some kind of Turk’s Head”. I have my doubts.
What are all the Armies of the World that issued their soldiers field stoves? Google doesn’t know. Although if you go country by country, someone will try to sell you one if it exists. But that took too long and I gave up.
It took a long time for me to find those canvas safari tents you see in movies. I finally found them. If I knew just what I was looking for was called to start with, the search would have been simple and quick.
On Sunday I was thinking about old “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” episodes from the Jack Palance era ('82-'86), when I watched as a kid. One story that particularly interested me then (and now too, obviously) was a story about a girl who died and her parents built her a playhouse as a gravestone of sorts. I searched for information on this for two days, and haven’t found anything. I’ve come to the conclusion that this story must have been one of the “or nots.”
I have a copy of this, it is very hard to find. If you need help with a particular segment, I could try to help you out, once I find it. A lot of my books are in boxes right now, and this is one of them. I’m sorry, I’m not willing to sell it ('twas a gift).
Because it is copyrighted material, I do not believe that you will find it online.
AAH! I had a flashback to a futile search: For an anthropology class, I wanted to find references to an African tribe that had a very curious mutation: their feet had only 2 toes (imagine making the live long and prosper Vulcan sign with your hand, hide the thumb and you will get an idea how their feet looked).
25 years ago, I did see a report on the tribe in a Latin American magazine, then forgot about it and remember it when it was shown with film footage in “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” from the Jack Palance era, so 6 years ago, I thought I could find a reference for it on the web… Bupkis.
The answer to this question has been my most difficult google search to date. I am still looking and if I don’t find something soon, I won’t have to worry about using google because my computer is going out the damn window. Or into the river. Or off a cliff.
One time years ago I somehow stumbled upon an MP3.com page for an artist dubbed “E-System”. I think it was under Blues/Games. E-System had three songs: “Connection Disconnection”, “Lightyear Never Ends”, and “Rain Fever”. All three were very good chiptune songs. Chiptune songs are songs made using old videogame-style synth instruments. Anyway, I downloaded all three and enjoyed them. Unfortunately somewhere along the line I lost Rain Fever, which was the best of the three. I’ve done a number of google searches and filesharing device searches, but to no avail.
I think we should start campaigning for those episodes to come out on DVD. I’d buy the set for sure. It was my favorite show at the time. Sunday night, a big bowl of popcorn … ahh, the memories!
Nothing was as cool as seeing Jack Palance drinking the snake blood cocktail!!
[sub]- (after drinking, he looked at the camera (with a face that was screaming "I don’t believe I just did that!) then he said:[/sub] “Believe it or Not!”
Similar to the Believe It Or Not stories; I saw something about a lost treasure on Unsolved Mysteries. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but later I got curious. I couldn’t find anything about the program or anything that seemed related to the details I remembered. I searched for quite some time using a lot of different terms and found a whole lot of info about a whole lot of lost treasures, but not the one they were talking about. I don’t know–maybe they made the whole thing up.
I also tried to find a photo I saw when I was a kid and found out that a lot of other people were trying to find the same photo! In fact, I’ve been meaning to start a thread about it.
