EPISODE 42

I used to listen to National Public Radio a lot, particularly when I drove around in my car.  I was really into collecting bootleg recordings of the Grateful Dead at the time and so my car was littered with tapes and cassette cases.  Nothing sounds quite as anguished as the crunch of plastic cassette as you inadvertently step on it.  As I managed to dispatch many of my beloved tapes under the boot, so to speak, I was often unable to locate the tunes I wanted to hear and was forced to flip on the radio instead.  Luckily, the National Public Radio affiliate in the Upper Connecticut River Valley carried a great line-up of talk and news shows in the afternoon and I found myself slowly becoming addicted to them.

My favorite program was Fresh Air.  This show was produced out of Philadelphia, a point that was proudly proclaimed at the beginning of each broadcast by the show's host, Terry Gross.  While a few of my friends could be somewhat derisive about Ms. Gross, I really enjoyed her stuff.  One of my pals loved to imitate what he perceived to be Gross' standard line of questioning:

"So tell me, when did you first realize that you were a gay lion tamer?"

Sure, Terry could bring in some pretty off the wall guests, but she always made up for it with the others.  I recall being glued to an incredible interview with actor Peter O'Toole when he revealed that during the shooting of his first film, Lawrence of Arabia, he and the other actors forced to ride camels had developed patterns of sores and blisters on their nether regions that O’Toole felt defied even the most carefully considered description, for fear that it might be bleeped out of the broadcast.  He said that obtained a piece of foam rubber, which he wedged between his butt and the incredibly uncomfortable saddle that had been provided for him.  He discovered that it almost completely eliminated the chafing that he had been suffering and so he continued on the back of his beast in great style.  Other actors working on the set were curious as to why this rookie movie actor was able to outlast them on the set everyday.  Accordingly, one of the extras in the production took a peek at how O'Toole had been sitting in his saddle and caught a glimpse of the piece of foam rubber.  As word spread of the young actor's ingenuity, the relative size of O'Toole's piece of foam began to shrink.  After only a short time, O'Toole discovered that his prize had been whittled down considerably and that his fellow actors all seemed to ride a bit taller each day.  Eventually each of them ordered and received their own foam perches.  By the end of filming, the popularity of the innovation had spread to the Bedouin themselves, who adopted the practice of rigging their own saddles with foam rubber.  They dubbed O'Toole "The Father of the Sponge", an honorary title that must have amused the hell out of him.

I love little stories like that and so I made a point of listening to Fresh Air whenever I was driving around during the late afternoon.  On one particularly beautiful mid-summer day, I made the long haul from Burlington, having just finished an overnight trip to New York on Bosco's behalf.  My flight landed a little after 3 o'clock and I tuned in my radio to 107.9FM to pick up the show.  At the end of the broadcast, Terry had a guest on who she claimed was the one true expert on the World Wide Web.  Her first and only question to him was to name the 5 best sites on the Internet.

She had my attention.

After giving a fairly entertaining description of the Vatican's Web site, the guy brought up a remarkable little site called firefly.com.  The premise behind it was that you would log in and then be presented with several portals to areas that dealt with various genres of music.  Once you had selected your genre, you were given choices of reviewing individual artists, specific recording by those artists or their various works as performed by other musicians.

"It's incredibly cool!" he exclaimed.  "I'm a huge fan of Bartok's compositions, so I looked for recordings of my favorite compositions.  The site presented me with a list and then it asked me to rate each of them on a 1-7 scale, with 7 being the highest.  It's so cool!  It's fun too!  If you don't know the specific recording they've shown you, or if you're unfamiliar with the orchestra or chamber group, you indicate that you'd like to see a list of artists that either influenced them or whom they have influenced.  In doing so, you learn a ton about the music!

"But the best part is after you've made somewhere around 25 ratings, the site asks you if you'd like some recommendations for music that you might not know about.  It's completely interactive!  They know what you enjoy listening to, based on the selections and ratings you've already provided, so they give a few ideas of what to look for when you go out buying stuff for yourself."

The segment on firefly.com was very short, but in just 10 minutes I had finally learned what Bosco had been talking about.  There was a world of information being exchanged on the Web and if we could figure out how to gather it and resell it, we could make a hell of a lot of money.  I was very excited by the time I got back to the office in White River Junction, but I also had a pile of new questions to ask.  Bosco was pleased that I'd had my little breakthrough, but I was concerned when he gave me no clue of how we were going to harvest the data, or even what kind of data we were looking for, let alone how we would sell it, or to who. 

"Michael, I've been waiting for you to tell me that," he told me as he clicked the mouse on his desk and moved from site to site.  He was only vaguely aware of the images and text that popped up on his screen and when I told him to enter firefly.com into his browser, he seemed even less engaged.

"Maybe," he continued, "it might be a good idea to find out who these guys are at firefly."

"I'm on it!" I replied.

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on June 23rd.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.