Budweiser
Budweiser Budvar
Carling
Corona Extra
Efes
John Smith’s Original Bitter
Kaliber
Lynx Premium
Miller Genuine Draft
Newcastle Brown Ale
Skol

If you like the taste of that, you can get The Non-Beardy Beer Book here.

William P Suitor was an original test pilot for the Bell Rocketbelt, and also flew the Tyler Rocketbelt and the Rocketbelt 2000. He has clocked up more rocketbelt airtime than anyone else, and flew two of the most famous rocketbelt flights of all time – as one of the stunt pilots on the James Bond movie Thunderball, and in front of a worldwide audience of billions at the LA Olympics opening ceremony in 1984.

He was the test pilot on the RB-2000, but thankfully got out before the project spiralled towards its murderous conclusion. Bill supplied a lot of information for my book, and you can read more about his involvement in the caper here.

Sadly, Bill’s book doesn’t feature the foreword he wanted from the first Bell rocketbelt pilot Hal Graham. As previously posted, Hal died in October, aged 75. According to the Nashville Scene, Hal replied to Bill’s request with a message saying, “I probably won’t be around after tomorrow. Catch it in the papers.” The following afternoon, Hal drove to the local headquarters of the Federal Aviation Authority, which had revoked his pilot’s license two weeks earlier. Hal entered the building, saying nothing, took out a handgun, and shot himself in the head. You can read more about the tragic end to a high-flying life in the article Hero pilot Hal Graham’s hard fall to earth by Brantley Hargrove.

Bill Suitor’s tale has a happier ending, and he is currently attending book signings to talk about his remarkable rocketbelt career. You can get his Rocketbelt Pilot’s Manual here.

In music, the big news of 2009 was the UK launch of Spotify, the streaming music service that has already changed the way millions of us listen to music, just as the iPod did at the beginning of the decade. Most of the music picks below are linked to Spotify for your listening pleasure. (The other links point to Amazon.co.uk.)

In terms of actual music, 2009 wasn’t a vintage year. There were enjoyable albums by A Camp, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Noah and the Whale, but the only couple I really had on repeat play were Sigh No More by Mumford and Sons and the odd but fantastic indie-prog opera that was The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists.

Great movies were equally difficult to find in 2009. I wasn’t as blown away as the Oscar voters by Slumdog “Milliner”. Much better were Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, The Hangover, Swedish kiddie-vampire flick Let The Right One In, and JJ Abrams’ surprisingly entertaining re-imagining of Star Trek.

No 2009 movie was as good as the best of 2009’s TV. Season two of Mad Men was a joy, with Don Draper developing into one of TV’s most intriguing characters. The Thick of It was the best British offering, with Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker spinning fantastically out of control. And any Seinfeld fan will have loved the reunion storyline that ran through the hilarious final(?) season of Curb Your Enthusiam.

Books? Maybe it was weariness in my first year away from book publishing, but I’m not sure I found a single 5-star book in 2009.

But what about the noughties as a whole? It was a great decade for music, and I’m struggling to whittle my selection of faves down to less than ten. So I’m going for Gold by Ryan Adams, Josh Rouse’s Nashville, The Trials of Van Occupanther by Midlake, Glory Hope Mountain by The Acorn, O by Damien Rice, Come On Feel The Illinoise by Sufjan Stevens, The Crane Wife by The Decemberists, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco, Funeral by Arcade Fire, and Give Up by The Postal Service. (Annoyingly, my two top picks aren’t available on Spotify, so the service is by no means perfect.)

The best movies of the noughties? They’ve got to include The Lives of Others, The Royal Tennenbaums, Donnie Darko, and Daniel Day Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s incredible There Will Be Blood.

The noughties was quite possibly the decade in which TV came of age, thanks in no small part to HBO. The Sopranos ran through until 2007, and the intelligent, multi-layered mob drama, with every episode better than most movies, probably deserves to be called the greatest TV show ever made. Perhaps only David Simon’s intricate, addictive onscreen novel The Wire can challenge for that accolade. HBO also brought us Curb Your Enthusiam, Six Feet Under, Deadwood and Band of Brothers, all brilliant in different ways. Elsewhere in US TV, the reimagining of Battlestar Galactica was approximately one zillion times better than any reimagining of a really quite rubbish 70s sci-fi soap had any right to be. From US network TV, Arrested Development was a brilliant and much-missed sitcom, and The Shield was a brutally gripping cop drama that literally pulled no punches.

As for books, my favourites of the decade include Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Damned United by David Peace, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers meddled brilliantly with the formula of how books are supposed to be written. And The Road by Cormac McCarthy was quite possibly the best book I’ve ever read.

So that was the noughties. What will the next decade bring? Will the album format survive? Will the CD become obsolete? Will Voddler do for movies what Spotify did for music? Will electronic books take off?

As for that catchy name for the years 2010 to 2019, anyone for “tennies”?

Harold ‘Hal’ Graham was a 27-year-old science graduate from Buffalo who had been working for the Bell Aircraft Company as a test engineer for just over a year when he was selected to be the first man to pilot the rocketbelt – the iconic flying jetpack created by engineer Wendell Moore.

It would be Graham’s first taste of flying. He was not a registered pilot, and the only machine he had previous experience of driving was a car. He was, however, a rocketbelt fan, having grown up with Buck Rogers comics and Commando Cody serials. When Bell began to ask around for a volunteer to fly the rocketbelt he had no hesitation in applying for the job.

Graham’s first tethered flight took place in March 1961. These flights took place in a large aircraft hangar. The rocketbelt was suspended from the ceiling, and small amounts of thrust were used to generate moderate lift. 36 tethered flights later, it was time for the safety ropes to come off.

The very first untethered rocketbelt flight took place at seven in the morning on 20 April 1961. A 20-man Bell crew gathered at an empty clearing near the Bell plant on Buffalo’s Niagara Falls Boulevard and opposite the Niagara Falls Municipal Airport, which had been specially closed for 30 minutes. The crew ran through a detailed checklist in preparation for the flight.

Then Graham, wearing a black rubber suit, white helmet, work boots, and goggles, released the throttle in a short burst to check the propulsion. All seemed fine. Again he released the throttle, this time successfully lifting the belt around 18 inches from the ground in a thick cloud of steam, and piloted it in a straight line at a speed of around ten miles per hour.

The noise was incredible – an explosive roar of gas as loud as a pneumatic drill. And visibility was poor – almost zero according to Graham – due to condensation created by the rocket exhaust.

On the first free rocketbelt flight Hal Graham flew for 13 seconds and covered a distance of 112 feet – eight feet less than the Wright Brothers had covered in their inaugural flight. It was nevertheless a thoroughly triumphant debut.

Following the success of the test flight, Bell executives were keen to unveil the remarkable device to the public. After 28 test flights, Wendell Moore was satisfied enough to agree to a public demonstration.

The first public rocketbelt flight took place at Fort Eustis, Virginia, on 8 June 1961 at a demonstration of new technologies. Light bulbs flashed and film reels rolled as Graham piloted the rocketbelt into the air, legs swinging below him. Against a backdrop of Air Force planes, Graham maneuvered the rocketbelt over a truck, and higher into the sky. He flew to around 15 feet, and then descended, bouncing slightly as he landed on his feet. Graham then offered a salute.

After removing his fire suit, Graham was mobbed by the press. Microphones were thrust into his face, and pencils jotted down every word he said. Bell officials handed out press releases which began, ‘Harold M Graham is believed to be the first man to fly with back-carried rocket equipment.’

The story made the front pages across the US. The New York Times headline read, ‘Portable army rocket propels man 150 feet in 11-second test flight.’ Life magazine said, ‘Graham was strapped to a hydrogen peroxide-fuelled rocket. The Army hopes it will someday make all foot soldiers look like Buck Rogers.’

One week later, Graham demonstrated the rocketbelt on the front lawn of the Pentagon in Washington DC in front of a huge crowd of military personnel.

Then, in October 1961, Graham, Moore and the Bell crew travelled to Fort Bragg in North Carolina to participate in another military demonstration, this time as part of a display of combat readiness. The demonstration was performed in front of a notable guest of honor – President John F Kennedy.

Graham, wearing a US Army uniform, took off from an amphibious landing vehicle, flew across a pond in a spray of water, and landed 14 seconds later on a sand embankment in front of JFK. Graham remembered to salute but forgot to depressurize the belt in the excitement of the moment, although he managed to remain on the ground. ‘Mr Kennedy was described by an Army Officer sitting near him as “wide eyed and open mouthed, just like a kid”,’ reported the Buffalo Evening News.

The public interest and publicity surrounding Graham and the rocketbelt generated much correspondence. Letters requesting public appearances began to flood the Bell offices. One man wrote to Bell requesting the use of the rocketbelt in order to claim a $1 million treasure trove that, he claimed, he could only reach with the use of the belt. Suspicious Bell executives turned the request down.

Although Hal Graham could now proficiently fly the rocketbelt, he was still not a registered airplane pilot. In November 1961 he decided to do something about that. He began to take flying lessons, and qualified for his pilot’s license in July 1962. That year also saw the debut of the B-Series rocketbelt. The new belt was engineered to reduce weight, and, as rocketbelt pilot, Graham was kitted out in a brand new bright yellow flight suit.

But Hal Graham’s short career as a rocketbelt pilot was coming to an end. During an ill-fated demonstration at Cape Canaveral, Graham fell 22 feet, landed on his head, and was knocked unconscious. He survived the crash, but decided to get out of the rocketbelt business. Graham made 83 untethered rocketbelt flights during his time at Bell, but he left the company in 1962 to pursue his new love of flying traditional aircraft. He set up his own one-man, one-plane charter flight company in Crossville, Tennessee.

Hal Graham died in Nashville on 22 October 2009, aged 75.

Watch Hal Graham fly the rocketbelt (YouTube)
Visit Hal Graham’s rocketbelt website

The Rocketbelt Caper was selected as one of ShortList magazine’s 25 greatest summer reads for men, alongside books by Antony Beevor, Irvine Welsh, Chuck Palahniuk and Malcolm Gladwell. “What happens when you mix three men, a crushing ambition to build a Buck Rogers-style jet pack, murder and a $10 million lawsuit?” asks the mag. “The sound of Hollywood falling over itself to snap up the film rights to this bizarre story.” If only…

Russ Routledge got to see his friend Muhammad Ali on the Champ’s final visit to the UK. He showed Ali his photos, and handed out copies of my Ali feature, but was saddened by his hero’s declining health. My account of Russ’s friendship with Ali is here.

Spotify is now available on the iPhone (and Android, and soon on S60). As expected, it features an offline mode that allows users to store 3,333 tracks on your phone. The iPhone app has just been updated, and Spotify have also added an offline mode to the PC version. You’ll need to be a premium user, but £9.99 a month for virtually unlimited music seems a small price to pay.

Lots more content has been added to the TV Ad Music website, including this interview with Slow Moving Millie, who provides the music to the Virgin Media backlot advert, and an explanation of why the track on the Land Rover advert is NOT by Noah and the Whale. See the latest ads here.

I’ve yet to receive my free copy of Free, the book by Chris Anderson. Almost 3 months on it doesn’t look like I’ll be reviewing it any time soon on these pages.

In related news, the Rocketbelt Caper free ebook download offer will be ending in the near future, and if you haven’t yet downloaded it for free you can do so here.

So, for example, a piece of software or a game will be given away free, with the belief that a percentage of the people who use it will end up paying for a related service or a premium version, such as support for the software, or extra game levels.

The book began as a Wired cover story, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, which provides a neat introduction to Anderson’s theory.

The hardback is out now, priced £18.99 (currently discounted to £9.41 on Amazon). But as you might expect, Anderson is also making his book available for free.

The ebook can be read – although not downloaded – at Scribd.com. An abridged 3-hour audio book is available on Spotify. Free is the first audio book to appear on Spotify. The 6-hour unabridged version can be downloaded free from Audible.

Anderson promises that the book will be rolled out in other free formats over the next few weeks, via iTunes, Kindle, Google Books and more. Check his blog for more details.

Most interestingly, Anderson and his UK publisher Random House are giving away an abridged paperback edition, which Anderson says is “the entire book minus, if memory serves, the appendixes”, courtesy of a sponsorship with Adobe and via the Brand Republic website. The paperback giveaway will begin at the end of this week.

I’d like to say I trumped Anderson by making my book The Rocketbelt Caper free in both ebook and paperback editions a couple of weeks ago. (See this write-up at TeleRead.) But Anderson was an inspiration for the free promotion, and his distribution model has the potential to really shake up the book industry.

Earlier this year I attended the London Book Fair and saw publishers attempting to embrace ebooks, but determined to charge paperback prices for electronic editions. This will not work for one simple reason: physical books are better than ebooks.

“If you believe that the physical book is the superior form, then you have to believe that people who love the sample will buy the physical book,” Anderson said at a keynote speech at SXSW in Austin earlier this year. And making the full version of Free available on Scribd.com is essentially offering a sample, as few readers will want to read the whole thing via Scribd’s online reader.

Making a paperback edition free courtesy of sponsorship is a really interesting idea. When I worked in publishing we briefly attempted something similar, but the project didn’t get off the ground, mainly because sponsors and advertisers just didn’t get the concept. But it’s essentially the same concept that allows newspapers and magazines to be distributed free. And free newspapers and magazines have seriously damaged their paid-for equivalents, so the book industry needs to take a careful look at what Anderson and Random House are doing here.

It would be fascinating to know how much Adobe has paid to sponsor the project, and how the figures stack up for Random House, who will apparently spend £30,000 promoting the “giveaway”.

So I’m looking forward to reading and listening to Free – for free. And if it’s any good I’ll most probably buy it). A victory for “freenomics”.

It would be remiss of me to end without saying that The Rocketbelt Caper is available as a free ebook for the long term, and a free paperback for a limited period, right here.

The book tells the true story of three men who set out to build a real-life Buck Rogers-style flying machine called the Rocketbelt 2000. But their obsession with the rocketbelt shattered their friendship and set in motion an astonishing chain of events involving theft, deception, a bizarre kidnapping, a ten million dollar lawsuit and a horrifically brutal murder.

The eBook is released under a Creative Commons license.

It’s available in a range of DRM-free formats, including ePub, Mobipocket, and custom PDF, and is compatible with Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone or iPod Touch, iRex iLiad, Smartphone, PDA, Adobe Reader and more. And, of course, you can read it on your PC screen.

The eBook is hosted by and can be downloaded from Feedbooks, and you can also get format advice and help from that website.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch you can access the eBook via the Stanza app – just select Online Catalog and access ‘Feedbooks – Free Content’.

Why is it free? In a nutshell, because I want it to be read by as many people as possible. Please download it, read it and – hopefully – enjoy it. If you do enjoy it, you might like to tell your friends, or buy one of the lovely paperback editions, and if you think the eBook is worth paying for, you might even like to make a donation here. Thank you very much in advance. If you don’t enjoy it, well I’m sorry about that, but – hey – at least it was free.

Read more about The Rocketbelt Caper here.

The ePub edition can be read on the Sony Reader, on an iPhone with the free Stanza app, and on a PC with free Adobe Digital Editions. It’s reflowable and DRM-free. The PDF edition can be read with the free Adobe Reader.

The US paperback edition of The Rocketbelt Caper will be released on 29 June. Get more details here.

UPDATE: The ebook is now available – FREE – in most popular formats here.

Mobipocket format ebooks can be read on a Windows PC, Windows Mobile, Palm Os, Symbian phone, Blackberry, Pocket-PC, Cybook, iRex, Iliad, and more.

I’m currently working on making the book available in ePub format, compatible with the Sony Reader, and also intend to make the book available on Amazon’s Kindle. I wrote about ebook formats in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago. As I own the digital publishing rights to the book, I’m attempting to blaze something of a solo trail through the world of ebooks, shoehorning my experience of running a publishing company / typesetting books etc into a digital context. I’ll post updates, and possibly some how-to guides, over the next few weeks.

The US edition of The Rocketbelt Caper, released in paperback on 29 June, has a new cover, and very slightly abridged/updated text, and it doesn’t have photos. If you want the colour photos and Frank Dickman’s Building A Rocketbelt essay then you’ll need to get the UK paperback.

UPDATE: The ebook is now available – FREE – in most popular formats here.