If you’re in the US, the book is available from the US Kindle store. You can read more about the Rocketbelt Caper Kindle edition here.

And if you don’t have a Kindle, Amazon have launched an all-new slimmer and lighter version, which is available with Wi-Fi for £109 and with free 3G wireless and Wi-Fi for £149. Click on the banner below to take a look. Or you might just prefer to buy the paperback…

I should emphasise from the start that I had no involvement or contact with anyone involved in the production of Pretty Bird, so I when I say it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen I’m doing so from a (thankfully) detached position.

Pretty Bird is pretty bad. Perhaps not M Night Shyamalan bad, but still pretty woeful. But my overriding feeling after watching it was one of bafflement. Pretty Bird is just so odd, so half-hearted, so dull that it’s hard to figure out what exactly it’s trying to achieve.

The meandering first hour sees quirky entrepreneur Curt (Billy Crudup) recruit rocket propulsion expert and super-grouch Rick (Paul Giamatti and moustache) and chequebook-happy bed salesman Kenny (David Hornsby) for an unspecified scheme that is eventually revealed to involve building a rocketbelt.

What’s so special about this rocketbelt, the device around which the whole movie and any conflict within it hinges? Why are these guys so driven to build it, to fly it, to fight over it? We never find out. They build the thing without much effort, Curt and Rick fall out over nothing much, Kenny’s money runs out, and the rocketbelt disappears. And that’s pretty much it. It’s all deeply unsatisfying.

Although the leads do perfectly fine jobs, they’ve got very little to work with. The script is bland, the characters are underdeveloped, and the little conflict that exists is introduced too late. It’s pitched as a comedy, but there’s nothing remotely funny in it. It’s a really difficult movie to care about.

I was left wondering whether production problems played any part in Pretty Bird’s downfall. The best scene, Curt’s (very short) meeting with a potential investor played by Garret Dillahunt, almost seems like it’s been cut and pasted from another movie. And Curt’s romantic fling with one of Kenny’s employees, played by Kristen Wiig, shapes up interestingly, only for both the subplot and Wiig to be immediately forgotten about.

The movie labels itself as a work of fiction inspired by real events, and certainly the characters of Curt, Rick and Kenny are based on the real-life Brad, Larry and Joe. And there’s a rocketbelt in it. But comparisons with the true story pretty much end there.

I’ve no problem with the film makers playing loose with the facts. The real rocketbelt caper story is too complicated, too sprawling, maybe even too far-fetched, to be transferred to the screen without a thorough condensation of characters and events. But if you’re going to leave things out, you don’t leave out the most interesting bits, surely?

Pretty Bird makes dull work of unique and fascinating true story. It feels like a huge opportunity missed, and that’s a shame. I’m certain there’s a still great rocketbelt caper movie out there. It’s just that no one has made it yet.

Read more about The Rocketbelt Caper.

Anyway, it’s up now, so Kindle people can go and do their Whispernet thing. The price will vary according to which country you’re in, and to be honest I can’t work it out, so just go take a look.

If you don’t have a Kindle, you can get a non-Kindle ebook here. And, of course, if you’re still living in 2008 or something you can get a version of the book made of cellulose pulp, derived mainly from wood, rags and certain grasses, processed into flexible sheets or rolls by deposit from an aqueous suspension. That’s a paperback to you and me.

The Rocketbelt Caper is the non-bestselling true story of three men who build a jetpack, fall out, hit each other over the head with baseball bats, and other unspeakable things. It is most definitely NOT the source material for straight-to-video rocketbelt caper movie Pretty Bird.

[UPDATE 21/05/10] Having investigated further, the Kindle version costs $2.99 in the US – the lowest price it was possible for me to list an ebook on the service. Amazon keep 65% of that, and then pay me the remainder via a US dollar cheque, on which I have to pay a fee to cash into my UK bank account. So I’m not making any money on this. I’m simply making the book available on Kindle to get it in front of as many readers as possible.

However, in the UK, Amazon hikes the price to $5.86 – almost twice the price paid by US readers. The official reason given by Amazon for this is ‘taxes and operating costs’. Hmm. UK VAT might account for an extra 17.5%, but is there really an extra operating cost associated with sending an item that does not physically exist across the Atlantic? A rum deal, but if you don’t want to pay Amazon’s premium feel free to buy direct from this website instead.

[ANOTHER UPDATE 25/06/10] The UK price has now been reduced to $3.51 for no fathomable reason, but is now only $0.52 more than the US price.

The movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2008, but has sat on a shelf ever since. It stars Paul Giamatti, Billy Crudup and David Hornsby, and was directed by Paul Schneider. The story is credited to Zene Baker…

The original Wikipedia entry for the movie stated that it was based on The Rocketbelt Caper. However, as the revision history shows, a user named Econbowery has ‘removed erroneous information (that this movie is based on a book)’. Econbowery’s only user contributions to Wikipedia have been to edit the Pretty Bird listing.

The Rocketbelt Caper tells the true story of three men (Brad Barker, Larry Stanley and Joe Wright) who set out to build a rocketbelt, nicknamed Pretty Bird, only for their friendship to fall apart in bizarre and dramatic circumstances.

By contrast, Pretty Bird tells the fictional story of three men (Kurt, Rick and Kenny) who set out to build a rocketbelt, nicknamed Pretty Bird, only for their friendship to fall apart in bizarre and dramatic circumstances.

The movie had mixed reviews after the premiere and failed to find a distributor, hence its straight-to-DVD release. See some reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. This review mentions The Rocketbelt Caper.

For the record, I have had no involvement or contact with anyone involved in the production of Pretty Bird. The movie option for The Rocketbelt Caper was purchased by another production company, but that option expired without a film going into production. (Interestingly, Pretty Bird is being released by Paramount – the same company that held the Rocketbelt Caper option.) I have not yet seen Pretty Bird, and so have no reason to believe it takes any details from the book that are not otherwise available in the public domain. I am looking forward to seeing it.

The Amazon product description says: ‘Based on a true stoy, this comic tale of three would-be entrepreneurs set out to invent a rocket belt. The venturesome partnership soon takes an unhealthy toll as their mismatched personalities clash and some unexpected success lead to retaliations and kidnapping in this parable of American dreams and delusions.’

The DVD is released on 29 June 2010 and can be pre-ordered from Amazon.com.

The Rocketbelt Caper is available in paperback and as a download here. It should also be available on Kindle soon.

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.