Smith Journal – Volume Fourteen

He still has a couple of platinum records from the old days, but no one could say he’s living off past glories; his indestructible threads continue to make rock stars around the world fall to their knees. Ken Warby’s got a couple of specky accolades, too. Back in the mid-‘70s, he set the world water speed record using a boat that he built in his backyard. Almost forty years on, he and his son are trying to make something that will go even faster. Foley artist John Simpson’s set of gongs takes up a whole shelf. He’s recorded sound effects for everyone from Peter Jackson to Steven Spielberg. That said, his studio doesn’t exactly scream Hollywood; it sits in the middle of a remote paddock four hours north of Adelaide. As far as unusual workplaces go, though, Simpson’s building doesn’t have anything on the one used by Dennis Wingo. He and a team of ‘technoarcheologists’ operate out of an old burger joint on the edge of a NASA research centre. Their mission: preserving the history of humanity’s adventures in space. If all that wasn’t enough, the mag also includes stuff about the U.S.S.R.’s only advertising agency, an Arizonan entomologist who’s been stung by nearly every creepy crawly under the sun and the secret mission to send Winston Churchill a platypus during World War II.