h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm definitely pro-Kermit. I figured that poor, dear frogs were probably suffering so that their DNA could help those silly ersatz dinos be brought into our alien world .

But seriously...wait, I think I have momentarily forgotten how to be serious. Sorry. I will call back when I'm in the right mood.

Which way to the rainbow connection?

I was worried that you would think my comments were silly. Which they were, of course. But this gets into the matter of considering your readers. Some, like me, would be thrilled by vistas of beautiful, sleek frogs. Sure, those dinosaurs were fascinating, but how did they end up so perfect with all that the gene-splicers were up against? Shouldn't the dinosaurs have looked more like the frogs? Just sayin'. Stretches the suspension of disbelief quite a bit.

I agree. The frog DNA was definitely the more interesting idea - and, of course, the punchline, at least in the novel. I've only 'seen' one of the films. I put that in quotation marks because actually, I fell asleep halfway through.

It was in a cinema, it was a matinee, and the film was in Sensurround, which meant the place was vibrating. But the dinosaurs were so boring.

Read the book, people.

In Hollywoodland, there are no ugly dinosaurs or disappointing music rehearsals or disastrous experiments (unless the "villain" is involved).

Of course, a film with the title "Ugly Dinosaurs" would not get made, let alone distributed to theaters.

Sometimes both the book and the resulting movie are hard to fathom. "Inherent Vice" was such a confusing book that I bought the DVD to see if it made more sense as a film. Nope.

The filmmaker apparently couldn't disentangle the story either?

I've read other Thomas Pynchon books with roughly equal results. critics seem to love Pynchon. They routinely list his latest title among the best books of whatever year it comes out. So I routinely borrow them from my library and read them. Some day I may go back and retrospective read "Gravity's Rainbow," which was about 800 pages. Each succeeding Pynchon books was consistently shorter, until "Inherent vice" was only half that.

Jon Foster Wallace's "Infinite jest" is more than 1,000 pages, and I just cannot get very far into it. Those critics who worship it have a lot to answer for . At least Pyncohn is mellowing into something more tolerable, if still hard to decode.

I think I'm rambling. I'd better stop.

The Pynchon book I like is 'The Crying of Lot 49'.

I've heard good things about that. It is among the many that I hope to read someday. But I have a pile of 13 books that I'm currently reading now. Correction, 12 books, as I finished one of them tonight.

I'm also reading four books that I will be giving to relatives as Christmas gifts. Gotta be sure that they're getting nothing but the best.

That's good reasoning.