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

Thanks LT, those are great - I've printed them out and pinned them up above my desk.

We can't always follow the first rule - we can't make a special trip across continents to visit someone's favourite restaurant and check that the curtains are indeed orange - but where we reasonably can, we should.

The biggest problem I've seen is articles that don't answer questions 2 & 3, by not giving you absolutely basic information about the subject. I'll give you hypothetical analogies rather than embarrass researchers, but if an article on James Bond didn't mention Ian Fleming, or one about fish didn't mention water, I think we have a responsibility to fill that gap (or reject until the author does).

What would be really nice is if the researchers themselves could pay more attention to these questions - why just leave to the subs? I might take to posting a link to them on some articles

Indeed. Perhaps we can take a clue from the title "Researcher". I don't think that's arbitrary. The goal of a Researcher is to do research, no? Guide Entries should be based on at least a reasonable amount of research, even if we can't aspire to the lofty goals of condensing an entire planet into two words based on thorough knowledge.

We're all in the project together, of course. At times some of us spout off out of frustration or fatigue or whatever, but it doesn't serve any of our purposes (I hope) to have adversarial relationships develop between the paid staff, the volunteer staff, and the Researchers.

Here's an interesting case by example: the bestselling Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, which came out last year. The first edition was littered with copy errors, and people noticed and knew they were errors. Check the many reader reviews of the book at amazon.com for a feeling of how sensitive readers are to typos. You could forgive one or two. But "their" instead of "there"?

Beeline, I have read The Language Instinct and some other stuff on linguistics, but I don't have the book to hand, and so cannot debate the matter. In any case, I think comparative linguistics is fuel for some other thread.

Meanwhile, I finally ransomed my HST books and they arrived this afternoon, so I expect to complete my fact-checking shortly.

Lil

James Bond?

There was an entry recently entitled "Why James Bond is Lucky" which I thoroughly enjoyed reading and joined in the forum discussions that resulted.

But the entry didn't explain "why" JB was lucky. It gave examples of ways in which he was lucky. Unless the name of the entry has been changed it doesn't deliver what it promises.

This, I think, is the sort of thing that some people are getting a little irritated with.

Oops - fatigue caught up with my fingers when posting my set of rules.

The last par should read - The sub may find questions unique to h2g2. If he/she does, good luck to them, and I'd be he glad to hear from them. At any rate, let's hope they note these six rules.

> In any case, I think comparative linguistics is fuel for some other thread.

Agreed.

BTW, some months ago I also subbed an article on 'Why' James Bond was so lucky. I can't remember the article number, but I rejected it for pretty much that reason, amongst others. Strange how similar yet unlikely article topics crop up again and again! Ahhh, cultural immersion, eh? Isn't it? You know. Marvellous.

1. HST was honourably discharged from the US Air Force in the Fall of 1957. How this came about is a whole nother story which I am in the processing of summarizing.

2. I wrote, in my second post to this thread:

>[quoting author]"On a visit to the Chicago Democratic Convention he >was assaulted by the downer cops, it was then he decided to strive, >fight and write for change, he got political."
>run-on sentence.
>a. This wasn't just a visit, it was a writing assignment.
>b. Doesn't this kind of, like, totally miss the point of what >happened at the Democratic Convention in 1968? Hunter was already >political. What happened at Chicago deserves a better description, >however brief, than this.

I was wrong about point (a). He had no assignment, although he was wearing press credentials when he was attacked by Chicago police and pushed through a plate glass window. I believe I conflated the Chicago convention with the Republican convention in Miami in 1972.

I was also wrong when I said in point (b) that HST was already political. When Rolling Stone assigned Hunter and Tim Crouse to cover the 1972 campaign, HST had no contacts and virtually no experience in political reporting. This did, however, give him a unique outsider's perspective.


Actually, if I were subediting an article on HST by me I would reject it on the grounds that I was trying to cover too much ground. I would tell me to focus more specifically on some aspect of HST's career, like the genesis and writing of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.

Lil

Beeline, for someone who argues for looseness you seem to write much better english than appears in a lot of the approved entries.

The JB entry was a bit of harmless fun, but I'm pretty sure I got to it via the front page - which means that someone approved it despite the minor fact that JB is fiction. The guidelines clearly specify 'no fiction', and this is the sort of thing that pisses people off.

All we ask is that the guidelines be clear, and adhered to by the editorial staff.

Would anybody like to write a really fascinating on JB as a cultural icon that provide valuable insights into the male psyche? You know the sort of thing, the impossible role-model that millions of men secretly dream of emulating, and how it has evolved over the last 30 yrs.

> Beeline, for someone who argues for looseness you seem to write much better english than appears in a lot of the approved entries.

Thank you, although I'm not sure if you're remarking on the difference between my 'looseness' and my good English, or the apparent disparity between my good English and the quality of some approved articles!

To address the former, I think 'looseness' and 'good' are not mutually exclusive. I'm only advocating a slight looseness of *style*, not of spelling or grammar, as laid out in the Guide's guidelines. When so much credibility - rightly or wrongly - rests on the prevalence of spelling or syntactic errors, you just can't afford to let the obvious ones get through for fear of inflaming nit-pickers like ourselves. I think the inclusion of some of the borderline cases makes up a large proportion of what is then deemed 'the house style'. As h2g2 is somewhat more friendly and subjectively based than most written resources, we can get away with a few more colloqualisms and greater individualism, and that's what I think needs to show through.

As far as the latter point goes, the sub-eds all have different standards of editing and writing style - mine just happen to coincide with yours, I suppose, and I am fairly well practised at spotting errors. Some always get by me, though, because I'm careless and inattentive sometimes; especially on Fridays. I could rewrite all the articles I receive in 'my' style, but that would not sufficiently credit the original author, would take rather a long time, and rather squashes the point of community writing! There are still occasional things, however, that I let pass as a matter of honouring the original style. In any case, any system that uses a number of different people (about 25 at the moment, I think) to create and maintain a 'uniform' style is bound to show discontinuities at various points. Let's not forget that no-one has ever tried anything on this scale or width of acceptance criteria before. It's still very much in evolution.

BTW, I was also amazed at the number of typos in Neal Stephenson's books - I'd have thought that a professional publisher should be able to have the book read by at least one professional editor before it's sent to press. DNA's publishers - PAN - are also pretty terrible at that: they even spelled his name wrongly on the inside of one of the Mostly Harmless paperbacks! I'm just about to start on Cryptonomicon... Amazingly enough, after my first post in this thread, I've just finished a collection of Bruce Chatwin's essays, published by Vintage, and there is not a single error in it that I could spot. But then, knowing him, he probably didn't make any in the first place!

Bravo, Loony. Mind if we nick your excellent list and create a bigger, fatter version for the subs?

Glad to see the way this thread is turning out. Discussion... that I like.

You're still not getting my birthday details, though. Not yet, anyway...

Were I to guess, I'd say it was sometime in August....

...and that the year is perhaps somewhat later than experience with Algol 60 would suggest...

Mark, I submitted my list of rules as a h2g2 guide entry. It lives at http://www.h2g2.com/A258112

A little birdie told me your star sign is Leo

Apologies for tardiness and accomplishing this task, but a horrid coughing illness has cut my brain off at the knees... At the beginning of this thread Mark asked me to defend some of my criticisms of the HST piece, and to supply further material where I claimed it was necessary. I have done so and append the results here.
******
My source for this reconsideration is _Fear and Loathing: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Hunter S. Thompson_, by Paul Perry. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992. There are no authorized biographies of HST, but this unauthorized one is based on interviews with over a hundred of Hunter's friends (including those from childhood), relatives and professional colleagues, all of whom are cited by name. There is, however, no bibliography. I have assembled one from online resources.

Hunter Thompson and Sports

HST was an avid sportsman from childhood onward. He participated in local sports, attended every event in the Louisville area, and even organized an athletic league for children under 14. As he grew older he proved less talented on the field than he had hoped, but adjusted well by turning to sports writing. He was still only a boy when he first began writing sports columns for the Southern Star, a mimeographed paper edited by 10-year-old Walter Kaegi, Jr.

It was thanks to a journalism opportunity that HST was able to escape the hated electronics school at Eglin AFB, during his brief enlistment. When the sports editor of the Command Courier, the base newspaper, was busted for urinating in a public place, Hunter immediately applied for, and obtained, the position.

Author Paul Perry describes sports writing as the "journalistic equivalent of being a dilettante" [page 26], but there is nothing to suggest that HST felt this way. He has demonstrated a life-long passion for sports, and has written about sports intermittently throughout his career. If anything, such a nomadic career admirably suited a man as ungovernable as HST. He simply could not remain confined for long, either at a classroom desk or in an office cubicle.

As a matter of fact, it would seem that rock and roll reporters were considered the bottom feeders of journalism. The editor of Scanlan's, a magazine not unlike Harper's, said he "...considered rock reporting as a state of the journalistic art on a level with Ben Gay ads (a liniment once heavily advertised on US television by troglodytic athlete spokesmen)."

His Brief Military Career

HST and two friends got into trouble with the law just over a week before he would have graduated from high school. His friends, being of wealthy families and having 'connections' got off with little or no consequence. HST himself was sentenced to 60 days in juvenile detention (reduced to 30 days for good behaviour) to be followed by enlistment in the Army. Instead he joined the Air Force. Not surprisingly, however, he rebelled just as much against military regimentation as he had rebelled against any civilian restriction. After boot camp he was assigned to electronics school, which he loathed. "His only way out of the less-than-exciting world of electronics would be to take a dishonorable discharge. But he didn't want such a heinous label following him the rest of his life. That isn't to say he didn't tempt fate."[p. 25, Perry]

He nearly did get thrown out, but several officers sympathized with the tortured but gifted young Thompson. And so he was honourably discharged in the fall of 1957.

What happened at Chicago ....

At the time of the Democratic Convention, Hunter was a stringer for Scanlan's and several newspapers, but it was speculative curiosity that led him to go to Chicago, and he walked unwittingly into the middle of the riot. The police ignored the press credentials hanging round his neck and set about him with their batons. He escaped a bad beating by falling backward through a plate glass window. Always a combative sort, HST was personally enraged by the behaviour of the authorities, but it would not be until the next US election that he became involved in political reporting.

Bibliography:

Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. New York: Ballantine, 1967. His first full-length book, and a solid popular success, Hell's Angels cleared up many of the myths and horror stories which surrounded the motorcycle outlaws.

"The Kentucky Derby is Evil and Depraved", Scanlan's magazine, 1970. While not a stand-alone piece it is well worth citing for two reasons. First, it was the first partnership of Hunter's prose and Ralph Steadman's illustrations, and, second, it was the work which earned HST the sobriquet of Gonzo. He had in fact developed a serious writer's block and wound up filing his notes just before press deadline. But because those notes were so well-written and closely observed, they conveyed a coherent story.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was first published by Rolling Stone Magazine, starting in 1971. It was based on two visits to Las Vegas on separate assignments, the first to cover the Mint 400 Motorcycle Race for Sports Illustrated, and then the National District Attorneys Association's Third Annual Convention on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (at the instigation of Rolling Stone).On both trips, HST took with him a radical and about-to-be-disbarred Chicano lawyer named Oscar Zeta Acosta, who featured in the final manuscript as a Samoan attorney and fellow debauchee. The story is a piece of psychedelia gone wrong, a tale of violent hyperbole, and it was a smashing success.

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 was originally published as a series of articles by Rolling Stone Magazine.

The Curse of Lono. Ballantine, 1984. The book sold well, but contained comparatively little text by Hunter. Perry says that Ballantine padded out the book with excerpts from Mark Twain and Thomas Ellis, and published the book in what they called "greeting card format", the better to highlight Ralph Steadman's copious illustrations.

Rum Diary. It can be regarded as a sign that a writer or artist has achieved master status when his/her early work, however unpolished, is published. Rum Diary, although not published until 1999, was written in 1959 while Hunter was living in Puerto Rico.

The remaining works listed below are compilations, of columns, magazine pieces, essays and letters.

Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the 80's. Random House, 1989.
The Great Shark Hunt. Random House, 1991.
Better Than Sex. Ballantine, 1995.
The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman. Random House, 1998 (published in 1997 as The Fear and Loathing Letters)

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

Lil, thanks for posting the information here. I'll draw attention to it.

The Hunter S Thompson entry has now been updated. Squeal if there are any howlers, but thanks to the above input it's (hopefully) much better.

Thanks for all the comments, guys, and special thanks to Lil for her additions.

According to a conversation somewhere else, Mark's b'day is August 1. Don't hit me. Don't hit me. *thwack* I said don't hit me. Anywho, I'm making a list of researchers' birthdays at http://www.h2g2.com/A293195

its reassuring to see that HST is still causing trouble

(What a great punchline )