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

It would seem that the majority of the time taken writing a column is spent acquiring a sudden unfounded interest in functional desk accessories.
The cooling fan on my desk has held me captive for some weeks now. On Tuesday I discovered the humming noise, which it makes whilst it is busily blowing everything that isn’t bolted to the floor through the window, actually changes quite dramatically in pitch depending on exactly where I place it on my desk.
After a few hours of avid experimentation I found I could actually move the fan around in such a manner as to produce an uncannily accurate rendition of Donny Osmond’s ‘Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool’. After encouraging my computer to emit the odd well timed beep in accompaniment, I can assure it is almost worth
hearing.

...It is precisely for such reasons I have never secured myself a regular column of my own in any publication. That’s if you’re not counting (and I’m sure you’re not) the magazine for which a handful were erratically produced: a wholly worthy and laudable periodical strangely entitled Colin.
Every so often at intermissions of anywhere between a few months and a few years the editorial team for the magazine (comprising of the Editor and myself) would assemble in the same room and discuss the latest issue. After collating all the available and completed material we had been tirelessly working on since the last meeting, we would carefully comb through it sorting the wheat from the chaff, deciding what would go in the magazine.
More often than not we were usually left with a deficit amount of material relative to the demands of such a wide ranging
publication. So we’d generally place the material (which we found, more often than not, would conveniently fit on one sheet of A4) in a box and put the issue to bed —as we like to say in the trade.
Well actually we’d shove the box under my bed and bugger off to the pub for the rest of the day.
At such a rate of production we may have enough material for the much delayed first issue of Colin somewhere between the next fifteen to seven hundred years, but don’t hold me to that...