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

Dear willem,

Thank for your super letter. If you give me the name of the casette of south african birds then I can ask my daughter to buy it and it can be one of K's presents for his birthday. !! What a lovely idea.

I would also like to purchase one of your paintings. I shall ask my daughter who lives in Joeys when they go up to their ranch in Botswana - which I think is reasonably near you - and you have obtained through my mentor - Lil "auntie giggles" - my RL name and addy, then my caughter C. and her husband C. can do a detour and they can come and choose the painting. they might even be able to bring it over and I can have it framed here.

Do you have the wonderful flowers which come with the rains? I must admit that the ficus is the one I wouold like, but I am sure that K. would like one of the birds. Anyway, I think that you must also get help about the calendar. Who knows you might even be able to make enough money to come and visit us all in England. !!

You could have a speciality South African bird calendar. and then next year a speciality wild aninal calendar etc. etc. You would choose them, and then get an expert printing firm to print them. do not forget there is something called patents which you would have to make a note of so that other nasty people do not plagiarise your work. !!

Ou kerel you can do it. !!

I am sorry that Pa is not able to use his video camera. You must use it and take some of you and your Dad and Mum and all the wonderful family visits he is having. He must be a wonderful Pa as your mother must be. the whole family is rallying round and giving you all strength.

With much affectionate love.

Your very ancient friend,

Christiane
AR80

Hello again Websailor and Anoldgreymoonraker! In fact I am very close to the tropic of Capricorn! It's about 40 km/25 miles north of my home town of Pietersburg/Polokwane. There are two highways northward from here that cross the tropic; on both, there's a little signpost indicating you've just entered the tropics. On the road to Louis Trichardt/Makhado, this place is very scenic! There are hills with huge rocks, and a group of fine tree euphorbias; I have a photo ... I'll dig it out and post it; then you'll see one of the exact places that that guy passed! He would have seen those exact same trees and hills.

Hello Christiane! I see you posted almost exactly at the same time as I did!

I'll see about the bird call casette. These days there migh be a CD set ... those casettes I bought very long ago!

OK let Lil send me your real name and addy! As for paintings ... many of the paintings I show on Webshots have already been sold! But I still have many others here as well. We'll talk about it!

I'll talk to people over here about a calendar. I happen to know people who own a print shop!

I'd certainly love to visit England if I make enough money!


My dad will learn all the little tricks about his video camera soon I hope. He's doing rather well these past couple of days, after having felt very bad for a few days following his latest chemo treatment.

We have more visitors today - Christiaan and his mom and dad! I'll post a piece about his visit later today.

OK and thanks again for looking at my paintings!

Love,

Willem

A Calendar sounds lovely. I am sure they would sell very well. Incidentally I printed one of your paintings off the other day

Which one Websailor ?

The white rhino that you sent to me

Websailor

Willem, these are superb. Really wonderful. If you wanted to, we could showcase some under the 'Cartoons' section of The Post - let me know if this would be of interest to you. I think as many people should see these as possible.

Hello Skankyrich - thanks! - of COURSE I would love it if these pictures are in The Post! I really like sharing them with people. Would they fit under 'Cartoons'? Could one also put a bit of information underneath each?

'Cartoons' is the bit of where we have image-based articles, essentially - they don't necessarily have to be cartoons. So yes, it would fit in there just fine!

If you'd like to email in any you'd like us to use, with whatever text notes you want underneath included, we'll start running them in the next issue

OK Rich! I've had a bit of concern about copyright issues. But the way I figure it ... the images here will not have a lot of detail so wouldn't be suited to high-quality copies ... so I guess it wouldn't be likely someone copied them from here and made money off them without crediting me. What do you think?

That's absolutely correct. The images will all be less than 100kb in size; I doubt very much whether anyone would be able to make a Post image into a saleable asset.

On that note, how much do you charge for prints? I rather like the idea of having a pearl-spotted owlet on the wall to remind me of The Gambia...

Rich, I don't know yet what to ask for prints ... if you really are interested, please email me and we could talk 'bizness'!

So ... I email a picture and a bit of writing to 'The Post' and that's it? A paragraph or two - making it a 'little' illustrated entry?

Yes, whatever you like! I was thinking just a few lines to give a bit of background to it, more as a showcase for your work with a couple of your thoughts, but if you want to do a couple of paragraphs that's fine by me

Email the first one in and I'll give you some thoughts, and will reply from my own email address with some haggling

OK Rich, I just emailed the first one - the Pearlspotted Owlet, since you mentioned it!