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

Thanks for the superb subbing you've done with the Hallstatt Entry. I'm so pleased that the original words of the first author can still be discerned!

Lovely

You're welcome.

Ouch, that must hurt. You've lost the top of your head! At least, in your profile pic on the new H2G2 you have. Instead it looks like a picture of Lanzababy's chest. I suggest you trim your original picture to square and then resubmit it.

I know it's terrible, not at all what I wanted or expected. I just had a look. I think I'll just delete and find another one completely. Thanks for the heads up (oh sorry about that pun )

My wife Mary has beautiful auburn hair, as has one of my two daughters.

Bel has similar-coloured hair, and Beatrice dyed her hair ginger recently. Galaxy Babe did too, a while back.

Sho was talking about changing her hair colour and I suggested dying it red because "most of my favourite women have red hair", and she said that it was actually naturally auburn anyway.

So now you tell me you've ginger hair?

Well, I think it has been called strawberry blonde in the past, as it fades quickly in the sun. The natural look is on my FB profile at the moment.

I am embracing the ginger.

Well done on subbing "Science Fiction Novelisations"!

Oh I found it really hard going, so thanks for the recognition

In fact, in the end, I had to do the whole thing from the last paragraph, backwards. Reading from start to finish made me drown in the facts. I was like this

I just hope I've not made too many glaring errors.


Lanzababy

I subbed Bluebottle's "Asterix" project, as well as some of his castle entries and his "Osborne House", so I know how you feel.

I spotted a few typos, and extensive use of the dash character, which should be changed to – - I've fixed all these now.

Thanks Gnomon! I'm never sure as to the protocol for &ndash, I'll take that on board, especially because I use [-] a lot in my own writing.


Am I right in thinking that all mdash (ie the longer type of dash, of which I don't have a keyboard character for) should be replaced?

Yes.

You should use the hyphen key (which on my keyboard is beside the 0) for hyphenated words. Looks like this: half-baked

You should use – with spaces around it for dashes, although a hyphen with spaces around it is acceptable: looks – like this

You should not use mdashes at all. Change them to —

oops -- change mdashes to –

On second reading, I see you missed one irritating habit of Bluebottle's - always spelling out a person's full name every time he refers to them. This means that the name "Ian Fleming" occurs about five times in the course of two or three sentences in the section about James Bond. It should have been abbreviated to just "Fleming". I'll try and sort that out some time later.

Are you thinking of going to London in May for the meet? I'm vaguely thinking of going, but there would have to be some people there who I really want to meet. I'm not going to London just to meet 2Legs.

I'm sorry, but I shall be going back to Lanzarote fairly soon. If it had been in April I might have gone. It's too dear to keep coming back and forth, also not very green to keep flying in and out of the country just for a few days.

I'm sure we'll meet one day.

That's OK, Lanza. I wouldn't expect you to delay just to see me, and you're right about the cost of shuffling backwards and forwards.

I'm sure our paths will cross at some stage.

You and Mrs G will have to come for some winter sunshine next winter

I did want us to go to Lanzarote over last Winter, and we would certainly have visited you, but with all the fuss about Mrs G being possibly fatally ill, we didn't get around to it. Things are better now that that particular cloud has lifted.

Sam has just sent me a big collection of instructions on how to be a Guide Editor. I'll e-mail them to you and the rest of the Future Guide Editors when I get home.

Whoohoo! what excellent news!