Journal Entries
DNA's Passing
Posted May 15, 2001
14 May, 2001
At 6:02am today, while lying in bed listening to Doc's newscast on KROQ, I was stunned to hear that Douglas Adams had died last Friday. When I got to work, I checked out the h2g2 website and read all of the news stories that they'd linked to. But I still had to put my own 2 cents in, so when I came home this evening, I posted the following message in one of the tribute forums at h2g2. Here it is, verbatim:
This seems like as good a place as any to relate my DNA epiphany story. We all sound like 12-steppers who became addicted to a GOOD thing...
Sometime in 1981 (probably the summer between junior high and high school for me), my mother told me about a funny television show she'd seen on the PBS channel here in Los Angeles. She said that I would really like it, but I was doubtful, because it had the stupidest name I'd ever heard: "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
As often happens with PBS, the show was scheduled at a time when no 13 year-old boy with sober parents could possibly watch it, so I never caught an episode. But my older sister found out that there was a companion book, and purchased it. She, too, recommended it, and so couple of days later I borrowed her copy.
It was as if some British guy I didn't even know had said, "Hey, Kid! Yeah, YOU, the short one with the longish hair -- I wrote this book for you!" The book was MINE, and not because it was science-fiction and I was the target audience, but because this was the kind of humor at which I'd been waiting my whole life to laugh.
Of course, I quickly scooped up "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", and later "Life, the Universe, and Everything" when it finally was published [my first hardcover!]. A few years after that, my mother came back from a trip to England with a box-set of the whole radio series on cassette, and just so I could follow along more easily, "The Original 'Hitchhiker' Radio Scripts" was published in 1986, complete with a grammatical error in Geoffrey Perkins' prologue. Perkins' and DNA's footnotes in that volume made me laugh as hard as anything in the actual show, no small feat.
As you can see, I suffer from what Stephen King has called "literary elephantitis", so I'll try to wrap this up. I never did see all of the episodes of that oddly-named TV series. But I still have that first copy of "Hitchhiker's" that my sister bought almost exactly 20 years ago. I also have all of the other DNA books I bought subsequently, including my single favorite book of all time, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency".
I still have them because they are timeless, a vital, beating heart (yech) of all-important humor. Those books explained the Universe to me, by explaining that there is no explanation to the Universe. How neat is that?
Almost, but not quite, exactly neat enough. I'll miss you, Mr Adams.
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Latest reply: May 15, 2001
Date, possibly
Posted May 4, 2001
4 May, 2001
It's Friday, and since I had a spare 5 minutes at the end of the workday, I thought I'd make a quick journal entry.
Spoke with Rose today about our slowly-progressing wedding plans. I think we've finally agreed on a tentative 5-day window, sometime during which we will possibly be married, probably out-of-state, probably in Santa Fe, NM.
"Cold Feet" is/are certainly understandable: I hate being the center of attention, even on a happy occasion. I've said it before, and I still do think that weddings should evolve into a ceremony wherein the groom is excluded completely. He should just be free to hang out in the hotel room or something. Let's face it, weddings are for brides, and the grooms usually screw things up during the ceremony anyway.
Not that I'm not romantic... at least, I USED to be. It has occurred to me that I used up all of my gushy romance on the first girl with whom I fell in love. Since she didn't fall in love back, it was if I'd built a spacecraft to go to the moon, but it missed -- and I was left with no more materials to build a new spacecraft.
I'm still kind and giving, very generous and patient (or try to be), but I'm out of... "sap". Of course, I've never been an emotional person, and so I think that there was very little sap there to begin with; and now even that is gone, drifting somewhere beyond the moon's orbit.
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Latest reply: May 4, 2001
Joining; Memory; Teeth
Posted May 2, 2001
2 May, 2001
My nickname is Arhythmius. I'm sure I'll eventually break down and give away my real name, but for now we'll go with the nick.
Joined h2g2. Finally get a chance to keep an online journal, without having to write code. Even HTML is too time-consuming for me; when I want to make vain public declarations, I want to do it NOW.
Highlights of the last eight days: 1) Got a 12% raise at my job. This may very well turn out to be the highlight of my entire life, at least financially. I do not realistically expect to receive a raise of that size ever again. 2) Went to Disneyland last Saturday with my fiance. Hmm... her nickname is "kissesofrose", but that's just too frickin' long for a journal. I guess I'll refer to her as "Rose" for the purposes of this journal.
Have a (so far) minor toothache. Also having extreme difficulty understanding the evolutionary necessity of nerves on the inside of TEETH. The next stage of human evolution will surely do away with this ridiculous hindrance. Hell, it works for sharks, and they're one of the oldest families of animals on Earth. They lose a tooth, they just grow it back. In fact, doesn't the average shark lose 10 teeth a day or something? No prob, they have several ROWS of teeth, and lost teeth grow back in a flash.
Yeah, we need to be like that. Stupid human body...
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Latest reply: May 2, 2001
Arhythmius
Researcher U172732
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"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."