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

There isn't a guide entry on Victoria Wood. Pity - as it would have been good to be able to link to one.

I've created a page of links for Victoria Wood. I think I will do some more research and do a separate entry for her - I think she deserves one.

Have a look at the links on http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A662104 and see what you think.

Good. I'm also working on two other entries, now that I've broken the ice.
I haven't been on all day because I guess all the kiddies off from school and such. I just barely squeaked in . All my search engines are unavailable and my server keeps clicking off and I have to restart to make another connection.
I guess all I want you to do is make style suggestions and catch my typos. Ask questions about what I haven't said.

AWW is the alternative writing workshop, where they send things that have been thoroughly trashed in the PR.
AGGH is the Alternative Galaxy Guide something or other. It's JWF's baby.

You can have Victoria Wood. I think my point is proven. There ain't too many females in the piano business.

How did it go with JK Rowling's Cash Cow?

Yes, I know how it is with ankle biters. I bought mine some marbles, which he wrote on a shopping list for me and now I'm having difficulty getting any time to myself because he wants me to play with him. The cash cow was OK, but everyone had raved about it and although I thought it was good, the pictures and sounds inside my head from the book are better. There was some very good casting and I did think that John Coltrane as Hagrid stole the show.

Style, typos and questions are fine by me and what I'm good at, so I'm happy to do that.

Female piano players with a comic twist - no, not many but at least one *very* good one. Have you ever heard of her before I mentioned her?

Nope. hadn't heard of her.

My daughter thought it was stupid and the kids didn't look eleven, which she is.

The Quiddich game I could have done without.
I think they've already started filming the sequel.

How are you feeling?

I gotta go clean up the Thanksgiving kitchen mess.
She Who Must Be Obeyed crawled in there at the last minute the other morning and trashed it. Now she's tapping her dainty hoof.

I suspected Victoria Wood wasn't well known over in your neck of the woods. She's very talented and one of my heros.

My car failed to start today, so I achieved one out of the three things I had planned to to do with Himself, which was the film. We went by bus, which he thoroughly enjoyed. He was at times bouncing up and down in his seat with excitement. When I asked him what part he most enjoyed, however, he said the train journey. I was a bit disappointed with the ending. The Quidditch game had to be done, I think, as in the book, there are at least three Quidditch games, and it's fairly central to not only this book, but also to the others.

Me, I'm tired.

I hope your Thanksgiving celebrations went well.

I've a couple of questions to ask about the Tom Lehrer piece. First, though - I really like the title - spot on!

I was a bit confused about the different recording bits. I had thought, as I mentioned earlier, that he had stopped performing entirely. Now, I gather I'm wrong. When did he start performing again? Or was it just recording again?

Are you intending to put headings after the intoductory bit?

The bit about the Two Ronnies - they are Ronnie Corbett (the little one) and Ronnie Barker (the big one), not Ronny.

I thought I'd leave more detailed comments until you'd done more work on the entry.

How have you survived the day?

I walked with the kid to the store. We took our backpacks.

I meant the George Lucas quality of the Quidditch game.

Yes, got the Ronnie Barker from someone else.

The recording paragraph is a conflation of fifty years.

He performs when he damn well pleases, which isn't often. He does benefits and small parties sometimes. He's not above dumping a bit of doggeral on a class.

As for headings, not a clue. never done ML.
I stayed at the house on thanksgiving. My in-laws rag me when I'm out of work. I played with the computer and took a long nap.

I'm typing straight into the entry. Haven't begun to experiment with cut and paste yet.

Oh the Quidditch game - yes I tend to agree with you. That was one of the things that people raved about and it didn't quite do it for me either. For a start Harry looked scared to death most of the time and in the book, from his first kick-off 'flying was wonderful'.

GuideML is dead easy. Try copying and pasting the guide entry to your 'c' drive or to a floppy, so you can jiggle back and forth until you're confident.

I've generally found that when you tell it to switch to GuideML, it puts the basic structure round you. The first basic is putting at the beginning of paragraphs and at the end. This gives you a space above and a space below.

For headings, you type Then type the header here.

Two more things you may find useful - Whatever the footnote is here which will give you a superscript number and put the footnote at the end and
Name you want the link to have and bob's your uncle.

It's a bit fiddly at first. If you get it wrong, it will tell you so. I've found as long as I check I've got the start eg and finish it usually sorts it out. The capitals are important, and it's dead easy to forget to turn the capitals off, but other than that, you soon get used to it. PREVIEW EVERYTHING before storing.

I'm by no means an expert, but give it a go, ask if you get stuck. For me it was quite a sense of achievement, especially when I cracked footnotes - they look so cool.

Even though I've seen films and stuff, I've never quite got the hang of what Thanksgiving is all about. Is there a specific event to be thankful about, eg independence, or is it more general? It could be a sort of harvest festival, I suppose?

To put it plainly, it's one of those manufactured 'patriotic' holidays that is used to violate the 'Constitutional' separation between 'church' and 'state'.

It's history is relatively recent and it buttresses the mythology of the 'hardy colonist' and the 'helpful native'. According to the commonly accepted cant, the 'First Thanksgiving' was celebrated around Jamestown during the second settlement of what became Virginia.
The first settlement, if I remember correctly, had its butt starved out with the rest of the east coast because they just happened to land their happy Puritan selves in the midst of a six year drought interspersed with some of the hardest winters the natives could remember. Well, the second settlement didn't fare too well, either.
Lot of them got off the boat sick. Many died. When they got around to looking for something to eat, they found the natives ready and willing to trade. Eventually, according to the tale, an educated brave named Squanto began to teach the 'Pilgrims' how to plant corn by putting a fish under each seed.
So, the first Thanksgiving is supposed to be in celebration of the first harvest.
Unfortunately, there is no historical record of any such thing.
As happened with Christ, the further the early Americans got from the actual events, I mean by the time of the American Civil War they were looking back two hundred years already (!), the more precious they became, so simple-minded people began to polish the images of the early colonists until they shone like saints, with little halos around the heads of the whites and the natives.......
Not a mention of Cromwell.....Not a mention of five deaths for every survivor....Not a mention of the fact that every boatload brought a government functionary or a representative of the absentee landlord...Or the fact that the religious principles of the mythologically sainted folk would probably have prevented them from engaging in an act of public pridefulness...
On the other hand, the Puritans were capable of many things....so, who knows, maybe there was such a celebration, only it was a drunken orgy and the Daughters of the American Revolution don't want it bandied about that their ancestors were brought forth in any manner short of immaculate conception....

I'll do a dummy entry first to play with the ML.
I'll see if I can get the old printer out of the shed.

Thanksgiving conjures up for me that old James Stewart film - can't remember its name - where he runs a bank and gets taken out of time so that he can see what an impact he has made on people's lives with his generous and supportive nature. (Actually, I think it ends at Christmas time, but it still reminds me of Thanksgiving.)

Your synopsis was interesting.

Someone's just given me a printer, so I'll see if I can work out how it works. The person who gave it to me said she didn't know, but that relatives had given her at least two printers as presents, so she have me one.

I'm in the break now between having walked my son to a schoolfriends party and going back to pick him up.

I'll look forward to seeing the GuideML style entry!

Hi!

The printer doesn't work - I can't see a power source - no electrical plug, and if there's a battery, I can't see where it goes.

How are you doing with GuideML? I saw you'd changed your home page and seem not to be entirely happy.

Also saw the stuff about bad things happening in childhood and what particularly struck me was the thing you said about adults who were supposed to protect failing us. It seems that an awful lot of us have had stuff like that to go through, losing much of our self esteem along the way and then facing the challenge of rebuilding it and discovering and reclaiming our true and rightful untarnished and magnificent selves.

How are you doing? How's the Tom Lehrer entry going?

I went to the shed and dug out two old printers I'd had stored in case we ever bought another computer. One I bought, the other was thrust upon me. The one I bought had a dead print shoe. It was a thermal printer and weighed a ton. Into the dumpster with it. The other is an old Star. Plugged it in, the Windrows 98 disc had the driver, and we're in business....only it needs a new ribbon. Went and got a couple of ribbons, picked up some cheap software cds for label making and checkbook accounting.

I suggest that your particular printer is one of those stupid things you have to have the seperate cord for, like this NCR/Daewoo monitor I'm using, which also has a weird buss cord, which I also had to pay for. Fortunately we have a lady here who stocks that kind of weird stuff. The Radio Shack (Your Source for All Things Electronic!) didn't even have the cord in their big catalog.

Oh, and depending on the brand, some of the old printers over here had their power coming through the buss cord. Which meant you had to have the right kind of cpu...

I'm all wrapped up in this AWW/GAG stuff right now. You can see the entries for the intro on the column page in the Post on my space under the titles 'Open up you rmind and say AWW' and 'Version 2.0'.
Jwf didn't like my first two intros.
I'm going to dedicate a day to finishing all my entries. Now that I've got a functioning printer, I can print out the stuff I downloaded.
Haven't downloaded all the ML dreck yet. It takes forever with this screeching little midget of a printer.
I tried five times to get that stupid picture to pop up. Nada.
I'll try and read the instructions more carefully.
All these techno-fetuses around here make me sick. Maybe I should let the ll-year-old try!

Hmm, the printer. It's a Hewlett Packard something or other. Having looked, it seems to have a sort of hole with a rod in the middle of it, which is maybe where you plug in either an external battery, or one of those adapter things which are attached to a plug you stick in the wall. I'll ask the person who gave it me to have a look around.

I should be working on one of my entries in progress, but I'm doing peer review stuff, which can be really interesting.

I've not got into the other stuff you are working in or even looked at them so far.

Have you tried putting the GuideML onto a floppy (or the 'c' drive) and just jiggling back and forth? Not as good as being able to print out, I grant you, but better than doing nothing.

Techno fetuses? Somewhere I learned that there is a way to look at the GuideML for all the clever stuff that people have done on their home pages which shows you how they did it. If you're interested, I'll have a poke around to see how to do it. I think it's fairly simple to do.

Off to bed now, as it's late here

Yes, well, I've spent almost forty years proving that just because somebody else can do it doesn't mean I can do it. I still carry a map to get around town.

And don't worry about time. I'm responding 15 hours later.

I thought you'd like to know that one of my my American friends who I sent your synopsis of Thanksgiving thought it was 'about right'.

Incidentally, I wrote something completely different yesterday in response to this and got unceremonially chucked off not just h2g2 but the Internet.

I spoke to the friend who gave me the printer and she'd discovered a bit of it she hadn't given me. So with any luck, if she gives it to me tomorrow it will be up and running by the weekend. Hooray!

Have you got the hang of GuideML yet?

Hmm, spot the bad grammar in the first paragraph!

<musicalnote

OH! SORRY!
I was not here most of yesterday. I was dealing with my spousal unit's Avon business and defragmenting my drive and reading entire year's worths of online comics and cartoons. Playing hooky from H2G2 is like playing hooky for real.

Not gotten into Guide ML at all right now. Still printing it out when I can find the earplugs. This printer screeches!

I was also looking for online writing work and slipped in the back doors of some members-only sites.

There's some weirdos out there!

Also, my springoff did not arrive home from school at the appointed time and I drove around for half an hour before going into the school
office and asking what they'd done with her.
Band practice.
Even the child had forgotten. When asked why she hadn't called, she said their was a line to the phone until practice started.
The whole world knows when Gerri Halliwell(sp?) has a pimple, but no one can tell me when my child is going to be late.

I know the feeling of playing hookey. I think there's occasions where playing with the computer sort of substitutes for real life and if I've posted something, I tend to want to know if I've had a reply. As my package allows me to be on-line from 6pm-2am (local time) weekdays and all over the weekend, I come home from work looking to see what's new. If someone has asked me something, I feel kind of obligated to reply, even if I would be better served going to bed.

Tonight, young 'un is at a pantomime - 'Jack and the Beanstalk' with a friend and her daughter, so I've an evening to myself. He's not at the stage of being allowed out alone yet, but I can imagine the worry your daughter not being home caused you.

Yes, there are some wierdos. As an ACE I get access to off-site conversations and I saw an interesting one about the motivations of people who manufacture and spread viruses. Now there's an attraction I really do not understand.

I've still not got my printer going and I hope when it does, it doesn't screech. That sounds painful.

I should be doing some research into two entries I've sketched out, but it's the end of a very busy week, so I think when offspring comes back, I'm having an early night.

Where are you with Tom Lehrer? Are you still otherwise occupied?

All the necessary bios and data have been downloaded.
I intend to print most of them out and then sit with them in front of me as I reedit the entry. As I said before I brainstorm the first few drafts and then go in and fix the facts later.

As to weirdos...I ran across some sites for the fatteners, a bunch of guys who like to feed women into immobility....They're real big into morphing photos to create an ideal...ugh!

Then there are the piercing sites......ah, no!

So, I spent a good two hours today looking at the naturalist/nudist sites and they seemed to be fairly healthy if a bit potentially carcinogenic.

What package? I spend 19.95 to a local server and can be on any time.