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

hmm. i never thought of manic street preachers as 'angry.' maybe i'm thinking of the wrong dudes. i can't think of any of their songs.
you're probably right about the internet... not happy to admit it but i suppose someday i'll have to leap forward into the mp3 age since it really is a good way to choose for yourself. what other media are out there anymore? seems like ther should be a better way. for some reason i hate to rely on my computer for stuff like that, it seems like it should be more tangible. i use my computer for a lot of stuff and i love it, but at the same time i am suspicious of technology, like i don't believe it can deliver real experiences... the minute we lose track of the real physical world is when the aliens will shut down our grid and exterminate us all...

Yeah. The internet is a strange beast. I had a cyber stalker once, terrified the living daylights out of me.

my god. what happened?
uck. i'm pretty sick of this alicia keys song...

*tunes it out w/ radiohead's The Bends*
ahhhh.

well, nothing actually physical. It was a girl I got chatting to on msn messenger who was rather unhappy in her actual life. She was really very pleasent at first and it was fun talking to her. However she got a little obsessed and before I knew what was happening I was getting sixty emails a day. You can probably guess the content - threat/apology/justification/blame in an endless cycle. There was something very eerie about talking to her on msn as well - for a while the line 'Mary is typing a message' was the most frightening sentance in the world.

What really got in my head was that I seemed to have filled a vacuum in this girl's life, and was therefore held utterly accountable for her every mood and whim. As I say, nothing happened outside cyber and emails, but it was very very scary nonetheless.

In the end I deleted my hotmail account. It was simple, really.

that is scary.... and very poignant somehow. seems like you should write a short story about it or something.
i understand that whole vacuum thing, clinging and subsequent victimisation... i try not to act out on those tendencies but i know i myself have them. i'm not so much "like a cat whose own humors are swinging him by the tail," to quote O Brother Where Art Thou... i can actually be quite cold and distant as well... best of both worlds.
have a nice thanksgiving? i'm back in my damn dorm room counting the days til xmas n' listening to the Tomb Raider soundtrack... bad movie but really awesome album. if you like dance-type electronic stuff eg fatboy slim... plus a new NIN track which is pretty decent.

We don't have Thanksgiving in England, although it can only be a matter of time...

I think cyber fosters very intense relationshis, because there are so very many lonely people in the world who are drawn to the easy intensity of cyber relationships. I mean, this wasn't cybersex or anything, just me babbling on about stuff, but I must've struck a chord somewhere. Then again, if you are looking to cling to someone, anybody will do - had it not been me, it would've been someone else.

(Weirdest thing ever: I have Beatles albums on random select, and Eleanor Rigby came on as I was writing the last paragraph. 'All the lonely people, where do they all come from' indeed. That really made me shudder. Creepy.)

How's your book going? I've been bashing out synopses on mine for about six months, slowly coming together. I also churn out stand up material for a couple of people, I am planning to take have a go myself next year...

loneliness is a . and shy people do find it much easier to empty all the crap out of their heads when they don't have to look into someone else's judging eyes and say it... that can be a dangerous kind of freedom.
so, stand-up? cool. i had the privilege of seeing a guy do his very first standup routine ever a couple months ago. it was pretty awful. but considering it was his first time and he actually had the guts to do it, it was probably pretty good. some of it was mildly funny, though most of his material consisted of anecdotes about diarrhea. i you not.
the "book" is moving along, slowly slowly, but it hasn't died yet. I'm determined to finish it, i have this strange feeling that it's very important. well, to me. i also have the feeling that it won't be worth anything to anyone else... i e-mailed it home to have my parents and various other trusted persons look it over; i got a pretty positive response last time...
of course you don't have thanksgiving in the UK. you didn't have the satisfaction of surviving the first harsh winter on a new continent and sharing a celebratory meal with the native folk who you were fixin' to steal the whole damn landmass from... if that's how the story goes... nobody's made me dress up as a pilgrim since preschool.
bought System of a Down's Toxicity today... Chop Suey! and Toxicity are pretty good tracks.

Loneliness is a pain. However, I think it is the essential human condition. It is very important for the survival of the species that we feel lonely now and again. It's certainly more important than the reproductive urge. Reproduction will create humans, but only loneliness will bring them together in cohesive units.

At the moment I write stand up for a few comedians here in London. (That's London England to you). I also work sporadically with another writer. However, I'd like to perform some stuff myself, just for the experience.

Been listening to Sgt Pepper incessently over the last few days, captivated by the sheer quality of the harmonising. Lennon and McCartney really can sing. 'She's Leaving Home' is the perfect vehicle for Paul McCartney's voice. A very pretty track. It's a pity he's chosen to inflict an endless stream of waffly nonsense on the listening public ever since the Beatles split.

'waffly?' what a lot of cool words you have over there.
what does it mean to call someone 'mullet?' because in America it's a humorous hairstyle.
looks like i'll be contributing my research paper on jackson pollock's Composition to the Guide, if i can figure out how... i'm writing it for my art history class and it's due tomorrow, and there don't seem to be any entries actually about jackson pollock here. as if my grade weren't motivation enough...

Waffly as in waffling, as in just whittering on about nothing. A particular forte of mine, now I come to think of it.

A mullett is a curious short-but-long haircut first spotted on early 1980's footballers. It was rendered classic by Newcastle United and England midfielder Chris Waddle in the 1990 World Cup. Bizarrely, it appears to be the only hairstyle legally allowed in Australia.

These days, the mullett seems to have enjoyed a rejuvenation on the Jerry Springer Show, a broadcast which has given people across the globe the opportunity to laugh at Americans.

Art History? Cool. Jackson Pollack inspired the artwork on the Stone Roses fantastic first album in 1989, I seem to recall. I went to an exhibition of his work at the National Gallery a couple of years ago and really liked it. I remember being particularly struck by some sketches of ballerinas he'd done. I'm going to be studying again myself next year - I'm doing Political Philosophy at home. I always regretted not going to University, and if nothing else will lay the ghost to rest.

okay, that definition of mullet corresponds with mine. funnily, i wasn't aware of it until like last year when suddenly all kinds of random artwork and t-shirts celebrating and mocking the mullet started appearing around my school. the reason i asked was that a.) in the adventures of priscilla queen of the desert, Bernadette calls a gunky woman in a bar a 'mullet' and b.) ewen bremner's character in Snatch is named Mullet even though he does not sport the hairstyle. i am aware that priscilla queen of the desert was shot in australia, so perhaps their usage of 'mullet' (the word) is different. i think somebody should do an entry on the origins of the word and the hairstyle. not me, though.
now i think i'm going to try and decide if any part of my 3 pages of bull is worthy of an attempt at an h2g2 entry.

i didn't know pollock drew ballerinas... i thought that was all degas's bag.

No, it's true. They were just casual sketches in a notepad, but they were really...pretty.

Oh, if in doubt post your article. I've got four to post but I simply cannot get my head around Guide ML. (The articles are: 'Kissing To A Popular Tune - The Story Of Suede', 'Mods and Rockers', 'Football Hooliganism' and 'POW - The Who in the Sixties').

I read your NIN article, you have a good journalistic style, very confident.

thanks. not all of that is my doing. i think all the album descriptions are mine.
i did get that pollock article up. even used some guideML for italics and paragraphs...
it's been 3 weeks since i heard from my NIN associate. and i can't seem to edit the page so it's just sitting there. grr.
those articles you mentioned sound interesting. did you say you had them up or just ready to go? you can always do plain text...

I was going to submit them in plain, but I would get bored of reviewers saying 'Yeah this is great, but perhaps you should try it in Guide ML'.

They're all pretty much done. The Mods one and The Who one I am going to merge together. They're on a disc somewhere, I'll get them sorted out over the next week. I'm in no particular hurry to get them posted, it's cool. I have a finished article on Rochester Castle which is in my Personal Space at the moment, again waiting for me to unravel the mysteries of ML. I know it can't be difficult.

Pity about George Harrison, isn't it. I lived for a while in Henley on Thames, where he has his house. It is a beautiful building. The Beatles were the first band I ever really loved, I was besotted with them for years. Very sad. I may well knock out an article on the Revolver album, as I saw a really good one on H2G2 about Rubber Soul.

yes, my mom and i are big beatlemaniacs. i guess that would make me second-generation. i heard about george on my AIM news ticker. but it wasn't a great shock, really, even though he had supposedly survived his cancer. i hadn't even known he was sick til i heard about him getting stabbed in '99.
unless you want to get fancy, ML stuff is really pretty simple, it seems to me. you just have to put the 'guide' and 'body' tags at the top and close them at the bottom... and actually i think it does that for you... though i did find it kind of hard to find anything resembling a list of all the commands for what does what...

I can dimly remember when John Lennon died. I was eating toothpaste in the bath, actually, when my mum told me. At school that day all the teachers were really upset, there was a big assembly about him, and we were allowed to watch 'A Hard Days' Night' in the afternoon. In Liverpool, there is a statue on Mathew Street which has their faces and 'Four Lads Who Shook The World' written underneath. I love music, as you have probably gathered, and have strong opinions about it, but every band you or I or anybody else will ever love counts for nothing whatsoever next to the Beatles. Nothing like them can or will ever, ever happen again.

Anyway, I'll have a stab at GuideML later. I am re-writing my Football Hooligan article, as I think it might be interesting to approach it from an apologist's viewpoint. There are quite simply many worse types of people than football hooligans. It is an injustice that a bunch of lads who have voluntarily decided to beat the living daylights out of each get 12 years in prison whereas a rapist (for example) on his first offence will get 3, with time off for good behavior.

wow. that is really frightening. 12 years for brawling and 3 for rape?
i read a lot about football hooligans in Irvine Welsh books. i would be interested to hear what you have to say about them.
it really does baffle the mind to think about the magnitude of the beatles' influence... i can't really think of what it is that made them so special, besides the insane way people reacted to them... they were beautiful, their songs were great... they were huge. it's been 'beatles or elvis?' ever since.

I think the Beatles were not only very very very good, they happened at precisely the right moment. They had a genuine enigma - they reason that the Beatles are so special is because they are the Beatles.

I've followed West Ham around the country since I was 14, and have seen things you simply would not believe at football. Also, some of my cousins were/are pretty active in the Inter City Firm (notorious West Ham mob). I think the maddest thing was at Leeds United. A jagged piece of circular metal came whizzing into the West Ham enclosure, just missing me. I picked it up, and it had 'I hope it cuts your f*****g head off, you Cockney b*****d' written on it. Nice. I also saw an Arsenal fan get thrown through a window, and a West Ham fan get so angry because he couldn't find any Chelsea to hit he punched stright through a car windscreen. Hooliganism is on the rise again, but it tends to happen well away from the grounds now. The London Underground on Saturdays, when there can be a dozen different mobs running around it, can get very nasty.

Try and get hold of Football Factory by John King if you can, a good book about hooligans, by a fantastic writer.