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

Aye, outside...

Inside it's same old same old.

Mushrooms for tea. Two punnets o' the demme things - mushrooms, onions, rice, soy sauce I suppose.

Miah is out.

Susan is at work.

I have been reading Rankin, Bell and Paton & Cameron.

I don't think I'll be voting on 7th May - I have worked out that it is the best way of getting the result I'm hoping for.

I think I will have to cut the grass out back tomorrow.

It's funny - all the cancelled flights upheaval post 9/11, shoe bomb, pants bomb &c &c yet the volcanic ash cancellations have not produced a deluge of airport horror stories and have been accepted with calm stoicism. Maybe it's just that the media decided not to go to Panic Red on the story or maybe it's just spring break/pre-election chill, whatever, but it's nice. It would have been lovely if BA staff had managed to reschedule their strike for yesterday and today - a splendid opportunity for truly world-class schadenfreude lost.

The X Files movie was fun. Series 6 starts tonight. What'l we do when we come to the end of the 'complete' box set? Start again? Try to find some other 50+ DVD set? Peet keeps on recommending things to me - "it's the new X Files" - but they mostly seem to be contrived short attention span bells whistles and flashing lights slick homogenised TV pablum. TV has got a lot dumber and a lot slicker in the 12 or so years since the X Files high water mark.

I have been reading The Invisibles by Grant Morrison. Cities are, it seems, a virus - one which infects us and makes us go out and build more cities. Cities spread out to fill the planet, then, as resources run out, force us to move to other planets. Cities are a very effective virus. Cities are fascinating things. London is a fascinating place; the city - the people in it are like lice.

Thibaut de Castries said "At any particular time of history there have always been one or two cities of the monstrous sort -- viz., Babel or Babylon, Ur-Lhassa, Nineve, Syracuse, Rome, Samarkand, Tenochtitlan, Peking -- but we live in the Megapolitan (or Necropolitan) Age, when such disastrous blights are manifold and threaten to conjoin and enshroud the world with funebral yet multipotent city-stuff." He also noted that "The ancient Egyptians only buried people in their pyramids. We are living in ours."

Morrison points out that on top of Canary Wharf there is a pyramid.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/images/photo/2007/10/01/20071001POD/20179130.JPG

There would have been cities in the millenia before Ur, before Babel, these now erased by wind and sand and water. It would be a million times more important to uncover the remains of any such city than to warch a UFO land in Trafalgar Square - we know that there are aliens out there, but we know nothing of our Hyperborean pre-pre-pre-prehistory.

Bluddy heck, you can see just how much I want to do my quota of PhD reading today...


Douglas

I recommend "Northern Exposure".

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Northern-Exposure-Complete-All-Seasons/dp/B000TV5LIG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1271434119&sr=8-1

Ta.

Twin Peaks is a candidate, but it isn't really long enough, and the price will have to drop significantly. I commenced groundwork on the Twin Peaks front yesterday by showing Susan a picture of David Duchovny in drag as a transwossnasme FBI agent in it.

Northern Exposire might just fit the bill, but I rather suspect that it might prove a tad too quirky for Susan.

I hear good things anent Battlestar Galactica and ditto The Sopranos. HBO is something of a seal of quality.


Douglas

"Morrison points out that on top of Canary Wharf there is a pyramid."
Yes. But is there an Eye in it?

Watched Twin Peaks when it was first shown on UK TV in the early 90's but haven't seen it since. I think it would bear re-viewing. I always liked the intro with the saw sharpening machine. I have a theory that Lynch saw one of these in action and was determined to include it somehow in a movie so wrote one about a logging community.

It feels weird to look up on a clear evening and see not a sign of aircraft. Possibly the first time since I was a medium-sized boy (barring Xmas Day). Are you surviving or slowly being buried under volcanic ash?

PJ's OH

Anent eyes in pyramids - maybe... I would be really impressed if you knew who Morrison is, BTW.

We are most definitely not being buried in volcanic ash, and any that does come down will probably do the ground no end of good.

What's the worst case scenario? Lousy summer? Feh! Respiratory problems? Can be offest against the health benefits of the smoking ban, meaning that, on balance, we'll be no worse off than we were in the 70s, and the 70's currently rule big time. Food shortages/starvation? Might do some of us, present company not excepted, some good. Earth splits in two, whole population dies? Aye' like this is the first time we've had a volcanic eruption...

The sky is falling, the sky is falling.

I wonder if the Tornados they have on 24/7/365 patrol around nuclear power stations are grounded? I'll bet not...


Douglas

Yes - you can practically smell the intense sweet spiciness of wood shavings. Maybe a double reference to the sawmill scene from one of the Bond films and the wonderful poem by Les Murray 'Driving Through Sawmill Towns'.

http://tinyurl.com/y3w5o2s +scroll down to second pome.

[Sorry if the link doesn't work - the only text I can find on-line is NY Times - no subs.]

Michty! Matrimonial harmony.

I'll try reading Susan a pome tonight...


Douglas

No way!

Not terribly impressed by tonight's DH. Offspring and I agreed that we don't like comedy Daleks: only real evil-galactic-spanning-empire ones.

It has been extremely sunny and pleasant here today. A flight of vintage planes came over about 18:00. I thought it might be a reprise of the Dunkirk evacuation: all prop driven planes to report to Gatwick Airport for Patriotic Duties?

PJ's OH

I have to agree re. the Doctah. Three so-so episodes in a row - Moffatt is taking us back to the McCoy era...

Re. Amy not recognising the Daleks - I said something in my journal back in December to the effect that the Tennant Who era might be be relegated to an 'it never happened' alternative reality, giving Moffatt a clean sheet. It looks is if this, in part, at least, might be true...

Setting aside the hype, it seems to me that we have a comedy turn, an over-promoted occasional scriptwriter and a first-rate companion - a combination that results in a good writer (Gatiss) turning out a clunker, a stinker, a rotten egg, a bourroch, a kirn. And I don't like the look of the new Daleks - does my bum look big in this?

Did you really mean to say DH, BTW? Dr Hu sounds more Steely Dan than Delia Derbyshire to me.


Douglas