Geriatric OE

The weekly musing of a couple of Kiwis on their geriatric OE in The UK






Wednesday, 22 August 2012

So long Douglas, and thanks for all the stories

These bank holidays creep up on you if like me you haven’t grown up with them. This coming weekend is a long one. I spent a bit of time this morning searching for a good ‘late deal’ before deciding that day excursions from home will be the order of the day…er weekend. The weather is supposed to deteriorate and who wants to be staying away when it’s raining. So like us, you’ll just have to wait and see what we get up to day by day.
I’ve been reading a book called The Salmon of Doubt, or Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time. And I really like this quote about life which is of course from The Guide.
Anything that is in the world when you are born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it
Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Adams had an amazing ability to conjure up the future. And what I hear you ask did he foresee. Well, he called it the sub-ether-net, which is what we know as the internet. The Guide itself, a smart-phone, I rest my case.

Of course he didn’t’ only write the HHGG series.
Here’s what wiki says about him
Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English writer, humorist and dramatist. He is best known as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which started life in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a "trilogy" of five books that sold over 15 million copies in his lifetime, a television series, several stage plays, comics, a computer game, and in 2005 a feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.[1]
Adams also wrote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff (1983), Last Chance to See (1990), and three stories for the television series Doctor Who. A posthumous collection of his work, including an unfinished novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002.
Adams became known as an advocate for environmentalism and conservation, and also as a lover of fast cars, cameras, technological innovation, and the Apple Macintosh. He was a staunch atheist, famously imagining a sentient puddle who wakes up one morning and thinks, "This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in—fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!" to demonstrate the fallacy of the fine-tuned Universe argument for God.[2] Biologist Richard Dawkins dedicated his book The God Delusion (2006) to Adams, writing on his death that "Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender."

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