Douglas Adams

May 25th is Towel Day, a celebration of Douglas Adams and his work. Make sure to carry around a towel at some point today. Unless you're a hoopy frood and already know where your towel is. Oh, and next year will be the 10th anniversary of Adams's passing, so be sure to plan something big for Towel Day 2011. Coincidentally (or maybe not) I will be 42 next year. \m/ \m/ Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters for everyone!

By the way, you just know computer geek Douglas Adams would totally be rocking Twitter nowadays, beaming silly messages from all over the world a la Stephen Fry. :)

We miss you, Douglas!

From 2001, Douglas Adams speaks on "Parrots, the Universe, and Everything".

Douglas Adams was the best-selling British author and satirist who created The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In this talk at UCSB recorded shortly before his death, Adams shares hilarious accounts of some of the apparently absurd lifestyles of the world's creatures, and gleans from them extraordinary perceptions about the future of humanity.

Via TED.com "Best of the Web."

Blind river dolphins, reclusive lemurs, a parrot as fearless as it is lovelorn ... Douglas Adams' close encounters with these rare and unusual animals reveal that evolution, ever ingenious, can be fickle too -- in a University of California talk that sparkles with his trademark satiric wit.

A few months ago I got the idea to create a reading queue based on anniversary. There were quite a few great books celebrating more or less significant birthdays in 2009.

Continuing the idea, here's a list of possibilities to choose from for 2010, with the ordinal in parentheses. The list is skewed to 20th Century lit since I didn't go farther back in my searching except for certain authors -- there will be scads of additional selections available if you feel like looking around. Feel free to offer any other suggestions in the comments.

I'll strike out those I get around to reading during the year.

• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (30th) - Douglas Adams
• I, Robot (60th) - Isaac Asimov
• The Handmaid’s Tale (25th) - Margaret Atwood
• Martian Chronicles (60th) - Ray Bradbury
• Ender’s Game (25th) - Orson Scott Card
• The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (10th) - Michael Chabon
• Farewell, My Lovely (70th) - Raymond Chandler
• The Brothers Karamazov (130th) - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Sign of Four (120th) - Arthur Conan Doyle
• Baudolino (10th) - Umberto Eco
• The Name of the Rose (30th) - Umberto Eco
• LA Confidential (20th) - James Ellroy
• As I Lay Dying (80th) - William Faulkner
• Good Omens (20th) - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
• Love in the Time of Cholera (25th) - Gabriel García Márquez
• The Difference Engine (20th) - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
• The Marble Faun (150th) - Nathaniel Hawthorne
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (70th) - Ernest Hemingway
• Rhinoceros (50th) - Eugene Ionesco
• The Cider House Rules (25th) - John Irving
• The Town and the City (60th) - Jack Kerouac
• Tristessa (50th) - Jack Kerouac
• Immortality (20th) - Milan Kundera
• To Kill a Mockingbird (50th) - Harper Lee
• A Canticle for Leibowitz (50th) - Walter M. Miller
• Devil in a Blue Dress (20th) - Walter Mosley
• Ringworld (40th) - Larry Niven
• The Violent Bear It Away (50th) - Flannery O’Connor
• Hemingway's Chair (15th) - Michael Palin
• Skinny Legs and All (20th) - Tom Robbins
• Still Life with Woodpecker (30th) - Tom Robbins
• Contact (25th) - Carl Sagan
• Green Eggs and Ham (50th) - Dr. Seuss
• One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (50th) - Dr. Seuss
• The Bachelors (50th) - Muriel Spark
• The Ballad of Peckham Road (50th) - Muriel Spark
• Cryptonomicon (10th) - Neal Stephenson
• Zeitgeist (10th) - Bruce Sterling
• The Artificial Kid (30th) - Bruce Sterling
• The Snake’s Pass (120th) - Bram Stoker
• A Confederacy of Dunces (30th) - John Kennedy Toole
• The Accidental Tourist (25th) - Anne Tyler
• Hocus Pocus (20th) - Kurt Vonnegut
• The Sleeper Awakes (100th) - H.G. Wells
• The Age of Innocence (90th) - Edith Wharton
• Jeeves in the Offing (50th) - P.G. Wodehouse
• Mrs. Dalloway (85th) - Virginia Woolf
• Le Bête Humaine (120th) - Emile Zola
• Nana (130th) - Emile Zola

As part of my anniversary-themed 2009 book list, I re-read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (30th - 1979) and Sirens of Titan (50th - 1959) over the last couple of days and was noticing some similar themes and reminiscent imagery between them. Lo and behold, via Wikipedia:

In a 1979 interview released in 2007, Douglas Adams discussed Vonnegut as an influence on The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy[7]:

"Sirens of Titan is just one of those books – you read it through the first time and you think it's very loosely, casually written. You think the fact that everything suddenly makes such good sense at the end is almost accidental. And then you read it a few more times, simultaneously finding out more about writing yourself, and you realize what an absolute tour de force it was, making something as beautifully honed as that appear so casual."

As the saying goes in Sirens,

I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

;) But Adams was right -- Vonnegut's book feels casually written, but as you approach the end you get that immediate sense of the masterful construction involved.

Update: Whoa, the accidents continue. I have three books left on the 2009 list, two by Ursula K. Le Guin* and finally From Hell (10th** - 1999), the Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell graphic novel about Jack the Ripper. In the Wikipedia article:

From Hell was partly inspired by the title of Douglas Adams' novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency; to solve a crime holistically, one would need to solve the entire society in which it occurred.

I bet an interesting reading list could be constructed by following a chain of inspiration from author to author or even book to book.

* - The Left Hand of Darkness (40th - 1969) and The Dispossessed (35th - 1974)

** - While the original 10 volumes were published individually 1991-96, the collected edition was released in 1999.

While my gray matter continues to flow out my nose (a cold has slammed me not unlike the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, which is said to be like having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick), enjoy these fine links:

Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox - Image from Wikipedia

The Open Sourcerer: "How to remove Mono from Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala"

Anyhow, my personal opinion of Mono hasn’t changed much. There are no Mono applications in Ubuntu that make me go weak at the knees and get all excited[...]

In the latest, shiniest, bestest, release of Ubuntu to date, and it really is a cracking release, the desktop version of Karmic Koala (version 9.10) contains two Mono dependent applications in the default install along with the Mono VM and associated libraries etc.

Now, this time, we have 3 ways to go Mono free[...]

BLAFS: "Tomboy to Zim notes conversion" (Via Zim extras page.)

The script provided here is useful if you for some reason would like to convert your Tomboy notes to a set of notes for the similar Zim application. Both are desktop wiki style note taking applications. While Tomboy uses the Mono framework, Zim uses Perl and is in general considered to be leaner on resources than Tomboy.

This small python script converts notes written by the Tomboy application to notes for the Zim application. It does most of the work of conversion but some Tomboy formatting does not exists in Zim and is hence stripped of the notes (different text sizes, fixed width). Nested bullet lists in Tomboy is converted to a flat bullet list in Zim. Besides this the script does a descent conversion job, I think.

NY Times: "Hiking History: England’s Ancient Ridgeway Trail"

The Ridgeway is the oldest continuously used road in Europe, dating back to the Stone Age. Situated in southern England, built by our Neolithic ancestors, it’s at least 5,000 years old, and may even have existed when England was still connected to continental Europe, and the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine.

LA Times: "Physician convicted in cycling case"

A physician accused of deliberately injuring two cyclists by slamming on his car’s brakes on a narrow Brentwood road last year was convicted Monday of assault with a deadly weapon, mayhem and other serious criminal charges.

The three-week trial of Dr. Christopher Thompson drew close attention from cyclists, many of whom viewed the case as a test of the justice system’s commitment to protecting cyclists.

Much like for my favorite movies, here is a list of my Top 25 favorite writers.

1. Vladimir Nabokov
2. Ray Bradbury
3. JRR Tolkien
4. Kurt Vonnegut
5. Douglas Adams
6. Mark Twain

The rest in alphabetical order by last name:

• Robert Benchley
• Charlotte Brontë
• Emily Brontë
• Albert Camus
• Raymond Chandler
• Umberto Eco
• William Gibson
• Spalding Gray
• Franz Kafka
• Milan Kundera
• Ursula K Le Guin
• George Orwell
• Dorothy Parker
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Muriel Spark
• Bram Stoker
• Jules Verne
• Edith Wharton
• HG Wells

Honorable Mentions

• Jane Austen
• Jorge Luis Borges
• George Carlin
• Philip K Dick
• James Ellroy
• Ernest Hemingway
• James Joyce
• Jack Kerouac
• Stephen King
• Herman Melville
• Flannery O'Connor
• William Shakespeare
• Mary Shelley
• Neal Stephenson
• John Steinbeck
• Hunter S Thompson
• Virginia Woolf
• Oscar Wilde
• PG Wodehouse
• Emile Zola

Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine travel to some of the most remote places on earth in search of animals on the edge of extinction. Follow the journey online through exclusive video and blogs.

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