Douglas Adams

One must assume a towel or towels will be making appearances in the increasingly unwritten-by-Douglas-Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Linked to already today by the entirety of Geekdom was this Guardian story, “Eoin Colfer to write sixth Hitchhiker’s Guide book”.

Douglas Adams’s increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy is to be extended to six titles, after Adams’s widow Jane Belson sanctioned a project which will see children’s author Eoin Colfer taking up the story.

Spoiler alert for the already-published fifth book in the next quoted paragraph. However, if you have not read it, you should probably turn in your geek card to the appropriate authorities.

And Another Thing… by Colfer, whose involvement with the project was personally requested by Belson, will be published next October by Penguin. No information has yet emerged about the plot of the novel but Hitchhiker fans will be hoping for a resurrection of much-loved characters Arthur Dent, Trillian and Ford Prefect, who were all apparently blown to smithereens at the end of the fifth novel, Mostly Harmless.

Why am I suddenly suspicious Douglas Adams has been dead these seven years only for tax purposes?

Anyhow, Eoin “It’s pronounced Owen!” Colfer (website) is Irish, so he has that going for him, but is also reportedly a megabestselling fantasist (see Artemis Fowl series) with quite a following of his own. So we shall see. He’s off to a good start saying this:

Colfer, who has been a fan of Hitchhiker since his schooldays, said being given the opportunity to continue the series was “like suddenly being offered the superpower of your choice”.

“For years I have been finishing this incredible story in my head and now I have the opportunity to do it in the real world,” he added. “It is a gift from the gods. So, thank you Thor and Odin.”

This is a pretty spiffy day.

• The Phoenix landed safely and is already sending back amazing photos.
• Clayton Kershaw had his major league debut for the Dodgers, and while he didn’t get the win, he acquitted himself quite well, and the Dodgers wound up winning in the 10th inning off of Andre Ethier’s first career walkoff hit. Luis Maza also hit his first career homerun.
• This is Towel Day, honoring Douglas Adams, the hoopiest frood ever.
• It is the one-year anniversary of my epic Star Wars Day marathon.
• It also marks the beginning of a one-year countdown to the even-more-epic Alien vs Predator Saga movie marathon in 2009.

Today is the birthday of Douglas Adams, who had this to say in Last Chance to See:

I’ve heard an idea proposed, I’ve no idea how seriously, to account for the sensation of vertigo. It’s an idea that I instinctively like and it goes like this. The dizzy sensation we experience when standing in high places is not simply a fear of falling. It’s often the case that the only thing likely to make us fall is the actual dizziness itself, so it is, at best, an extremely irrational, even self-fulfilling fear. However, in the distant past of our evolutionary journey toward our current state, we lived in trees. We leapt from tree to tree. There are even those who speculate that we may have something birdlike in our ancestral line. In which case, there may be some part of our mind that, when confronted with a void, expects to be able to leap out into it and even urges us to do so. So what you end up with is a conflict between a primitive, atavistic part of your mind which is saying “Jump!” and the more modern, rational part of your mind which is saying, “For Christ’s sake, don’t!” In fact, vertigo is explained by some not as the fear of falling, but as the temptation to jump!

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

— Douglas Adams

“The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place.”

— Douglas Adams