Friday, June 22, 2007

Brain the size of a planet...

And they give me this to do.

No, the first week at the new job has not been going well. Long periods of inactivity and crushing boredom - interspersed with occasional tooth-grinding stints of being asked to make important decisions without any of the necessary information.

"The first million years were the worst. The second million years, they were the worst too. The third million years were really awful. After that, I just went into a sort of decline."


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have yet to read/watch hitchhiker's guide... you don't happen to have a copy I could borrow???

Froog said...

Alas, no, I don't.

The original and best version is the 1970s radio shows (which I'm sure you can download somewhere on the Web these days). I only fairly recently discovered that there had been a new batch of radio series made more recently - with most of the original cast - attempting to 'harmonize' the two original radio series with the subsequent very different series of books. The books have their particular joys too, though: I've always cherished the line "the spaceships hung in the sky in exactly the way that bricks don't"; and I feel a keen sympathy for Agrajag, a miserable creature whose peculiar destiny is to be repeatedly - inadvertently - killed by the hero, Arthur Dent, in an endless succession of improbable reincarnations.

The '80s TV series was utter shite - apart from the animations which accompanied the extracts from The Book.

I suspect the recent film version was even worse, and am in no particular hurry to see it.

Hitch-hiker was never great science fiction, but it was great comedy - and, in particular, great radio comedy: it really engaged your imagination. Even more so than with a favourite book, you really don't want to see someone else's visualization of it.