Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy DVD

My Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy DVD finally arrived and we’ve spent the last few days watching it. It’s actually a two DVD set with all six episodes on DVD 1 and a whole bunch of documentaries on DVD 2. There’s a Douglas Adams documetary, several Hitchhikers documentaries (including one about the radio version), and excerpts from several TV programs that did segments on the Hitchhikers or Adams. One of the funnier things was a “making-of” type documentary in which the actors kept being asked to use an “American” accent for various things. I always thought they’d just made up weird alien accents – I never would have guessed they were supposed to sound American. But the cheesy, homemade production qualities of BBC stuff like Hitchhiker’s and Dr. Who is part of what makes them so much fun to watch.

I went to a meeting of the Apple Corp of Dallas on Saturday. I was supposed to meet a friend there but she didn’t show up and I bailed after listening to 45 minutes or so of the group members having a heated discussion of whether or not the minutes of the last meeting indicated that a particularly contentious motion had been tabled until the current meeting or until the next quarterly meeting. The controversial motion was to shut down an old, dial-up BBS and try to move to a web site! Some members seemed to think this sort of thing was a bit premature. The only other thing that was discussed while I was there was that membership had fallen from 1400 to just 200 over the last few years. Hmmm… maybe because there was nothing going on but debate about minutes and motions and recruiting of new members? I wonder if more people would show up if there was some discussion of, say, Apple computer stuff?

Seems like most organizations, whether government, non-profit, or commercial eventually become primarily concerned with self-perpetuation rather than whatever they were originally created to do.

So Long and Thanks for all the Fish

It’s always depressing to wake up to bad news. Douglas Adams died this morning of a heart attack. He was only 49. By now, I’m sure everyone knows. It’s been covered by the BBC, AP, and the NY Times (as well as a lot of others I won’t bother to list…)

Nothing is up yet on his official site but I’m sure they’ll put some more information up soon.

We’ve read his books, have the tapes of the original BBC HHGG broadcasts, the old Infocom text game, and even a few servers named after characters from his books. From the look of Slashdot, I’m not the only one who’ll miss him. It’s hard not to imagine him in Milliway’s right now, shouting ‘Hi, guys! How’d you do?’.