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.