Felix Atagong's Unfinished Projec

Gentle Ghosts

Entry 274

I have (re)read Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency for about the fourth time now and still I'm puzzled. I really don't understand the ending and maybe some helpful ghost could give me a call to clear things up a little...

Attention: if you haven't read the book...

S P O I L E R S  A H E A D

When the ghost from the planet Salaxar (who hijacked the body of Michael Wenton-Weakes) arrives in Cambridge he has a chat with Dirk Gently who says at a certain point: "I've never cross-examined a four-billion-year old ghost before." How does Dirk knows the ghost is that old, wouldn't it be more logical to assume that the ghost is of Coleridge's time period (some 200 years ago). It is only in the next chapter that the ghost reveals that he (she? it?) is a space traveller who roamed the earth before life on it started. But that is only a minor point.

The time machine is then used to transport the ghost-Michael-Wenton-Weakes entity back in time so that he (she? it?) can prevent his spaceship from exploding. Only when it is nearly too late the holistic detective finds out that the spaceship explosion will trigger life on earth. Although he has travelled a few billion years back in time he has now only 2 minutes to save the world.

What happens in those two minutes? Do they kill Michael Wenton-Weakes (with the space travelling ghost inside) while he is walking towards the ship? If yes, how? Do they shoot him although I don't recall a gun? They can't run into the poisonous atmosphere and grab Michael Wenton-Weakes so they need to stop him another way.

There is a two minutes unexplained gap in the book.

In the following chapter the gang of time travellers (minus Michael who is apparently dead) are already back in Coleridge's cottage and change the Kubla Khan poem, this to prevent that the two Salaxar ghosts (thanks to the time paradoxes the amount of living ghosts has doubled) will remember how to destroy life on earth once again (or again and again).

Can someone provide me with the What and Where and When and How and Why and Who of this All?

If you are confused by this post you'll know exactly how I felt after reading the book.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: So Long

The Dirk Gently Time Travel Thread

Entry 287

If you happen to read this blog on a regularly basis, what I don't believe at all by the way, then you may have seen, and probably not read, several posts about Douglas Adams. In Dirk Gently's first adventure the holistic detective meets

A: a retired time lord who isn't called a time lord for copyright reasons so I assume (Douglas Adams used to write for Doctor Who at the Beeb.) and;
B: a few ghosts:
B stroke 1: one pathetic one who tries to phone home to whisper a last message to his sister and;
B stroke 2: another ghost who tries to travel back into time to undo the things that turned him into a ghost to begin with.

Now a blog is a bit like a timeline: things that were published a while ago are canned inside the archives, while things that have been posted recently are flourishing in the 'present' section of the blog.

This is of course utterly confusing as my thread about Dirk Gently started with a problem in the past while possible solutions have been posted in the immediate future, that has become the past as well now that you read this. If you start reading the top story in the Dirk Gently category you will find out after some time that it is really the wrapping up from the posts before, so you better start reading from bottom to top if you catch my drift.

Not to confuse you even more, gentle reader, I put here the threads in ascending chronological order: first post first, last post last. Or is that descending? One never knows with these time paradoxes. Anyway you may read from top to bottom here, I guess.

Gentle Ghosts 
Tukler's Time Treatment 
2001: A Time Odyssey 
Mrs Sauskind's Cat And Other Relevant Facts 
The Wrath Of Kubla Khan 
Tukler's Revenge 

In my search for possible theories about Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency I stumbled upon this, so if you still haven't got enough of it, here it is:
An Invalid Ending

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: The Abandon Earth Kit aka How To Leave The Planet

This Satanic Trip

Entry 298

OK, I admit. I am in my Douglas Adams period. During those periods all that I touch, all that I see, all that I taste, and all I feel circles around DNA. However, you have to admit, the man was a genius. But also a shrewd entrepreneur.

He made Hitchhiker radio shows (on the air, on vinyl, on CD and even on DVD), books, comics, a computer game, a television show, a (rather bad) movie, and even a towel. The man did not only look like one but was also a mogul of good taste. He even played on stage with Pink Floyd. For his birthday. Just like that. What you gonna do for your birthday? Oh, I think I will jam a bit with Pink Floyd in a room with 30,000 spectators. Should be fun.

Of course it was a fine designed master plan. Nearly every sidestep in one of his novels can be extrapolated into a new adventure. And thus the novel Life, the Universe and Everything, whose title was, by the way, taken out of one of his other books, contained a sentence that become the plot for yet another one, other than the first other, if you can still follow me on this trip through Adams's parallel paradise.

Starship Titanic, or fully titled, Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic, was not written by DNA, but was commissioned by him to a parrot, not a dead parrot of course, but a living one. Terry Jones, who used to be a full Monty Python in his glory days, did the deed.

So far for the introduction. Now for the book. What could be better then to quote a bit?

"Yarktak, Edembop, Raguliten, Desembo, Luntparger, Forzab, Kakit, Zimwiddy, Duterprat, Kazitinker-Rigipitil, Purzenhakken, Roofcleetop, Spanglowiddin, Buke-Hammadorf, Bunzlywotter, Brudelhampon, Harzimwodl, Unctimpoter, Golholiwol, Dinseynewt, Tidoloft, Cossimiwip, Onecrocodil, Erklehammerdrat, Inchbewigglit, Samiliftodft, Buke-Willinujit..."

You may have guessed it; it is full of aliens. Some of them even have sex with an Earth specimen, and that goes a bit like this: "It sounded as if they might have been playing polo, or doing a bit of water-skiing all mixed in with some pretty serious weight-lifting. "

Not bad at all.

The best part of the book is saved till the end. It is a picture. Of the author. Sitting in front of his bookcase. Laptop on his lap. Naked.

By the way: Starship Titanic is also a computer game. Not a towel... yet...

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Gentle Ghosts 

Nomen Est Omen: Starship Titanic

Entry 300

Having read the Douglas Adams novel  that was actually written by Terry Jones, from Monty Python fame, I found that it was about time to titillate my visual sensor systems and to play the game that listens to the same title: Starship Titanic.

I remember the game well, around the year 2000 it was lying in heaps in the sales bin of a local CD shop, that also happened to sell some software and videos of girls in various stadia of nakedness, and perhaps due to the fact that nobody knew what this shop was actually selling it went bankrupt after a while. Therefore, I never had the chance to buy the Starship Titanic box, which apparently contained some 3D-glasses that do not come handy at all in playing the game.

Lucky for me I could take a space-cab to the nearest parallel universe were time stood still at 1998 and where I could get hold of one of those goodies. I realize this may not be all together legal at this mirror side of ZZ 9 plural Z alpha but who cares. The day some person or thing will bring the box out again, I will buy it, paying with real zilch, promised.

So after installing the game and browsing the net to find that particular Cinepak codec to make the game run under Window XP Service Pack 2, I placed myself in front of my flatscreen and pressed the Starship Titanic icon. The game is strange, so strange it took me two ctrl-alt-del sessions to understand that this was how the game was supposed to start. I was quite baffled by the touchdown of the ship and the movie that followed it. So I prepared for a strange, interesting and hilarious adventure...

Meatloaf once vociferously expressed that 'two out of three ain't bad', but in this case I can't totally agree. Although the game promises to have a graphical interface it really is just an upgraded text adventure with some simple click and point interaction. The screen doesn't give you the first person free movement environment as promised (although the Wolfenstein 3D engine was invented seven years before that, in 1991) but consists of a multitude of slides with hotpoint triggers and a visual effect to imitate some action from one view to another. These visual effects have been programmed into 446 AVI files, so there is really a lot to watch, but it starts getting tedious after a while anyway as 'moving around' inside a room isn't always as simple and easy as it looks. In order to solve a puzzle, some objects lying on the floor have to be taken but due to the fact that the right slide has to be triggered before this can be done this becomes a rather frustrating experience. The same goes for finding the right elevator, the right corridor, the right room... (That click and point games don't need to be boring was already proven by Lucasarts in 1993 with Days of the Tentacle: Tentacle Day.)

Douglas Adams was a storyteller and the Starship Titanic novel proves there was an - albeit rather flimsy - story to tell. That story gets completely lost in the game. It starts promising enough with the introduction by the doorbot after the ship has demolished your house (again an AVI movie), but after that you are on your own... Early in the game you find a dead body and it is left to your imagination to find out who this is, who has killed him and why, why he is carrying these goodies, etc... An attempt is made when you find the logins and passwords of the mailboxes of the dead guy, but reading through a dozen of 'mails' is a typical text adventure solution and not apt for a graphical game. (The Starfleet Academy adventure from 1995 featured 'live' video-messages from Captain James T. Kirk, Captain Hikaru Sulu and Chekov to help you through your missions.)

Nearly at the end of the game you have to resuscitate the ship's main computer, called Titania, and this robotic creature gabbers nearly for five minutes without the possibility to shut her up. While she is explaining what has happened to the ship and who may be responsible for all this and why she thinks you should take the helm and lead us back to Earth in order to find that Leovinus fellow back who has probably jumped off the ship while it crash-landed the only thing you can think of is that it was a big mistake to wake her up to begin with.

Douglas Adams himself can be seen two times in the game, once as the enthusiast author ordering us to hurry up with the game (a237.avi), the second time as Leovinus (a113.avi) in something that can be defined as being the most boring epilogue for a game ever. It's the description of the game in a nutshell, I can only deduct that somewhere during the development of the software the creators must have lost the interest (or the money).

It's a pity, because the conversation engine that can handle more than 5000 situations and contains, apparently, 10000+ sentences is a real treat. Ask about The Beatles, about Monty Python, about Douglas Adams, 42, Life, the Universe and Everything, the maximum air velocity of an unladen swallow and you'll get some very daft answers.

Forget the game - just keep talking to the bots, that is were the fun is...

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: This Satanic Trip 

The Abandon Earth Kit aka How To Leave The Planet

Entry 307

Don't panic!

This 'Unfinished Project' of mine has finally been, euh, finished. It contains a text from Douglas Adams that he once wrote for a shoe company. A Belgium shoe company! Although written in Flash it isn't flashy at all. You are warned.

How To Leave The Planet

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Nomen Est Omen: Starship Titanic

Popular science books are fun

Entry 323

I've got one called On The Road To Infinity from Dr. A.E. Wallenquist, published by the Bosscha Space Observatory Lembang (Java) in 1934. It is still written in the old school Dutch spelling from De Vries and Te Winkel (1864) so it is even tricky for Dutch speaking people to read (the modern Dutch spelling rules were made in 1946 but it took to 1954 before the new spelling was made official). But Mr. Wallenquist, who was an astronomer, was perhaps too much of a scholar to write gobbledygook so the book isn't as nonsensical as one could expect after 70 years.

I've tried to look up several popular science authors from a few decades ago on the web. The Belgian Jos Van Limbergen, who wrote a dozen book club bestsellers, is even unknown on Dutch Wikipedia. Only some antiquarian sites that have copies of his books mention this author.

Does anybody care for I.S. Shklovskii who wrote Universe, Life, Mind in 1962? This Soviet astrophysicist had to introduce mild communist propaganda and some blatant American criticism in his book in order to see it published. Nevertheless when Carl Sagan received a copy of the book he was so thrilled by it that he asked Iosif Samuilovich if he could translate it into English. Sagan added some of his own comments, sometimes disagreeing with Shklovskii, to the original text, deleted some of the propaganda (but mentioned why and where he did that) and in 1966 the book was presented to the American public under the title: Intelligent Life in the Universe. Sagan and Shklovskii truly believed, or at least suggested, that aliens had already visited Earth. Thus was the political situation in those days that the authors could not meet and had to communicate solely by writing. Shklovskii once commented to Sagan: "The probability of our meeting is unlikely to be smaller than the probability of a visit to the Earth by an extraterrestrial cosmonaut".

Propaganda wasn't always a Soviet thing of course. Jos Van Limbergen's 1961 Conquest of the Moon (Dutch: Verovering van de Maan) contains several anti-communist attacks. The fact that the Russian spacecraft Lunik 2, the first object ever to land (i.e. crash) on the moon, contained a Soviet flag is named a 'chauvinist sin' done by communist 'pub philosophers'. But one has to confess; even today Russians have the flair to plant their flag on undiscovered territory just to call it their own, n'est-ce pas?

Probably the book that has influenced me the most is Adrian Berry's The Next Ten Thousand Years. Now here was a man who separated the science from the fiction. Published in 1973 it deals with matters as Dyson Spheres, Von Neumann self-replicating machines (Battlestar Galactica anyone?) and gives a simple DIY introduction to Einstein's special relativity theory. I took the book out of my library today - it was slowly hibernating between Brian W. Aldiss' Billion Year Spree and James Michener's Space - and it literally broke into pieces when I opened it. Out fell a sheet I once made containing the different ratios for Einstein's mass vs. speed formula

√	( 1			v 2	)
				c 2

So this was the kind of thing I did when I was young, beautiful and a pimpled virgin. One thing struck me though; in 1973 Berry did not write a single word about quantum mechanics, string theory or the 11 dimensions we currently live in.

I experienced nearly the same enthusiasm this week when I read Michael Hanlon's The Science Of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. At first I feared it would be another one of those rip-off books, genre The Anthology at the End of the Universe, where a sly editor with Vogon blood running through his veins has invited so-called ‘leading SF authors' to say something witty about Douglas Adams. After you have read all pieces, you are frankly impressed by two of them, annoyed by at least six, and the dozen other are already forgotten.

But The Science Of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is other shit. One of the reviews at the back of the book reads: "An excellent book exploring fundamentally serious matters in a most entertaining way. Rather a shame that many might ignore it because they think it's about the 'Guide'!" And for once a blurb couldn't be more accurate.

Chapter 9 deals with teleportation, and as both Captain James T. Kirk and Arthur Dent have this way of transport in common I dived into the local Bermuda triangle that contains my library and found The Physics Of Star Trek, a book written in 1995 by Lawrence M. Krauss with a foreword by Stephen Hawking (that book is amongst the few that are recommended on Adrian Berry’s website by the way).

According to Mr. Krauss a human being contains about 1 x 10^28 atoms.
According to Mr. Hanlon it is about 7 x 10^27 atoms.
The difference is a tiny 3 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 atoms and an explanation for that could lie in the fact that James Tiberius Kirk is wee bit fatter than Arthur Dent.

Both books come to the same conclusion. There is a huge ethical problem when it comes to teleportation: is the person that has been teleported the same or is it an identical copy? To quote Michael Hanlon: teleportation kills its subject and creates an impostor. Luckily, so concludes Lawrence M. Krauss, it will never be possible to teleport a human as loading the data into a buffer would take slightly longer than the Universe itself. But, adds Michael Hanlon, teleportation of, lets say, a microbe will be done before the end of this century. Already a few years ago atoms have been successfully teleported in different laboratories over the world. Before the next decade is over attempts will be made to teleport several thousands particles in one go.

Add to this the news that parallel universes may well exist, that time travel is no longer a theoretical possibility and that there is a spooky Tiplerian Omega Point where we will all be god it is no wonder that the one and only Guide has these big reassuring letters printed on its cover: Don't Panic.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Gentle Ghosts

So Long

Entry 361

I am rereading Douglas Adams' So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish for the umpteenth time now. I know volume four in the trilogy of five isn't considered his best by many fans. It is a rather thin novel and was written at gunpoint. Douglas Adams was a master in procrastination (and making a load of money out of that) and after a while Pan Books were so desperate that they released a promotion kit without actually having a book. Inside the promotion kit a prayer could be found: "Please God grant to Douglas Adams the gift of inspiration (...) so that he can deliver the manuscript in time."

As god (all of them) and Douglas were never on speaking terms the prayer didn't help a lot. In the end there was nothing else left to do to isolate Douglas in a posh hotel suite with a guard before the door and force him to write a book in 2 weeks time. Two whole weeks. Nobody really knew what the story was going to be about but artists at both sides of the Atlantic had already been summoned months before to create the cover image: the English cover (by Gary Day Ellison) showed a dinosaur morphing into a walrus, the American jacket had some jumping dolphins. To quote biographer Neil Gaiman in his Don't Panic book: "There are no dolphins in So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish but there are more dolphins than there are walruses or dinosaurs."

Douglas Adams wasn't really keen in writing yet another hitchhiker novel. At one point in the novel he even tells the "regular followers of the doings of Arthur Dent' to mind their own business (and stop harassing the author). To those readers who are expecting more goofiness and less love story he has the message to "skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it'. But Marvin, the paranoid android, only has an appointment with death, as if Douglas Adams wanted to say: see what happens if you keep on asking for my regular characters?

After the tin man has died the novel ends, leaving the reader in quiet desperation. Douglas Adams makes it fairly clear that he is fed up with hitchhiker as well: "There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind." It makes me think of Ian Fleming whose James Bond character (in the original novels) matures from a one-sided government killing machine to a person of flesh and blood, questioning the politics of the British Empire concerning Cuba and refusing to kill a spy in The Living Daylights.

 

So long is in many ways a tender love story, and its construction - which is very episodic - is full of little scenes that are almost self-contained and that show off Douglas' talent as a sketch writer. (Nick Webb in Wish You Were Here, p. 199-200.)

Quite right. Nearly every page contains some near-to-perfection sentences, thoughts or ideas. Take page one for instance:

This planet (Earth, note by FA) has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

You can't get more perfect than that, if you ask me. The first 150 pages of the novel are a treat and contain the cookie incident, then Douglas (still trapped in his hotel room, remember) and his vicious gatekeeper from hell suddenly realised that they needed to end the book because it was Friday, five minutes before five.

In the last 15 pages of the book, obviously written in a hurry, the following happens:

• a giant flying saucer lands
• Ford Prefect visits Arthur Dent (and Fenchurch, the girl, not the railway station)
• they board the flying saucer
• they arrive at the land of Sevorbeupstry (a little tired from the journey)
• they meet Marvin who is now 37 times older than the Universe
• they read God's Final Message
• Marvin dies
• They rent a scooter from a guy with green wings

The book ends with an epilogue (making that the 42^nd chapter) in which Blart Versenwald III designs a "remarkable new breed of super-fly that could (...) figure out how to fly through the open half of a half-open window'.

Basically this post started as an introduction to tetradecahedrons but it grew rapidly into a monster. I also wanted to add something else about Ian Fleming and his James Bond character but I have forgotten what.

You'll have to tune in next year, I guess, to read the next part...;

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The Cookie Incident (back to text)

For a description of this urban myth please consult: Snopes.

For Douglas Adams' comment on this subject, please consult: The Cookie Incident.

And a short movie on the same theme: The Cookie Thief.

The Restaurant At The End Of The Typewriter

Entry 778

Douglas Adams (DNA) obviously was one of those persons who graduated summa cum laude at the William Shatner Star Trek Unfinished Projects University. An explanation may be needed here.

In the seventies several attempts were made to resuscitate Star Trek at the movie theatres. Three scripts were made for what laughingly was called Star Trek II: The God Thing, by Gene ‘thank god for miniskirts’ Rodenberry; The Planet of the Titans, Kirk going mad and thinking he’s a Greek god – I kid you not!; and an unnamed blood sucking reptiles take over planet Earth story by Harlan Ellison that would have saved Brazil’s rubber production for the production of lizard suits alone. Every time someone uttered Star Trek and movie in one sentence hordes of lawyers, agents and cocaine delivery boys were summoned and gigantesque sums of money were handed over to the actors of the original series, who were begged not to take any other movie role for the time being. (This is valid proof of the fact that movie people are a bunch of ass-eating monkeys; you must be one sick person to even think that anyone wanted to cast the Star Trek actors for another project.)

After these three aborted attempts there were talks for a new TV series called Phase II. Business as usual: the actors got paid - nothing got produced. But the good thing (probably good is not the right adjective here) was that the pilot from the Phase II series grew into that horrific monster called Star Trek: The Motion Picture (ST:TMP). (Also here the choice of the adjective wasn’t really appropriate: the picture did a lot of things but moving wasn’t actually one of those.) Although ST:TMP contained a lot of miniskirts it was rather disappointing and the tagline that this was the most expensive SF movie ever was only true because the production company had added all previous cost of all aborted projects inside ST:TMP’s budget.

Douglas Adams also was one of those people who were extremely busy producing nothing and getting huge amounts of money for it. To quote Steve Meretzky, co-author of the Hitchhiker Infocom game: “Douglas certainly raised procrastination to an art form.” In 1983 DNA signed a contract with Infocom for 6 (six) text-adventure computer games based on his Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (H2G2) books. The first in the series came out in 1984 and sold a staggering 400 000 copies. But problems arose when Infocom politely reminded Adams that is was about time to think of parts 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 of the series. DNA who, according to his own terms, suffered from sequelitis, came with another idea. Infocom didn’t want to kill the goose with the golden eggs and reluctantly agreed to produce Bureaucracy. When that game came out in 1987, already a couple of years overdue, it sold a mere 40 000 copies. Days of text-adventure games were over. (I stole most of the above from M.J Simpson’s biography: Hitchhiker.)

Although attempts were made to create a second Hitchhiker Infocom game Restaurant At The End Of The Universe it was generally believed that the game never left the development stage. But a few weeks ago, so after more than 20 years, it was announced that a playable prototype does exist.

The full story (it is very long, you are warned!) can be read at the Waxy blog. It is also interesting to browse through the comments as well. These contain contributions, explanations and alternative timelines from Infocom people such as Steve Meretzky (H2G2), Tim Anderson (Bureaucracy), Marc Blank (Infocom VP and creator of Zork) and Michael Bywater (Bureaucracy).

The playable prototype has been published on the web and can be tested at the following URL (Java5 needed): Milliways.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: The Abandon Earth Kit aka How To Leave The Planet 

Kopfgeburten

Entry 991

This week, sad week, brought me scattered thoughts, feelings and sensations. Let me empty my cerebral scrapbook first before I continue with the subject of the day. Activate cynical mood warning…

1

Three weeks ago a Belgian soldier was killed in Lebanon attempting to dismantle an Israeli bomb. He was posthumously decorated and the big shots praised him for his bravery. Strange enough nobody from the Belgian government had the guts to convene the Israeli ambassador and to officially demand for an explanation what the fuck these bombs were doing there and how on Earth they were going to indemnify the Blue Helmets, the family of the deceased soldier and last but not least the hundreds of innocent victims who have been mutilated and killed and will still be mutilated and killed for years after the initial conflict has taken place.

Whenever a believer of the true Zion faith discovers a swastika on a wall a mind-boggling tidal wave of complaints hits the media. One of the silliest moments of an anti-Semite counter reaction took place decades ago when the Belgian-Israeli Weekly accused Albert Uderzo to be racist because he had caricatured a Jew in Asterix and the Black Gold.

Don’t get me wrong. The Jewish people have suffered a lot, especially in the last century, and I’m not here to minimise or contradict the Holocaust or anti-Semitism. But I don’t like the fact that these historical barbarisms are still used today as a scapegoat to defend military actions against civilians. Just make the following headbirth: what do you think the international reaction would be if a Blue Helmet was be killed in Afghanistan by a Taliban cluster bomb? Catch my drift?

I needed to get this off my chest.

2

Some silly people bombard my mailboxes with funny PowerPoint presentations, funny jokes, funny movies and the odd portion of pornographic material. Depending on the mood I’m in I just delete the crap (with exception of the pornographic material, I confess) and nod very friendly when I meet the senders, mostly at the local pub, when they feel it necessary to loudly analyse what they send me a couple of days before.

This one nearly made me piss my pants: Statue of St George falls and gets beheaded in a church.

But it also made place for another headbirth. Why do I find this Christian blasphemous act rather funny and the bombing of the Afghan Buddhas of Bamyan not?

3

A second movie that cracked me up involves a hidden camera prank that turns bad. A moron with a bucketful of paint decorates a parked car and is promptly attacked by its owner. When the nose bleeding actor explains that the scene was set up for the general amusement of the tv glotzing community this isn’t appreciated by the victim, quite the contrary. The man doesn't feel invited to laugh in front of the camera and kicks the prankster a bit more. I sincerely hope the authorities gave the mental bloke a medal instead of a fine. But at the same time a little silly bird keeps on fluttering in my head.

Time for a headbirth. What if the beating was a scenario driven thing as well? These days it is so hard to trust television.

4

My Live In Gdansk cd/dvd/goodies box arrived yesterday and although I pissed on the concept a couple of weeks ago the situation has somewhat changed since then. Rick Wright, the quietest of the brothers Floyd, is no longer among us and thus this 5 double disc is more or less his musical testament. Friday evening I watched Echoes on disc 3 and cried a bit, alone in front of the computer screen. Thank God my webcam is broken or it would’ve been a hidden camera item all over the world. (Now on YouTube: grown man cries in front of a Pink Floyd song.) The close ups of Ricks Wright’s fingers floating forever and ever over the keyboard keys only strengthened me in my belief that the man was a fucking genius. The last track on the DVD is the obligatory Comfy Numb. Rick sings the parts that are normally done by Roger Waters. Justice is done.

This reminds me of the unchecked fact that somebody, EMI probably, waved a bucketful of dollars in front of the Floyd politely informing if they were interested in doing a sequel to Dark Side of The Moon. Apparently they all said no.

Headbirth: although Roger Waters did sing about a surrogate band in the Eighties he apparently doesn’t realise that the Floyd songs he does on his live shows sound more like a tribute band than anything else.

5

What is it with these sequels and remakes anyway? Those who know me know I am a bit a fan of the original The Wicker Man, a cult horror movie from the early Seventies. The protagonist is a 30 years virgin policeman, not even a wanker, who gets lured to an island where Christopher Lee, dressed like Neil the hippie from The Young Ones, is a pagan high priest. Although the women on the island have the tendency to dance naked in the daylight, dance naked in the moonlight and even dance naked when there is no distinctive source of light present, singing Scottish folksongs, the copper refuses to get involved. When the town’s main hottie, played by Britt Ekland, juggles her bare buttocks in front of him, he still refuses to spill his seed on the ground and thus he is exactly the right spicy man to be sacrificed to their sun god.

Recently I came across the American remake with Nicolas Cage. Frankly, I don’t like the guy and in this movie Cage proves once again that he is not a method actor but merely uses screaming as a method. Somebody should explain him that modern movie sets have hi-tech microphones that can record sweet whispers as well.

HB: Why do people make remakes and sequels if they already know for sure that the result will be worse than the original? Is this some kind of a postmodernism thing?

6

Part 5 was a mere intermezzo, because the real message is here: Eoin Colfer, his name reveals that he probably has been living on The Wicker Man island for too long, has been commissioned by Penguin books and the Adams family to write the sixth sequel of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy trilogy. The book will be titled And Another Thing and will resuscitate Arthur Dent, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Ford Prefect. I’m not sure about Marvin, the paranoid android, as he did the decent thing of dying in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, but we can’t be too sure with all these parallel universes floating around, can we?

Kopfgeburten. Should I be happy or should I be sad with this news? I’m not sure and I don’t really care.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Ringmaster