Tributes



[ Donate :    Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund    Save The Rhino ] 


Next>
Subject: Even More Bizarrely Inexplicable ( 1 of 3 )
Posted by Karen Funk Blocher

Sometime around 1979, when John and I got married, the writing of Douglas Adams became a part of our lives. John was editing Starwind Magazine at O.S.U., which had received a review copy of that first Hitchhiker's paperback. By the time we actually read H2G2, Restaurant was out, which we bought immediately.

I think our original videotape of the tv series as broadcast on PBS was tape #23 in our video collection, the first tape labeled with something other than a number. I added HHG in large, friendly letters. We watched it on our first VCR, from which a repair tech later removed a Barbie doll shoe, despite the fact that we had no children or Barbie dolls in the house. It probably came from the same place as Arthur's carry-on bag.

The only bit of computer programming I ever learned to do was to make all the Commodore 64s at Sears endlessly print the Ultimate Answer.

By the time So Long... came out (my personal favorite), I felt the need to write to DNA. I composed that original letter on a bus while listening to another rider's anecdote about how someone had managed to get a Cabbage Patch doll for her sister despite the short supply that Christmas. Over the years I've written and re-written that letter, on a Commodore, on the Mac SE, on the Performa 630 and 6300. I never got around to revising that letter on the iMac. There's no point now. It was never sent, and never will be sent.

Circa 1991, when online services were still mostly self-contained rather than Internet-ready, there was a large group of H2G2 fans on Prodigy, who posted reams of silliness every night. We all had handles -- Arthur, Zaphod, my friend Lordy the Cat, the Voice of the Book and so on. I used the paradigm of the Universe being replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable as an excuse to sign off with a different Adams quote for a handle every night.

DNA was supposed to speak at Tucson twice, and canceled twice. We had a rare 1986 Comic Relief book with Young Zaphod Plays it Safe in it, signed by Mark Wing-Davey as "the Big Z." Someone in the P* group promised to get DNA to sign that book for me, so I mailed it off. I want that book back now, please.

I've never really stopped quoting from H2G2 in my daily life. Just last night, I was writing a long rant on AOL based on Adams' comment that the Universe is so complex that most people move to "someplace smaller of their own devising." I had no idea that DNA had moved someplace else himself.

We have the books, the video games, the records, the laserdisc and VHS video, the South Bank show with DNA and Ford and Arthur and the Monk, several versions of the tapes, a 45 single about Marvin, and the official towel. I held a Milliways party for New Year's Eve in 1998-9, and served a drink not entirely unlike Pan-Galactic Gargleblasters. I was even prepared to forgive Adams for the end of Mostly Harmless, if he would just undo the damage in a future book, or in the film.

I guess I'll have to forgive him anyway. What was I angry about? Pointless, needless death, the kind of death Agrajag met when Arthur turned up at the cricket ground with a bone in his beard. The kind that a world-famous writer and father of a nine-year-old girl met after working out at a California gym.

I hope God apologizes for the inconvenience.

Regards and thanks,

Karen Funk Blocher

"'Er, how are we for time?' he said. 'Have I just got a min—'" -- Zarquon, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

 Next>

[ Back to thread list ]



 


(c) 2001