The last male Northern White Rhinoceros has died

It's been a nearly a third of a century since Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine set out on a mission to document some of the most endangered animals on Earth, a project Adams wrote about in his book Last Chance to See. Some of the animals described have maintained their numbers, or even made a slight recovery. Others, like the Baiji dolphin, have slipped away into oblivion.

The Northern White Rhinoceros, so precariously close to extinction in 1985, showed some small increase in numbers in the decade that followed. But political unrest and relentless poaching quickly reversed any gains, and numbers were reduced to the point that the Northern White Rhinoceros was declared extinct in the wild in 2008. A last-ditch effort to save the species was declared: all individuals being held safely in zoos throughout the world were recalled to their ancestral homeland, the idea being that they would be more likely to reproduce in their natural habitat. This turned out to be an enormously bad idea, as many of the repatriated rhinos were quickly picked off by poachers. The few survivors were placed under around-the-clock guard.

As of yesterday, the global population consisted on one elderly male, one sterile female, and one female incapable of bearing young. As of today, Sudan, the last living male Northern White Rhinoceros, is dead.

This is not something that just happened. We were warned. We knew what would happen. We could have taken steps to avoid this outcome. There was nothing inevitable about it, until there was.

As of yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, the Northern White Rhinoceros was effectively extinct in captivity. The three remaining individuals did not constitute a viable population by any stretch. Losing one of them does not change that reality. They were not representatives of the hope for the survival of a dying species. They were living reminders of our guilt and failure.

Now there is one less reminder.

Sudan, the last male Northern White Rhinoceros.
From the Ol Pejeta Conservancy Twitter page (https://twitter.com/OlPejeta)

Somewhere

(I may have posted this before, but if I did, I can't find it.)

There's a reverie/meditation I sometimes do, a mind-stretching exercise to keep me from getting too locked-in to my immediate surroundings. It usually starts off with

Somewhere Bono is eating a sandwich.

...and then goes on to list other celebrities, icons, rich and famous and powerful people from all over the world engaged in mundane tasks. It actually had its start with Douglas Adams, who used to play a big role in the litany: in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, there is a patient in a hospital who is involuntarily vocalizing the internal narrative of Dustin Hoffmann, with a time delay of about twenty-four hours. What could be a fascinating or reality-shattering phenomenon is written off because this delay introduces the possibility of a clever hoax, and besides, it's not like having Dustin Hoffman read stock prices or sports results from more than a day ago is very useful. (Besides, there was a very large one-eyed old man who had been admitted to the hospital who was occupying everyone's attention.)

For much of the 1990s I wondered what Douglas Adams was up to. I hadn't heard much of him since Last Chance to See except for Mostly Harmless, which felt like a slap in the face to Hitchhiker's Guide fans. ("Oh you like this character? Zap, she's gone forever. In fact, let me see if I can just dispose of all of these damned characters, once and for all.") After I got the Internet in 2000 I was able to pick up bits and pieces of what he was up to. It seemed like he was mostly touring and giving lectures. I wondered if he would ever do a follow-up regarding the endangered animals he had seen in Last Chance to See.

And then he died.

Douglas Adams died nine years and eleven days ago of heart failure after a workout at a gym. He had been stressing himself relentlessly over his frustrations at getting a big-time Hollywood version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy into production. Had he lived, I wonder if he would have been at all pleased with the motion picture that was the result of all this effort.

Bono just had emergency back surgery for injuries sustained in a fall during practice for a show. Ronnie James Dio died of cancer at 67. Michael Jackson died of an inappropriately administered
anesthetic.

Somewhere, famous people are eating sandwiches and watching TV and going to the bathroom and driving to the supermarket. Just like you and me.

Somewhere, famous people are getting old and dying, too. Just like you and me.

It's confusing, I know.

No time for a real post right now. I have to get ready for work soon. But it's a four-hour night, from 6:00 to 10:00, so I may be back for more tonight. Then I have three days off, then I go back on Tuesday for a four-hour night from 10:00 to 2:00 AM, then three twelve-hour nights, then four more days off.


Title Reference: From the Douglas Adams-authored video game Starship Titanic. These are the words spoken apologetically by the voice of the transportation system after it has lectured you for trying to exit by the wrong door.

The Ultimate Answer birthday

I'm 42 today.

I suppose by now I should have learned some of the answers to life's deep questions. And to be perfectly honest, I have learned a lot, and continue to learn. And I've forgotten a lot, and will continue to forget. Eventually the forgetting will overtake the learning, and at some point I will be left with nothing but random stains of memories popping out at unexpected and inappropriate times. If I live so long.

But the deep answers? The basic stuff? No, I don't have that. Not even close. Hell, I'm willing to bet there are several hundred things you take for granted every day that are complete mysteries to me. But I'm pretty good at faking it, so maybe you don't even notice, most of the time.

I'm not going to try to be profound now, not going to try to impart some imagined wisdom to some hypothetical readers. Hell, I just learned that I have ho idea how to get a cake to pop neatly out of a pan without leaving most of itself attached to the pan. Nor do I know how to ice a cake without causing it to rip itself apart. Good thing we already have a cake on order from the local bakery.

I don't know how much longer I have. Maybe I'll die before I finish this post, in which case I'll never get a chance to hit the "Publish Post" button, so you'll never see it. Maybe I'll live another three decades or so. Maybe I'll live longer than that, sound in mind and body. I don't know.

Hopefully I'll live long enough to get a chance to learn all those things I want to learn. And maybe, just maybe, I won't forget them.

Last Chance to See: Stained Glass Edition

In 1985, Douglas Adams (the bestselling author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series) and Mark Carwardine set out on a series of expeditions to locate and document some of the world's most endangered animals. The book that was later made of these adventures was called Last Chance to See, a title that urged readers to recognize the imminent threat of extinction faced by these animals. See them now, it urged, before it's too late. Save them now, before it's too late.

It was too late for some of these animals. The Baiji Dolphin was probably past the point of no return well before Douglas and Mark made their trip to the Yangtze River, but the Three Gorges Dam sealed its fate. The Northern White Rhino was still "in with a chance," as they say, as long as intensive conservation efforts could be maintained and something like, say, intensive poaching efforts could be avoided. The Northern White Rhino is now extinct in the wild.

Sadly, Douglas Adams died in May of in 2001. But others carry on his work. Mark Carwardine and Stephen Fry are shooting a sequel to the original expeditions, and Gareth's Another Chance to See has kept the torch burning and the updates coming.

Animal species aren't the only things that go extinct.

Catholic churches in the Diocese of Scranton and throughout the U.S. face the prospect of imminent parish consolidation. Populations have shifted, fewer men are becoming priests, and economic pressures are making it financially infeasible to keep underperforming parishes open.

When parishes consolidate, churches close.

Some of these churches are well over a century old. Many of them retain aspects of their original construction that may very well qualify them for historical landmark status. Some, like my own church of St. Mary's (Our Lady of Czestochowa) in Nanticoke, contain works of liturgical art that are both priceless and highly immobile, like the stained glass windows that line the walls and bear the names of the donors - many of them historical figures who played major roles in the history of our region.

What fate awaits these churches? Some will remain open. Some will be kept inactive but in reserve, spending most of the year closed to public and parishioners alike and opened only for special occasions. Others will be closed permanently. Some will be deconsecrated and sold, after their liturgical ornaments - such as their stained glass windows - are removed. Some will fall into disrepair, fall victim to fire or vandalism or the ravages of entropy.

In another place and time, the stained glass windows of St. Mary's church in Nanticoke would be a major tourist attraction, drawing visitors from far and wide to marvel at their beauty and the skill of their manufacture and the richness of the symbolism built into each image. (That fellow in the window on the left in the picture above is St. Leo. Read up on him to find out who the dog-dragon at his feet might be.) But in the here and now, these are just ornaments in a church that is probably slated for closure.

In the Hudson Valley of New York there is a tiny church known as the Union Church of Pocantico Hills. This small, simple structure is exceptional for two reasons: its construction was partially funded by the Rockefeller family, and it contains nine stained glass windows by Marc Chagall and one by Henri Matisse. Visitors come from all over to see them. I've been there, twice. They're beautiful. They're worth the trip.

So are the windows of St. Mary's.

St. Mary's, however, is not set up as a tourist attraction. For security reasons it is usually kept locked when services are not being conducted. But the Union Church of Pocantico Hills literature notes that the best time to observe and fully appreciate the beauty of church windows is during a service, in the company of the congregation.

How much longer does St. Mary's have to be open? How many more services will be held under its steeple? How many more opportunities will people have to visit this church and marvel at the beauty of its windows?

The answer is, I don't know. I have no idea. Not yet, anyway.

In The Stained Glass Project I am making an effort to photograph and document these windows, to save them for posterity and share them with the world. This started out as a personal wish, a "...wouldn't it be nice if somebody..." sort of plan, which only started to become a reality almost on a whim when I found myself in the church, camera in hand, waiting for my cousin to begin her march down the aisle. At the moment I'm doing it entirely on my own, without official approval from either the parish priest or the Bishop of Scranton. I will carry on with it as long as I am able. I encourage others in other parishes do do the same thing, for as long as their churches are open and the opportunity exists.

It may be a matter of weeks, or months, or perhaps years, but someday the doors of St. Mary's will be closed and locked for good. And then the only way to appreciate these works of art will be from the outside, looking in.

So hurry, hurry, hurry. Do not miss what may be your final opportunity to gaze upon these works of art with your own eyes. Masses at St. Mary's are currently held Saturday evenings at 5:30 PM - too late to appreciate the windows at this time of year - and Sunday mornings at 11:30 AM. Directions to St. Mary's can be found here. Stop in, attend Mass, throw a few dollars in the collection basket. On the way out at the end of the services tell the priest how much you appreciate having the opportunity to see St. Mary's stained glass windows for yourself.

This may just be your last chance to see.

Northern White Rhino extinct in wild

Extinct is forever.

In Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams wrote about traveling around the world with zoologist Mark Carwardine to document animals on the brink of extinction and efforts being made to pull them back. One of the more hopeful stories involved the last - twenty-two, I think? - Northern White Rhinoceroses in the wild, all in Garamba National Park in Zaire. Northern White Rhinos, which are related to but genetically distinct from the more populous Southern White Rhinos, had once numbered in the hundreds of thousands. But thanks to habitat encroachment and indiscriminate hunting, their numbers dropped to just a few hundred in the 1970s, and then 22 by the time of Adams's 1988 tour.

The situation was desperate in 1988, but a glimmer of hope existed. Dedicated individuals taking great personal risks were putting enormous effort into protecting and preserving this last wild population. The biggest threats to the rhinos were poachers, who would kill the rhinos to take their horns to be made into ornamental dagger handles for sale in Yemen. With international support and a maintenance of the status quo in the local political environment, it seemed just possible that the rhino population might recover, albeit at a glacial pace.

Everything went to hell since then.

Zaire is no more. Like its neighbors, it is awash in violence and chaos. Sudanese poachers, long a threat to Garamba, have taken advantage of the chaos. The wholesale slaughter of the rhinos continued without restraint. The numbers dropped...and dropped...until only four specimens were left in the wild. Now those four are nowhere to be found.

Gareth Suddes's Another Chance to See, which follows up on the fates of the animals visited by Adams, posted this entry this week:

Poachers kill last four wild northern white rhinos

You can follow the sad story through his Northern White Rhinoceros archives.

So now they're gone. A few specimens still exist in zoos, but they do not form a viable breeding population. At this point I think the only hope is to collect and preserve DNA material, put it in cold storage, and hope that some future scientists will be able to do something with it.

This is wrong. This is unnecessary. Yet another magnificent creature has passed from the Earth, perhaps forever, in our lifetime. During our period of stewardsdship. While we were the watchmen on the walls.

What are we doing to stop the next species, and the next, and the next after that, from being driven to extinction?

SaveTheRhino.org
World Wildlife Fund
Another Chance to See

$3.39

No, not a follow-up to yesterday's post. Not yet.

Wait. Yes it is.

I paid $3.39 (and nine-tenths of a cent) per gallon for gasoline today. To fill up my mom's car, which I will be borrowing tomorrow while mine is in the shop. It cost more than $42 to top off her tank. And I got off easy - the station across the street was $3.49/gallon.

When Douglas Adams traveled to Beijing in 1988 on his quest to see a Baiji dolphin as part of the Last Chance to See expeditions, he encountered a city of bicycles. There were motor vehicles, of course, and massive pollution, but bicycles were the primary form of transportation.

Not anymore. Cars have become far more common in China than they were two decades ago. As the economic status of the Chinese people improves, many of them are emulating the lifestyle long considered standard for Americans and other Western cultures - including two cars in every garage. India is following suit.

In Lester del Rey's short story "The Coppersmith," one of the Little People awakes from six score years of slumber to find himself in a world he does not understand, where aluminum pots and pans resist his copper-mending skills and automobiles belch filth into the air, smoke that irritates him in a way that his beloved pipe tobacco does not. In the end he comes to an accommodation with this new world. In order to earn the honest living required of him, he takes a job in the only place where he finds that his skills with the old metals are sought after: a body shop, where he mends the copper and brass parts that once comprised critical parts of auto engines. (del Rey wrote this in 1939.) He reasons that, even though the pollution from automobiles sickens him and keeps others of his kind in enforced slumber, the more cars there are on the road, the sooner they will use up the finite natural resource that fuels them. So he puts his skills to work to speed the day.*

If only it were that simple.

How soon will we use up all of our available oil? It's hard to say, and it really depends on what your definition of the word "available" is. Once upon a time crude oil could be found bubbling to the surface in some places, but later it became necessary to drill to get at the big deposits. And then to drill deeper, and sideways, and in more inaccessible places. Someday all that may be considered low-hanging fruit as oil exploration turns to more and more difficult sources of oil.

Not that the availability of oil is what's driving the price up. No, there are other factors at play, economic factors too complex for me to even think about reading up on this close to bedtime.

But oil is a finite resource. And even if we're not in danger of running out of it yet, at some point we will run low on the easy-to-get stuff. And then the question will be, what premium will consumers be willing to pay for the oil that was more difficult to get?

My Economics professor in college told my class that the world will never run out of oil...technically. The price of oil, he maintained, would climb as the availability dwindled, rising as high as the market would be able to bear. Finally a day would come when the market - the consumers - could not afford to buy any more oil at a cost that producers would be willing to sell at. And there would be one last barrel of oil that would be unsold, because no one would be able - or at least willing - to pay the asking price. And that last barrel of oil would go in a museum, with a velvet rope around it and a small plaque explaining the history of petroleum in just a few sentences.

I believe the solution to fuel oil availability lies with plants. No, not with the generation of Ethanol from corn or sugar beets or weeds or what have you; I think that process is too inefficient, too energy-intensive, to make sense in the near term. No, I think the solution rests with plants that don't exist yet, genetically engineered plants designed to use the power of photosynthesis to manufacture plant oils that can be used as fuel oils with minimal processing. (Isn't this how The Day of the Triffids started? The book, not the movie.) Of course, this wouldn't do a lot to curb greenhouse gas emissions, or to slow down our headlong charge towards...well, see my last post.

In the meantime the price of gasoline keeps going up. Yet I haven't seen a reduction in the number of gas-guzzlers on the highway during my daily commute. Nor have I done anything to reduce the distance that I commute, or to reduce the amount of fuel I consume during that commute, roughly 1.75 gallons a day.

Nope, all I can do is bitch. $3.39?! Who's crazy here?


*Lester del Rey was a remarkable writer, but you shouldn't need me to tell you about that. For a similar "mythological creature seeks employment" story, read "The Pipes of Pan", in which the Greek god Pan seeks a way to earn his daily bread after his last devotee has passed on.

How NOT to get a blog post written

Or, "How to NOT get a blog post written":

1. Come home.
2. Eat dinner.
3. Call friends.
4. Go online and check half a dozen blogs.
5. Leave comments on several of them.
6. Watch John Stewart.
7. Watch Stephen Colbert.
8. Watch Carlos Mencia and realize that he's actually pretty funny.

Several of the blog posts I've read today are intensely personal. But here's one I'd like to share: Gareth's Another Chance to See has a post about an article in the current issue of New Scientist written by Mark Carwardine , Douglas Adam's partner in the Last Chance to See expeditions, about the extinction of the Baiji dolphin. Please check it out.

Busy busy busy

Yes, I've been pretty busy lately. So busy that I failed to mention the sixth anniversary of Douglas Adams' death on May 11, or the second anniversary of Haley's death on May 23. Sorry about that.

Now, I have to get busy again. No rest for the unemployed...

One month without Ashes

It's been one month, almost to the minute, since Ashes died.

It's also been five years since Douglas Adams died, a year and a day since Haley and I went for a morning walk under a sun pillar, and a year and three days since I took this picture of my father. In eleven days it will be a year since my uncle died, and in twelve days it will be a year since Haley's death. In thirteen days it will be nine months since my father died.

It doesn't end there. Another of my uncles, who took a sharp turn for the worse at the end of last August, is not expected to live much longer.

And a friend's cat just died yesterday after a bout with cancer.

It never ends. So long as life goes on, so too will death.

Five years without Douglas Adams

I meant to remember, but I forgot. Gareth's post at Another Chance To See reminded me.

Douglas Adams died on May 11, 2001 at the age of 49 while exercising at a gym.

The world is a happier place because of him, and a sadder place without him.

Time for a few small repairs

I'm finally getting around to doing some long-overdue housekeeping on my blog links.

First off, I've moved a few more blogs into the "Blogs on hiatus" category. Now, just so nobody gets the wrong impression from this, "hiatus" isn't intended to indicate anything fancy. It basically means "This person hasn't posted in a really long time, I hope they're not dead or have decided to stop blogging altogether, and I really hope they start posting again soon." These are all blogs that I've enjoyed reading in the past, and I look forward to reading new stuff from them again someday. I hope they start posting again soon.

One of the blogs is technically on "lockdown", not "hiatus", but I've stuck it here anyway. Maybe someday the lockdown will be lifted. I always enjoyed reading this blog, and it was one of the few that was updated regularly. I miss it a lot.

One more blog is in the "Gone but not forgotten" category. Unlike the other blogs there, SuperG's "The Hurricane's Eye" is not "standing dead" (to use the Douglas Adams phrase.) It's just gone. But SuperG's other blog is back with a vengeance*.

I've finally gotten around to removing the "(on semi-hiatus)" from SuperG's My Distractions In This Modern Age. I toyed with the thought of putting "(temporarily offline due to technical issues)" after another of my links, but I think my previous blog entries about Sammie's sdfsdf.wox.org being offline are serving the web-searching public pretty well - and considering how long SuperG's site has been off "semi-hiatus", this might be misleading in the long run.

I've also finally renamed Puppedude's Puppetdude3 to Puppetdude's Puppetdude. He made the change a long time ago, and I'm finally following suit.

There's an addition to the Blog Links, by special request: Jeffrey Hunter's Random Thoughts of A Deranged Mind! Check it out!

I've also done some housekeeping at NEPA Blogs. Go over there and see what people are blogging about in Northeastern Pennsylvania!

*The title of this post is a reference to the Shawn Colvin song "Sunny Came Home", but "with a vengeance" just kinda popped out here. I usually hear the relevant line in the song as "Sunny came home with a penguin."

Leaving London

Some of the rest you might already know. We had breakfast one last time at our hotel, packed our stuff, and checked out - not without incident. A new credit card system called "chip and PIN" has been strictly enforced since February 14 of this year in London and possibly throughout the entire U.K. requiring users of European-issued "chipped" credit cards to enter PIN numbers to use them - and woe unto you if you don't know your PIN number because you've never ever had to use it before. Fortunately, my credit cards were issued in the U.S. where "chip and PIN" is not yet in effect, so we were OK.

We hiked from our hotel to Paddington Station, dragging along our luggage newly-burdened with die-cast double-decker buses and pencil sharpeners in the shape of Big Ben. We took the Underground back to Victoria Station - beautiful and full of light in the daytime - and found our way to the Gatwick Express. The roomy, comfortable train glided easily out of the station on its southward course, past the vastness of the brick exterior of Victoria Station, past the industrial harshness and sky-scraping apartment buildings of South London, past the cramped tenements and row houses, past the chaotic garden plots known as the allotments, past gradually thinning houses giving way to fields and farmhouses and horses, and eventually past the highways that ring London, including one with a sign for Croydon. It took me a while to remember that this was referenced in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy ("not bloody Martin Smith from Croydon", a line which was not included in the movie version.) We also went through a tunnel at one point, which caused the Frenchman sitting across from me who was speaking to a woman on his cell phone to murmur a soft, drawn-out "Merrrrrde" after he was cut off in mid-conversation.

We got to Gatwick without any problems, but arrived too early to check our bags. We hung out a bit and got something to eat at the airport's McDonald's - the Happy Meal toy we got there, a Noddy figure with a garage door and storybook, is about ten times more complicated than anything I've seen in an American Happy Meal lately. By the time we made it back to the check-in desk, more than half of the people on our flight were there, too, waiting to check in. After check-in we were sent to a huge and vague central waiting area because Gatwick won't tell you what gate your flight is leaving from until it's time for you to board. I guess they like to keep their options open.

It was while we were waiting that we stopped in at the airport's Harrods (we never got to go to Harrods in London, even though it was quite close to our hotel) and at an excellent bookstore where I bought V For Vendetta.

After much anxious jumping up and checking of flight status displays, it was finally time for us to board. We made it onto the flight and soon were in the air.

We were heading back to Ireland.

London, part 5

Crossing the Tower Bridge

Phase 1 of our visit to London - touring the city in an open-top bus - was just about over. Phase 2 was a few hours away: seeing Les Miserables at the Queen's Theater. In between we wanted to do some walking, some shopping, and some eating. But first we had a few more stops to make.

The Tower of London

The Tower of London is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to be imprisoned, tortured, and executed there. It's smaller than you would think for a place with so much history. Once again we were faced with an unacceptably long line for the tour itself. Fortunately the gift shop was open and there was no line there. Seeing a costumed Beefeater added to the sense that I was in a sort of historical amusement park with its long lines and gift shops and costumed characters. (These guys aren't just random people dressed in costumes but are actual retired military personnel, so the perception that they are the British equivalent of Mickey Mouse at Disneyworld is probably moderately annoying.)

Wellington Arch

We boarded our bus with the intent of riding the tour around past our starting point at the Marble Arch and back to Piccadilly Circus, which is relatively close to the West End theaters. Along the way we crossed the Blackfriars Bridge, rode along the Victoria Embankment, passed the London Eye on the far bank of the Thames, saw Big Ben once again, flew past Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace, zipped through Victoria Station, careened past Wellington Arch, made it around Hyde Park Corner without hitting any female astrophysicists on mopeds, rounded the Marble Arch, and headed on to Piccadilly Circus. I took pictures along the way, including one of this tiny car:

Look! A tiny, tiny car.
(Soon to be marketed in the U.S. as the "Smart Car")

Eventually we made our way to Piccadilly Circus and left the bus tour. It is said that you cannot stand for more than 37 minutes at Piccadilly Circus without meeting someone you know. I was wary of testing this theory - you never know who might show up.

Piccadilly Circus at night

We did some shopping and found a restaurant - the Miso Noodle Bar on Haymarket. This was a great little place, with good food, generous portions, courteous staff, and reasonable prices. We shared our table with an older couple from about an hour outside of London who came into town a few times a year, and were there that day to see a play. They were wrapping things up for the day, and kindly gave us a compact map of the city to help us during our visit. To my everlasting regret, I failed to give them my card with the address of this blog.

Les Miserables at the Queen's Theater was great. Jean Valjean was played by Tim Godwin, the understudy for the role, but I can't imagine the regular performer doing a better job. (I must admit that I found his resemblance to a bearded Jack Black in the opening scenes a little distracting!) Cornell John dominated the production in the part of Javert - during his ovation, I think I saw his smile broaden a bit when the audience's applause and whistles were punctuated by a certain American whooping from the balcony. The peformance was done on a purpose-built rotating stage which was used to simulate travel, provide in-the round views of scenes to all audience members, or simply allow for quick scene changes. I'd be interested in seeing how other touring companies stage the production, so I'll have to try to catch the show if it ever comes through Wilkes-Barre or Scranton.

After the show, it was just a matter of getting a Night Bus back to our hotel, or to Paddington Station, or to anything close. I managed to get us on a bus going the wrong way. We got off near St. Paul's, which is a pretty desolate spot in the middle of the night, but were able to quickly reboard a bus going in the right direction.

We made it back to our hotel, drew up some plans for the next day's adventures, and passed out.

Almost Christmas

One more day of work and I'll be off until the third day of next year. Yeehaw.

I may not make it. My gift project is done - I took the wrapped gifts in today; twenty of them didn't even fill a banker's box, and all together they weighed only a few pounds. I just got done making a dessert for our party tomorrow, and I also bought the ingredients for more cookies, because somebody keeps eating the ones I already made. (Well, dammit, they're so good, I can't help myself.)

But several of our clients have decided to pull some typical holiday stunts. Several assets that were due last week for projects that were due this week are now scheduled to come in tomorrow. Well, tomorrow we shut down halfway through the day, have a party, and leave early, and half of us won't be back until next year - maybe. Other clients are trying to set up critical meetings for next week, when most of the people they want to talk to will be out of the office. And then, of course, there's the new client who just materialized. We have to establish all of his customer requirements with him, even though he is essentially serving as a broker for a company in the UK and needs to consult with them about everything. Oh, and he operates out of New York City, which means that during the ongoing transit strike he is spending several hours each morning walking in to work in subfreezing temperatures. By the time he gets in, his UK clients have retired to their pubs to enjoy blood sausages and warm beer while watching a spot of cricket on the telly, and he has to begin the slow international overnight e-mail ballet. Oh, and his project is due immediately.

When I leave work tomorrow I am supposed to turn all this off. It will become Somebody Else's Problem, and much of it will probably be waiting for me, essentialy unchanged, when I get back next year. I need to start thinking about another vacation, and soon.

Comments and Word Verification

In the wake of the smenita incident and in the spirit of The Meaning Of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, I would like to request that anyone posting a comment also mention the "word verification" word required for that comment, provide a definition, and then attempt to use it in a sentence. I kicked this off yesterday, minus the using it in a sentence, on a comment posted to one of my own entries. (The word was kpbait, which I said "either has sexual connotations or is military slang for something that is likely to get you K.P. duty." Sentence: "Beetle Bailey, stay away from Miss Buxley. She's kpbait for sure!")

Here I go, like a chump

The movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy failed in two important ways:
1. It failed to please fans of the Hitchhiker's Guide radio series and books.
2. It failed to please people who were not fans of the Hitchhiker's Guide radio series and books.
The DVD is going on sale for $16.99 (much less than the list price of $29.99) at Best Buy today. Like a chump, I'm going to buy my copy as soon as I get out of work. The widescreen version.
I think before I beat myself up too much over this, I should review my review of this movie and remind myself of why I said "Actually I quite liked it."
In other news of planned purchases, The Kamandi Archives, Volume 1 was supposed to be released today, but Amazon now lists it as being rescheduled for release on October 1. For those of you not familiar with Kamandi, this was a DC Comics series created by the great Jack "King" Kirby back in 1972. It was essentially a Planet of the Apes ripoff, with semi-mute barbaric humans and anthropomorphic lions and tigers and apes and snakes and giant grasshoppers and enormous bacteria and hostile giant bats and manipulative Misfits and Mutants who could turn to steel by touching their hearts. The title character was "The Last Boy on Earth", although he wasn't, really, and he cut quite a homoerotic figure with his long blonde hair, bare chest, jeans shorts, and leather boots. I had three, maybe four issues of it when I was a wee lad. My cousin had one issue that was a part two to my part one, and I coveted it greatly. Now I'll be able to own the complete series, in hardcover, starting with the first ten issues. Too bad the Revell ad on the back cover of one of the issues for a Komodo Dragon model (complete with a Macaque monkey - according to the ad, "the Dragon's favorite meal!") won't be included. Oh well. In any event, I'll have to wait until at least October 1 to be parted with my $32.99 (a 34% savings over the cover price of $49.99!)

Douglas Adams, 1952 - 2001

Douglas Adams died on May 11, 2001 at the age of 49 while exercising at a gym.

The world is a happier place because of him, and a sadder place without him.

Actually I quite liked it

Just got back from seeing The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. I guess I walked in expecting to be disappointed, and I was, but less than I expected to be. It is, to use a British term, a "curate's egg" - "quite good in parts."* It was consistent with all other versions of the story in that it blatantly contradicts all other versions of the story (a tradition established when the original radio show was re-recorded as a record album and then written into a novel.) It had a useless third, much like the planet Golgafrincham. And it has some new elements that are simply brilliant**, and may or may not be the product of Douglas Adams' several screenplays for the movie that would not be released until nearly four years after his death.

Some notes:

- Mos Def is good as Ford Prefect. Some of the early stuff made me think that he would be stiff, but there is a reason he looked stiff in the scenes I was seeing. (It had to do with where he had his thumb shoved.) The scenes with Ford and Zaphod together are great. And his lack of a British accent provides one of the great "new" lines in the movie.

- Sam Rockwell is fun as Zaphod Beeblebrox, although he seems at times to be channeling a certain idiot president a little too well. This is a different Zaphod than the one we're used to, by the way. Sam Rockwell plays him well, though.

- If you need to go to the bathroom during the movie, do it during the Humma Kavula scene - you won't miss anything important***, or entertaining. I was going to suggest stepping out for more popcorn during the Vogsphere scenes too, but actually you might miss one old friend here. (It isn't a blink-and-you'll-miss-it deal. He's in quite a lot of shots.)

- Pay attention to the images that flash by during the Infinite Improbability Drive sequences. The first grouping is, I think, a reference to the Platonic concept of The Forms. The images in the other sequences are also related, though I was only able to figure out two of the themes.

- If you didn't fall completely in love with Zooey Deschanel in Elf, you will here.

- The Slartibartfast/Magrathea/Earth Mark II scenes are worth the price of admission. Ever wonder why Ayers Rock looks so red? This movie explains it.

- Upset that the story has suddenly had a love theme overlaid on it? The mice didn't think much of it either.

- The Vogon soldiers' uniforms appear to be based on bondage gear, of the style worn by The Gimp in Pulp Fiction. The "scintillating jewelled scuttling crabs" and "elegant gazelle-like creatures with dewy eyes and silken coats" from Chapter 5 of the novel have been brought along on board the Vogon ships. The crabs are hard to miss.

- Watch for cameos - Kelly Macdonald (Trainspotting's Diane) as a reporter presenting a story on Zaphod, The State and Reno 911's Thomas Lennon as the new, car-advertisement-narrator or game-show-announcer voice of Eddie, the shipboard computer, and Simon Jones (Arthur Dent from the radio, album, and television versions) as the pre-recorded message on Magrathea. (If you have a pair of red/blue 3-D glasses lying around, take them with you for this sequence.) Plus, as previously hinted at, a certain metal man from the original TV series is in the Vogsphere scenes.

- The POV gun seems pointless but is actually pretty neat. You're gonna want one.

- Look for the foam hand-with-finger during the Deep Thought / Ultimate Answer Revelation scene. I also want one of those.

- Trillian's costume during the fancy-dress party is a test. You have thirty seconds or so to figure out who she's dressed as. I failed, and I had the advantage of having already seen a picture of her in the costume (holding a prop that's a hint-and-a-half) in the current issue of Starlog.

- The one story contradiction that I could have done without is one of the final images in the film, not involving the main characters in any way. See if you can spot it. (Hint: it totally invalidates the plot of the fourth book in the series.)

- If you've seen the TV series, The Horse and Groom pub should look familiar. If you haven't, you should see it. It's out on DVD.

- Get the original radio recordings. Listen to them.

- Get the books. Read them.

- Go to douglasadams.com. Thank the man by contributing to his favorite charities.


I am going to see it again. The only question is when.


* Neil Gaiman says that this is an inappropriate use of the term unless I mean that the movie was, except for some pockets of goodness, overall mostly rotten. Which I don't.

**Yes, some of the new elements suck, too. I said "some new elements that are simply brilliant."

***Oh, crap. I've been thinking about this since I wrote it, and I think I've come to the conclusion that Humma Kavula may be the most important character in the story - the reason behind why Zaphod does the things he does. Things to consider:

- How and why does the Heart of Gold wind up at Viltvodel? (There is a reason. M.J. Simpson missed it, or it wasn't in the version he previewed.)
- Why does Zaphod obsessively charge to attack someone he's already publicly defeated and humiliated?
- Why did Humma Kavula run for President of the Galaxy?
- Why is Humma Kavula, a non-Jatravartid, spending his time as the leader of an apocalyptic cult of non-Jatravartids who hang out on the Jatravartid homeworld and pray for The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, the Jatravartid bringer of doom?

Douglas Adams never completely or satisfactorily explained Zaphod's motives in either the book or the radio series. In this version of the story, could he have inadvertantly interfered with Humma Kavula's plans to become President, steal the Heart of Gold, travel to Magrathea, and do whatever the hell it is he planned to do there? And could Humma Kavula have gotten his revenge by 1.) manipulating the newly-elected Zaphod into stealing the ship for him, 2.) supplying him with an Improbability coordinate cube that would lead him to Viltvodel instead of Magrathea, and 3.) implanting post-hypnotic suggestions that would draw Zaphod directly to him if he ever got close enough? With Douglas Adams gone, perhaps we'll never know. But now I definitely have to see this again.

Slow on the uptake

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy opened today as a "major motion picture." I probably won't get to see it until Sunday, and I'm hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

I like to think that I'm a pretty sharp guy, that things don't get by me too easily. Sometimes they do, and I don't realize it until a long time later. Two of those things are associated with this film.

OK, I just lost the looong version of this post, so I'll just hit the highlights:

- Sam Rockwell, who plays Zaphod Beeblebrox in this film, played a character named Guy in Galaxy Quest. The joke was that his character was an actor who had played a "red shirt" character in one episode of the "Galaxy Quest" TV show - a character who is introduced solely for the purpose of getting killed. Not a major character, just some guy. (I didn't get this until a friend referred to Zaphod as being "...that Guy from Galaxy Quest." Fans of the Hitchhiker's Guide radio series will know that "Zaphod's just this guy, you know?")

- The Infinite Improbability Drive is a quantum mechanics joke, related to the probability wave function and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. 24 years and a B.S. in Physics after I first read the book, and I'm just getting that now. And I have the official movie site to thank for that revelation, since it refers to the Infinite Improbability Drive as allowing you to be "everywhere at once" - not the formulation that Douglas Adams used ("...passes simultaneously through every point in the universe.") Now I understand: Infinite Improbability can be thought of as Infinite Uncertainty in the position of a quantum particle. Douglas Adams was a hell of a lot more clever than I realized.