…the real disgrace of England is the railway sandwich, – that whited sepulchre, fair enough outside, but so meagre, poor and spiritless within, such a thing of shreds and parings, such a dab of food, telling us that the poor bone whence it was scraped had been made utterly bare before it was sent into the kitchen for the soup pot. (Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right, 1869)
Still true, 140 years later. Eating anything from a railway station is an exercise in extortion and gustatory torture. For the price of a decent curry in any West Midlands town, you're presented with a rock hard, tasteless lump of 'bread' containing stale and flavour-free substances masquerading as cheese, meat or vegetables. Douglas Adams knew a lot about British railway and pub food. He once speculated that British pub food was meant as
'a form of penance for some forgotten, but unimaginably dire sin. The sausages are for those who know what their sins are, and wish to atone for something specific'.
This is probably why Arthur Dent retired to an obscure planet to become a tribe's Sandwich Maker. Douglas Adams also had something to say about academia:
“It is often said that a disproportionate obsession with purely academic or abstract matter indicates a retreat from the problems of real life. However, most of the people engaged in such matters say that this attitude is based on three things: ignorance, stupidity, and nothing else.”
1. Blogger (e.g. Google) is incompetent.
2. If you can't log in to your blogger account, ignore their rarely updated and useless status page and @blogger Twitter account because they'll ignore you.
3. Don't bother with their claim that wiping your cache and history will sort it. It won't. You'll have to use Firefox, and even that will log you out every time you post.
4. Sit quietly and curse.
5. Think of Douglas Adams:
I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer.
Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, "You know that thing you just did? Don't do that."
The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true?
"It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils," came a low growl from somewhere on the table, "without undergoing a pre-frontal lobotomy."
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
Having just had to write "Brainyquote is not an academic source" on an essay, I'm starting to feel that way.
Douglas Adams was one of the funniest men who ever lived. The author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Dirk Gently and more died 10 years ago, at only 49. He was a reluctant writer, and enthusiastic consumer of Apple computers when everyone else thought they were rubbish, and a profound commentator on Englishness, cricket, the awfulness of English pubs, the mores of the bourgeoisie, and the utterly surreal nonsense that we pretend is reality.
He was - of course - a huge fan of the internet and the Guide itself is a prediction of the web-enabled smartphone.
So here's part 1 of his little-seen Hyperland, in which he and Tom Baker (yes, Dr. Who) explain the internet to everybody in 1990 - a year before Berners-Lee invented hyperlinking and therefore the Web.
Some Adams quotes:
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."
"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer"
"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
"The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"You live and learn. At any rate, you live."
"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."
"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
"We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win."
"This planet 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 movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
"We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books."
"Life,” said Marvin dolefully, “loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it."
"Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through."
"It all sounds rather naive and sentimental to be talking about children laughing and dancing and singing together when we all know perfectly well that what children do in real life is snarl and take drugs."
"The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is worth all the bother. On Earth, the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to the other - particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e., covered with tar, full of smoke, and short of fish."
At long last. Douglas Adams wrote the wonderful The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio/tv series/novels, but also a couple of existential science/philosophy detective novels featuring Dirk Gently which have been crying out for a television version for decades. This is why I pay my licence fee.
BBC4 will also dramatise Adams's 1987 novel about anti-hero Dirk Gently next year. Adams was writing a third Dirk Gently book, The Salmon of Doubt, at the time of his death in 2001.
Well, it is for me: I came back from seeing Jo and Ben loaded with books Ben either thought I'd like, or wanted to get rid of (he's ruthless, that man).
I am not a hoopy frood. In the HHGTTG galaxy, I am more Dentarthurdent (if you aren't familiar with the world of Douglas Adams, imagine Arthur as the proto-Mark Corrigan) than Ford Prefect. They both own good dressing gowns and exist in a state of befuddlement with the world's degradation. Only Mark has eaten a girl's dog though, and Arthur's essentially kind.
Today is Douglas Adams appreciation day, known as Towel Day. This is because 'a towel is the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have', and if you know where your towel is, friendly types will lend you anything else you may have mislaid.
I will be donning dressing gown and towel today, because I'm a huge fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide radio series, BBC series and books. They're more than a collection of Adams's one-liners about tea, cricket and technology - there's real heart in there, and serious (though sentimental) liberal-left values. Arthur is a man out of time, baffled by the shallowness of the Porsche-driving advertising executives who stand in for friends. A cup of tea, a girlfriend and peace and quiet is all he needs, yet the universe keeps intervening - blowing up Earth, for instance. The series is essentially a howl of pain as Adams observes the gentle liberalness which he saw as encapsulating Englishness ripped apart by capitalism and the Tories.
Douglas also cared hugely about species loss, what we've done to the planet, and Apple Macs. He died at the age of 51 in 2001. He's also responsible for my PhD-writing motto:
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by".
The final Twittercast (I know, I know) from the LCROSS satellite deliberately (and unsuccessfully) crashed into the moon the other days was a Douglas Adams quote - the first (and last) thoughts of the sperm whale which materializes above Magrathea then plummets to its doom.
What book has changed your life? What one book should people read? What one book shouldn't anyone read. I tried these questions on my first-year students and discovered that nobody likes 19th-century novels any more.
My answers:
Changed my life: Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
Book everyone should read: more tricky - so many good ones, so many for particular reasons. The Communist Manifesto? The Wind in the Willows? The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
Don't touch with a bargepole: The Lord of the Rings. Atlas Shrugged. The Book of Mormon. Left Behind. Any of Dickens' 'funny' novels. The Narnia novels. Loads more…
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe (can't remember which volume), Adams makes the point that humanity thinks it's the most advanced race on earth because it possesses nuclear weapons, amongst a bunch of other stupid developments. The dolphins think they're the most advanced species precisely because humans have nuclear weapons etc. etc.
The dolphins are right. Santino the Swedish Chimpanzee has demonstrated that humans aren't the only animals with the ability to plan for the future - an ability which proves an amazing level of abstract reasoning function. While the zoo was closed, Santino was making and storing rocks ready to bombard visitors. When the zoo closed for the winter, he didn't bother making them because he knew they wouldn't be needed.
Clearly, Santino didn't like being entertainment, and found a way to make his point consistently and clearly. What have humans done for Santino? Set him free? Provided secluded accommodation? Urgently re-written our animal experimentation laws to take into account the fact that lab chimps must spend their evenings in mortal dread of the next morning's torture?
No. Humans cut Santino's nuts off. That'll show him. Bet he didn't foresee that, despite his future-planning capability.
