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Hitchhiker's Guide, Salmon of Doubt
Posted by
michael
on Fri May 03, 2002 06:19 AM
from the thanks-for-all-the-fish dept.
from the thanks-for-all-the-fish dept.
ReadParse writes "There was a previous story about "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" being released on DVD in January. This turned out to be a Region 2 DVD, but the Region 1 DVD was released on or about April 30th. There are two discs, the first of which is the BBC Miniseries, which was adapted from the BBC radio play. It suddenly occurs to me to submit this story, because mine was just delivered within the past hour. Right now it's the 12th most popular DVD on Amazon." Several people also noted that Adams' final (I guess) book, The Salmon of Doubt, is now hitting the shelves.
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for once on /. (Score:3, Funny)
Towel Day coming up, too. (Score:5, Informative)
Begging the question: (Score:2)
-If
Re:Begging the question: (Score:3, Informative)
Mmm (Score:4, Funny)
RIP Doug
Radio Series (Score:5, Informative)
As well as being a good listen, it contains things not in the books (or any of the other versions). It was the original, and in some respects the best version of the Hitch Hikers Guide. You also get to see alternate ideas for things put in the books, etc. A good example is the Hagunneon (sp?) black space ship, being replaced in the book by the Disaster Area stunt ship.
Well worth it.
Re:Radio Series (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Radio Series (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Radio Series (Score:2)
The version on CD is not the original broadcast though. Due to copyright reasons some episodes have had to be edited slightly, and the mice voices were re-recorded. Subsequent repeat broadcasts and all issues on cassette and CD were of the modified version.
BBC Radio 4 did a repeat broadcast of the entire series last year. This was supposed to be of the series as originally broadcast. However the episode containing the mice was the re-recorded version, which was easy to tell as it was the only one not to feature John "Boggy" Marsh reading the credits at the end.
Re:Radio Series (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, you could - of course - buy it instead of stealing it!
BBC Shop [bbcshop.com]
Parent
Re:Radio Series (Score:5, Informative)
I wouldn't. I'd recommend buying the tapes. Yes, the tapes, not the CDs from which the MP3s were almost certainly made.
I have both tape and CD releases - bought the tapes years ago, bought the CDs shortly after getting my iPod. There are scenes missing from the CDs - one immediate example that springs to mind is the mice talking about buying Arthur's brain. Cut to ribbons on the CD.
Purists will tell you that the tapes have things missing too. I don't know - wasn't ever lucky enough to hear the original broadcasts. However the tapes are more complete than the CDs, and the MP3s have probably been created from the CDs.
Cheers,
Ian
Parent
Re:Radio Series (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.expa.hvu.nl/ajvdhek/hitch.htm
radio series & books:
http://tw2002.locallink.net/hhgg/
Re:Radio Series (Score:2)
It's not an audio book. The original is the radio series, the books came later.
Cheers,
Ian
BBC (Score:3, Informative)
It gives a feel of what to expect.
Great series if a bit short.
Next book? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Next book? (Score:2)
Douglas ? Is that you ??
For those of us who bought the Region 2 DVD... (Score:3, Informative)
You may want to do what I did - rip the DVD with DeCSS [cmu.edu], rip it to a VCD [exit1.org], and watch it in your DVD player. I found that this particular title suffered almost zero quality loss through the whole process.
Disclaimer: by doing this you are violating copyright law and can be prosecuted. Consider yourself forewarned.
Excerpt from Salmon of Doubt (Score:5, Informative)
Life
Dear Editor,
The sweat was dripping down my face and into my lap, making my clothes very wet and sticky. I sat there, walking, watching. I was trembling violently as I sat, looking at the small slot, waiting--ever waiting. My nails dug into my flesh as I clenched my hands. I passed my arm over my hot, wet face, down which sweat was pouring. The suspense was unbearable. I bit my lip in an attempt to stop trembling with the terrible burden of anxiety. Suddenly, the slot opened and in dropped the mail. I grabbed at my Eagle and ripped off the wrapping paper.
My ordeal was over for another week!
D. N. Adams (12), Brentwood, Essex,
January 23, 1965,
Eagle and Boys' World Magazine
[Editor's Note: In the sixties The Eagle was an enormously popular English science-fiction magazine. This letter is the first known published work of Douglas Adams, then age twelve.]
The Voices of All Our Yesterdays
I vaguely remember my schooldays. They were what was going on in the background while I was trying to listen to the Beatles.
When "Can't Buy Me Love" came out, I was twelve. I sneaked out of school during morning milk break, bought the record, and broke into matron's room because she had a record player. Then I played it, not loud enough to get caught, but just loud enough to hear with my ear pressed up against the speaker. Then I played it again for the other ear. Then I turned the record over and did the same for "You Can't Do That." That was when the housemaster found me and put me into detention, which is what I had expected. It seemed a small price to pay for what I nowrealize was art.
I didn't know it was art then, of course. I only knew that the Beatles were the most exciting thing in the universe. It wasn't always an easy view to live with. First you had to fight the Stones fans, which was tricky because they fought dirty and had their knuckles nearer the ground. Then you had to fight the grownups, parents and teachers who said that you were wasting your time and pocket money on rubbish that you would have forgotten by next week.
I found it hard to understand why they were telling me this. I sang in the school choir and knew how to listen for harmony and counterpoint, and it was clear to me that the Beatles were something extraordinarily clever. It bewildered me that no one else could hear it: impossible harmonies and part playing you had never heard in pop songs before. The Beatles were obviously just putting all this stuff in for some secret fun of their own, and it seemed exciting to me that people could have fun in that way.
The next exciting thing was that they kept on losing me. They would bring out a new album and for a few listenings it would leave me cold and confused. Then gradually it would begin to unravel itself in my mind. I would realize that the reason I was confused was that I was listening to Something that was simply unlike anything that anybody had done before. "Another Girl," "Good Day Sunshine," and the extraordinary "Drive My Car." These tracks are so familiar now that it takes a special effort of will to remember how alien they seemed at first to me. The Beatles were now not just writing songs, they were inventing the very medium in which they were working.
I never got to see them. Difficult to believe, I know. I was alive at the time the Beatles were performing and never got to see them. I tend to go on about this rather a lot. Do not go to San Francisco with me, or I will insist on pointing out Candlestick Park to you and bleating on about the fact that in 1966 the Beatles played their last concert there, just shortly before I'd woken up to the fact that rock concerts were things you could actually go to, even if you lived in Brentwood.
A friend of mine at school once had some studio tickets to see David Frost's show being recorded, but we ended up not going. I watched the show that night, and the Beatles were on it playing "Hey Jude." I was ill for about a year. Another day that I happened not to go to London after all was the day they played their rooftop concert in Savile Row. I can't-ever-speak about that.
Well, the years passed. The Beatles passed. But Paul McCart-ney has gone on and on. A few months ago the guitarist Robbie McIntosh phoned me and said, "We're playing at the Mean Fiddler in a few days, do you want to come along?"
Now this is one of the daftest questions I've ever been asked, and I think it took me a few moments even to work out what he meant. The Mean Fiddler, for those who don't know, is a pub in an unlovely part of northwest London with a room at the back where bands play. You can probably get about two hundred people in.
It was the word we that temporarily confused me, because I knew that the band that Robbie was currently playing in was Paul McCartney's, and I didn't think that Paul McCartney played in pubs. If Paul McCartney did play in pubs, then it would be daft to think that I would not saw my own leg off in order to go. I went.
In front of two hundred people in a pub, Paul McCartney stood up and played songs he'd never, I think, played in public before. "Here, There and Everywhere" and "Blackbird," to name but two. I've played "Blackbird" in pubs, for heaven's sake. I spent weeks learning the guitar part when I was supposed to be revising for A-levels. I almost wondered if I was hallucinating.
There were two moments of complete astonishment. One was the last encore, which was an immaculate, thunderous performance of, believe it or not, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." (Remember, this was in a pub.) And the other was one of the world's greatest rock 'n' roll songs, "Can't Buy Me Love," which I had first heard crouching with my ear cupped to the Dansette record player in the school matron's room.
There is a game people like to play that goes, "When would you most like to have lived and why?" The Italian Renaissance? Mozart's Vienna? Shakespeare's England? Personally, I would like to have been around Bach. But I have a real difficulty with the game, which is that living at any other period of history would have meant missing the Beatles, and I honestly don't think I could do that. Mozart and Bach and Shakespeare are always with us, but I grew up with the Beatles and I'm not sure what else has affected me as much as that.
So Paul McCartney is fifty tomorrow. Happy birthday, Paul. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
The [London] Sunday Times, June 17, 1992
Brentwood School
I was at Brentwood School for twelve whole years. And they were, by and large, in an up and downy kind of way, pretty good years: fairly happy, reasonably leafy, a bit sportier than I was in the mood for at the time, but full of good (and sometimes highly eccentric) teaching. In fact, it was only later that I gradually came to realise how well I had been taught at Brentwood--particularly in English, and particularly in Physics. (Odd, that.) However, the whole twelve-year experience is, for me, completely overshadowed by the memory of one terrible, mind-scarring experience. I am referring to the episode of The Trousers. Let me explain.
I have always been absurdly, ridiculously tall. To give you an idea--when we went on school expeditions to Interesting and Improving Places, the form-master wouldn't say "Meet under the clock tower," or "Meet under the War Memorial," but "Meet under Adams." I was at least as visible as anything else on the horizon, and could be repositioned at will. When, in Physics, we were asked to repeat Galileo's demonstration that two bodies of different weight fall to the ground at the same speed, I was the one who was given the task of dropping the cricket ball and the pea, because it was quicker than going to an upstairs window. I always towered over everybody. Right back at the very beginning of my school career, aged seven, I introduced myself to another new boy (Robert Neary) by coming up behind him and, in a spirit of experiment, dropping a cricket ball on his head and saying, "Hello, my name's Adams, what's yours?" This, for Robert Neary, I'm sure was his one terrible, mind-scarring memory.
In the Prep School, where I was for five years out of my twelve, we all wore short trousers: grey shorts with blazers in the summer, and in the winter those pepper-and-salt tweed suits with short trousers. There is of course an extremely good reason for wearing shorts when you're young, even in the depths of an English winter (and they were colder then, weren't they?). According to Wired magazine, we can't expect to see self-repairing fabrics until about the year 2020, but ever since we emerged from whatever trees or swamps we lived in five million years ago, we have had self-repairing knees.
So, shorts made sense. Even though we all had to wear them, it did begin to get a bit ridiculous in my case. It wasn't towering over the other boys I minded so much, it was towering over the masters. Wearing shorts. My mother pleaded with the principal on one occasion to please make an exception in my case and let me wear long trousers. But Jack Higgs, ever fair but firm, said no: I was only six months away from going up to the main school, whereupon I, along with everybody else, would be able to wear long trousers. I would have to wait.
At last I left the Prep School. And two weeks before the beginning of the Michaelmas term, my mother took me along to the school shop to buy--at last--a long-trousered school suit. And guess what? They didn't make them in a size long enough for me. Let me just repeat that, so that the full horror of the situation can settle on you reading this as it did on me that day in the summer of 1964, standing in the school shop. They didn't have any school trousers long enough for me. They would have to make them specially. That would take six weeks. Six weeks. Six minus two was, as we had been so carefully and painstakingly taught, four. Which meant that for four whole weeks of the next term I was going to be the only boy in school wearing shorts. For the next two weeks I took up playing in the traffic, being careless with kitchen knives, and neglecting to stand clear of the doors on station platforms, but, sadly, I led a charmed life, and I had to go through with it: four weeks of the greatest humiliation and embarrassment known to man or, rather, to that most easily humiliated and embarrassed of all creatures, the overgrown twelve-year-old boy. We've all experienced those painful dreams in which we suddenly discover we are stark naked in the middle of the high street. Believe me, this was worse, and it wasn't a dream.
The story rather fizzles out there because a month later, of course, I got my long trousers and was readmitted into polite society. But, believe me, I still carry the scars inside, and though I try my best to bestride the world like a Colossus, writing best-selling books and . . . (well, that's about it, really, I suppose), if I ever come across as a maladjusted, socially isolated, sad, hunched emotional cripple (I'm thinking mainly of Sunday mornings in February, here), then it's those four weeks of having to wear short trousers in September 1964 that are to blame.
Y
"Why" is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it.
The alphabet does not go "A B C D What? When? How?" but it does go "V W X Why? Z."
"Why?" is always the most difficult question to answer. You know where you are when someone asks you "What's the time?" or "When was the battle of 1066?" or "How do these seatbelts work that go tight when you slam the brakes on, Daddy?" The answers are easy and are, respectively, "Seven-thirty-five in the evening," "Ten-fifteen in the morning," and "Don't ask stupid questions."
But when you hear the word "Why?," you know you've got one of the biggest unanswerables on your hands, such as "Why are we born?" or "Why do we die?" and "Why do we spend so much of the intervening time receiving junk mail?"
Or this one:
"Will you go to bed with me?"
"Why?"
There's only ever been one good answer to that question "Why?" and perhaps we should have that in the alphabet as well. There's room for it. "Why?" doesn't have to be the last word, it isn't even the last letter. How would it be if the alphabet ended, "V W X Why? Z," but "V W X Why not?"
Don't ask stupid questions.
--From Hockney's Alphabet (Faber & Faber)
Copyright 2002 by Douglas Adams
Funny :) (Score:3, Funny)
I think this is the first time some kind of stat has gone down! instead of up when posted on slashdot.. granted its still early.. but still funny
Mostly harmless = ~HHGTTG (Score:3, Insightful)
I am (as you might guess from my
I would suggest to those who have NOT read MH to stop with So Long and Thanks for All the Fish - I think you will be much happier.
Re:Mostly harmless = ~HHGTTG (Score:2, Interesting)
Just goes to show how right he was!
Re:Mostly harmless = ~HHGTTG (Score:2)
I bought the book of Mostly Harmless when it came out. I lent it to a friend to read, and had another queuing to read it after.
On finishing the first friend handed it straight to the second, saying as he did so "I can't believe they all died in the end".
He hasn't lived that particular spoiler down in over a decade now...
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Mostly harmless = ~HHGTTG (Score:2)
And if you don't read MH, you'll never know the joys of Colin! Heck, that whole series with Ford was brilliant. As were the bits where Arthur was the Sandwichmaker. On the whole, I loved it.
So I would suggest to those who haven't read MH to go for it.
Re:Mostly harmless = ~HHGTTG (Score:2)
I agree. Nothing is more boring than a completely unfitting happy-end.
I always considered the whole series to have a rather dark subtext so it's only fitting to also have a dark ending. I rather think that "So long and thanks for all the fish" doesnt fit as neatly with the rest of the series.
Then again, this all boils down to taste so I just shut up.
But the TV series is nice in this regard because it doesnt contain the last two books.
Re:Mostly harmless = ~HHGTTG (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, it's worse than that. Re-read the section that takes place on NowWhat (I think that's the planet's name: the one that's at ZZ9pluralZAlpha instead of Earth). There's a disgusting local life form that communicates by biting. One breaks into Arthurs room, and bites him, i.e. tries to communicate with him. Arthur bashes its skull in. I'm pretty sure that the bog critter is supposed to be Fenchuch, or some analogue of her.
So, essentially, Arthur accidentally kills Fenchurch and never knows it. MH is darrrrrk.
Parent
Re:Mostly harmless = ~HHGTTG (Score:2)
When I read it, it just felt like the entire tone was off. The previous book was kind of the same way, but a bit too far over on the light and cheery side. I read all 5 books for the first time in the span of a couple weeks, so these two books really stood out for me. By the time I was well into Mostly Harmless, everything seemed locked into a downward spiral that couldn't be escaped except with the kind of sudden shift that the book started with. The ending was more a sad goodbye than deliberate destruction.
Adams explained his thoughts on the book's depressing tone in his interview [theonionavclub.com] in The Onion:
Another reason is that the last one, Mostly Harmless, is a very bleak book. People have tried to read all sorts of complicated reasons into it, and the reason was that I just had a lousy year. Just for all sorts of personal reasons, from a terrible death in the family to... Every kind of area, whether it was personal or professional, had just gone sour on me, against a background in which I had to write a funny book, which turned out not to be very funny. So I'd quite like to maybe do another Hitchhiker book that sort of perks up the tone again.
Re:Mostly harmless = ~HHGTTG (Score:2)
To me, it is the ultimate ending that could possibly happen. It left me with a giant warm ironic happy feeling in my stomach. I couldn't stop grinning as Douglas Adams wrapped up the whole of the 5 book trilogy in a final, ultimate, sigularity.
Pure beauty and art.
If you've read the other four, do yourself a favor and read Mostly Harmless. At least once.
Salmon of Doubt (Score:5, Interesting)
From the BBC [bbc.co.uk]:
"The publication will reportedly be edited but remain unfinished following its recovery from files on the novelist's computer.
Sounds like Adams felt this novel wasn't ready for publication but people close to him believed otherwise after his death. What could be their motivation?
Here I am, brain the size of a planet and I'm worrying about what a deceased author would think of me reading his book.
Re:Salmon of Doubt (Score:5, Funny)
I can't figure out how this would be different than any other Douglas Adams novel.
Parent
Motivation? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Motivation? (Score:2)
Re:Salmon of Doubt (Score:2)
"We're publishing John's porn collection, which we recovered from his computer, having used a Cray to decrypt the stuff, in a 36-volume retrospective of all that, for whatever reason, turned him on"
No thanks. Remember, if you think you're gonna drop dead, don't forget to format your hard drive first.
RP
Zone *what* ? (Score:4, Insightful)
What could possibly be the reason for zone locking more than 10 year old television material ??
It's an anti-free trade measure (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's an anti-free trade measure (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it's only partly correct.
For some material, there are licensing issues for other countries - depending on:
1. What music is used in the piece.
2. What brands/pictures appear in the piece.
3. Distributor rights for different countries.
4. Royalties for different countries.
etc etc etc.
Region coding allows them to get around these problems, by treating each release as a single case, instead of having to resolve all licensing issues in one version.
For example, when The Prisoner and DangerMan were released on DVD, Carlton UK had the rights to european distribution (they bought the rights to all of Lord Lew Grade's back catalog - ATV, IIRC), whereas the US rights were owned by a subsidiary of A&E. Because of this historical rights assignations, Carlton could only release a Region 1 version (hey, I phoned them and asked them). So for a long time there it was unlikely that the US was going to get The Prisoner, and nigh-on impossible that the US was going to get Secret Agent/Danger Man. Luckily, A&E have started releasing the Danger Man DVDs in the US. *phew*
Now, it is also used to keep prices at local market rates, instead of dropping to a global minimum. But that's not the whole story.
Simon
Re:Zone *what* ? (Score:2)
Why ? Just compare the sales in Europe to the sales in North America. I find it hard to belive that the number of Europeans buying from America, and the other way around, would have any big impact on the numbers.
"marketing purposes" is not a likely explanation.
So, what other possible purposes does that leave us with ? [bbc.co.uk]
DVD *and* Amazon in the same post :) (Score:3, Funny)
Let me guess, we should all buy the DVD and then burn it publically as a sign of protest?
Adams' readers also liked... (Score:5, Funny)
I followed one of the links off the isbn.nu page and discovered that according to this link [ebay.com], people who bought "The Salmon of Doubt" also bought:
Would you believe it?I just like the sheer quantity of misconceptions in that list item listing. Caveat Lector
Not interested (Score:2)
Re:Not interested (Score:2)
Re:Not interested (Score:2)
Easter Eggs. (Score:4, Interesting)
this is all from the r2 dvd, does anyone know if its the same in the r1?
Access The Egg
DISC 1 -
Move down to bottom of menu then move left to bring up a key pad, key in the time the earth was destroyed: 1146.
Displays the complete destruction of the earth sequence and an ad for Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters.
DISC 2 -
From the Outer Planets screen, turn on the subtitles. Go up to 'inner planets' and press left. This highlights the words "Dont Panic". Pressing enter plays all the computer readouts for the Heart of Gold display screens.
On the Inner Planets (First Screen) highlight 'Communicate' and press left to highlight the hidden planet Earth
Flick about left to right in the middle of the screen to select a hidden planet (earth). This plays the complete credit sequence (with the tunnel through the O lifted right out of the Doctor Who credit sequence)
I don't know about this, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
CG in HHGTTG... (Score:3, Interesting)
"I'm never going to be cruel to a Gin & Tonic again"
DVD as "good" as the VHS? (Score:2, Funny)
The books are good. I love the radio series. But I watched the video, and can not stand it. I owned it for 3 years. Watched it once. Never wanted to see it again.
I won't go so far as to say the video hurt the series, but I wouldn't recomend anyone watching it unless they get a 1/2 dozen beers in them first.
My Submission Got Posted on My Birthday (Score:2)
This is NOT offtopic, by the way. I'm referring to the posting of this very story.
Did anyone ever see this? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Douglas Adams (Score:5, Funny)
Arthur: You know, it's at times like this that I really wish I had listened to what my mother had told me when I was young.
Ford: Why, what did she say?
Arthur: (crossly) I don't know, I didn't listen.
Parent
Re:Douglas Adams (Score:2, Funny)
I rather expected Douglas Adams last writings was a non-issue on Slashdot, because I wrote up nice posts with links and everything and they kept getting send to file 86. From the rather lukewarm addition by Michael, I'd assume it's so. Too bad he didn't have an Anime version, but maybe there's hope.
"What??"
"Big yellow ship hang over MegaTokyo in exactly way that brick do not!!"
"What say!!"
"Arthur Dent, where my satchel!?! We go on Vogon ship, listen to Poetry!!"
"What??"
There's to be a VHS tape documentary [douglasadams.com], too, this from DNA's site, one year to the date after his death.
Re:huh? (Score:3, Funny)
...unless he plans to give the world "ghostwriter" a whole new meaning.