G'dday. >From: Kim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Reply-To: [email protected] >To: [email protected] >Subject: RE: [BookCrossing] watery releases >Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2007 05:59:08 +0000 (GMT) > >You can't say all of that and then NOT tell us how he died
<grin> There's the permission I was looking for. To bring everyone up to the same page, we're talking Douglas Adams, Author of Hitchhiker's Guide, Dirk Gentry and the like. I mentioned that his death is like one of those twisted and hysterically funny plot-asides with minor characters that pepper his books. He died like this:- He was planning a new book, He was in his fifties, a little gone-to-seed, personally neglected and overfed for a while, and he had concerns about his health. He knew his next book was going to be his greatest yet, but although he'd been thinking of it, he wasn't going to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) until such time as he got fit enough to survive. So he went to his doctor's, went to a gym, and got a medically approved plan to upgrade his health so that he's be around long enough to write his best ever book. He was really looking forward to it. Went along to his first ever session in the gym, spoke to his personal trainer who knew all about his health issues and was starting him off gently, got onto a machine under his trainer's supervision, and within a few minutes had a sudden and immediately fatal heart-attack. It was so fast that he, the King of Quirk, would barely have had time to appreciate the Douglas Adams-like irony of the nature of his death, killed before writing his greatest book by getting healthy enough to write his greatest book. I also mentioned his explanation of 42 as The Answer. It occurred in one of the ABC's Press Club Luncheons where he was the guest speaker a year or two before his death. They take the format of a lecture where all the listeners are eating lunch (I think the lecture is half an hour, I could be wrong), and when the tables are cleared a question'n'answer session takes place. The listeners are all journos from one rag or another. Adams' lecture was serious, based not on his literary life but on what had been concerning him over the last several years: nature in New Guinea and widllife, environmental and political decay in New Guinea. (New Guinea seems to get into people's blood: I have friends who spent as little as a year there who have spent decades being homesick, and a cousin of mine has been driven so loopy by being kept in Australia away from New Guinea that he regularly spends time in institutions). What Adams had to say about New Guinea was wonderful, marvellous, enthralling - and some of his comedy came out, as when he described the gait of a tree-kangaroo! The first couple of qwertsions were about what he had just been speaking about because he really was very interesting, then inevitably someone insisted on asking about the Number. He spoke for about five minutes, and I can't remember it verbatim, and I can't do the comedy he put into his answer. But his explanation of why he chose 42 can be summarised as follows:- I was writing a comedy, and for the whole book to work, it had to centre around a serious topic, so I decided that the answer to the question, the great question, the meaning of life the universe and everything was a serious enough issue to be funny. since finding the answer to that question is, of course impossible (because then we'd have no reason to go on living and we'd wink out of existence), the answer had to be found. And it had to be a very basic, easy answer, in front of everyone's faces. A number was perfect. Numbers are always there. Which number to choose? Well, It couldn't be a funny number, because that would undermine the joke of choosing a number in the first place, to that ruled out all double and triple numbers. And it couldn't be a number that meant anything to anybody. One is important for monotheists, two for lovers, three for magicians, four for mathematicians and geologists, five for Pagans, six for Jews, seven for ceremonial magicians, eight for the Chinese, nine for feminists etc etc. So all the symbolic numbers were out. It couldn't be a number that was difficult to remember, so all the three-digit and larger numbers were out. It couldn't be a prime number, because everyone knows there's something bloody funny about prime numbers, especially the really big ones, the eleven-digit ones and upwards. And it couldn't be an odd number because all prime numbers except 2 are odd numbers and I'm not enough of a mathematician to work out which odd numbers are prime and which aren't. So I was left with even numbers. And it had to be not symbolic, so that removed repeated numbers and multiples of ten and all sorts of other groups of numbers [which he defined but I can't remember]. So we were left with a range of numbers that sounded like human ages. I decided to choose the age at which people were most themselves, were most boring and least funny. It couldn't be an age when they were still developing and learning in spades, because that is funny. It couldn't be an age when they had started to decay, because that is also funny. So it had to be in the forties. 40, 44 and 48 (multiple of 12) were all out. I was basically left with 42 and 46, so I flipped a coin. That was Adams' explanation - he had everyone in stitches the entire time he was talking. It's worth noting that I saw this televised Press Club Luncheon significantly after I left a particular job where amongst my other important functions, it was my job to reset the number-doorlocks every week for security, and tell only those who needed to know. For other doors around the office I used 4-digit numbers, for the stationery cupboard which only I was allowed to enter, I used to fluctuate between 42 (as The Answer) and 46 (as the only other logical number that could be alternated with The Answer). All this years before I heard Adam's explanation, and its ending that he haed to pick between 42 and 46! Nisaba000 _________________________________________________________________ Join the millions of Australians using Live Search. Try live.com.au http://ninemsn.com.au/share/redir/adTrack.asp?mode=click&clientID=740&referral=million&URL=http://live.com.au Have you told a friend today? http://bookcrossing.com/tellafriend Archives and email list settings: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BookCrossing Yahoo! 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