cool
thanks
i'm glad to know that
i'll have to use it to impress someone
and i have just the man in mind
ta muchly
Nisaba Merrieweather <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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
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