Interesting findings on the internet

[Zenith]

Telecoms hacking for fun and profit, 1836 style.

https://nowiknow.beehiiv.com/p/hackers- ... et-edition

I wasn't aware anyone had actually hacked the semaphore telegraph system, but there are a couple of fictional accounts of interfering with it. "Hornblower and The Hotspur" and "The Count of Monte Cristo" come to mind.

[mnementh]

https://archive.org/details/the-hitch-h ... 02#reviews

Current playlist; all of the HHGttG read by the original Marvin. Thankfully, he only reads Marvin as Marvin.

I loved the radio plays, and the TV show... but there's a lot of "little bits of business"... Adams' stock in trade... that don't make the cut because you'd never advance the plot in a "performance" of the work. This is a nice way to enjoy the unabridged works; Moore has a delightfully rich, brown voice not unlike aural mocha cappuccino.

mnem
mostly harmless.

[mnementh]

https://www.youtube.com/@Physicsduck

This guy is smart, uses colorful speech, and has fucked up and fixed his life pretty publicly. He is mad passionate about bringing science and applied physics to everybody, and describes himself thusly:

I am a low budget weirdo shirt – Big Beaver Energy.png

mnem

FAFO R&D.JPG

[tggzzz]

I loved the radio plays, and the TV show...

Loved the radio show; the aural and mental pictures are unrivalled.

Disappointed with the TV show. The graphics were superb, but distracted from the pictures. Zaphod's animatronic second head was laughable.

Liked Ken Cambell's stage play. He was appropriately anarchic, e.g. his Zaphod was good: two men in a single jumpsuit.

Haven't bothered with the movie. I assume all the irreverence has been ironed out by a committee.

[EC8010]

I bought the radio series on six CDs on the same day I bought my first CD player. The original radio series was by far the best and the television version was a severe disappointment for the reasons you mentioned. I didn't like the TV Marvin either. No idea what Marvin should have looked like, but that wasn't it.

The film was terrible. Except... And it's a big "except", the Vogons. The Vogons were absolutely superb. The rest of the film is dreadful. Arthur Dent with a successful love interest? Come on! Arthur Dent is the quintessential bemused no-hoper where women are concerned. Any female association would be entirely accidental and neither noticed nor understood.

I bought the Eagles' LP having "Journey of the Sorcerer" on it because I enjoyed THGTTG's theme music. It was a disappointment. Not often that a cover is better than the original.

[tggzzz]

I bought the radio series on six CDs on the same day I bought my first CD player. The original radio series was by far the best and the television version was a severe disappointment for the reasons you mentioned. I didn't like the TV Marvin either. No idea what Marvin should have looked like, but that wasn't it.

The film was terrible. Except... And it's a big "except", the Vogons. The Vogons were absolutely superb. The rest of the film is dreadful. Arthur Dent with a successful love interest? Come on! Arthur Dent is the quintessential bemused no-hoper where women are concerned. Any female association would be entirely accidental and neither noticed nor understood.

I bought the Eagles' LP having "Journey of the Sorcerer" on it because I enjoyed THGTTG's theme music. It was a disappointment. Not often that a cover is better than the original.

I taped the radio series on its first broadcast at 10:30pm, simultaneously listening on cans. I could have sworn it was in 1977, but every source says 1978.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitch ... nd_repeats

Just why I decided to record that isn't clear, but I was glad I did since it wasn't available for many years after that. I bought the double album version in 1979, but was severely disappointed: it was re-recorded and had poor effects.

[mnementh]

I bought the radio series on six CDs on the same day I bought my first CD player. The original radio series was by far the best and the television version was a severe disappointment for the reasons you mentioned. I didn't like the TV Marvin either. No idea what Marvin should have looked like, but that wasn't it.

The film was terrible. Except... And it's a big "except", the Vogons. The Vogons were absolutely superb. The rest of the film is dreadful. Arthur Dent with a successful love interest? Come on! Arthur Dent is the quintessential bemused no-hoper where women are concerned. Any female association would be entirely accidental and neither noticed nor understood.

I bought the Eagles' LP having "Journey of the Sorcerer" on it because I enjoyed THGTTG's theme music. It was a disappointment. Not often that a cover is better than the original.

Adams was involved in the BBCTV adaptation as well as the radio play, and that Marvin matches the descriptives in the books pretty well, to my estimation. The movie Marvin is the one that was a disappointment to me, though it had its moments; usually due to Alan Rickman's impeccable deadpan delivery. Martin Freeman's uncanny ability to portray "overwhelmed and astounded" in so many ways, was the other mitigating factor for me.

What broke the movie for me was that they were so mired in conventional Hollyweird storytelling that they had to concoct a conventional villain out of whole cloth; Humma Kavula was literally a throwaway line in the original books, and making him a key protagonist just screamed how poorly they understood the original material. I loathed him not just because of Malkovich's unerringly delivered smarm, but because he should never have existed.

I far preferred the TV series to the movie, yes on that I agree, but I don't feel the TV show was at all inferior to the radio plays; it was just different. You have to tell the story differently as it's a different medium, and as Adams had creative control over it just as with the radio show, I fully accept it as "canon" material. It was my first exposure to Douglas Adams so it will always have a special place in my heart.

As for Arthur Dent's inability to hold a love interest... no, you are absolutely wrong there; it was literally the entire focus of later books in the series.

As for Journey of the Sorcerer... it was one of my favorite Eagles cuts long before I ever heard of HHGttG... hearing it playing was what made me stop channel-flipping long enuf to check out "this new weirdness on PBS". The Eagles were literally the soundtrack to my life; they released music that coincided with all the shit going on in my life for over a decade as I was growing up, and that foray into prog-rock was one of many things that echoed what was going on in my life elsewhere.

So, in short:

HHGttG Tongue.png

mnem
pants are highly overrated.

[AVGresponding]

I bought the radio series on six CDs on the same day I bought my first CD player. The original radio series was by far the best and the television version was a severe disappointment for the reasons you mentioned. I didn't like the TV Marvin either. No idea what Marvin should have looked like, but that wasn't it.

The film was terrible. Except... And it's a big "except", the Vogons. The Vogons were absolutely superb. The rest of the film is dreadful. Arthur Dent with a successful love interest? Come on! Arthur Dent is the quintessential bemused no-hoper where women are concerned. Any female association would be entirely accidental and neither noticed nor understood.

I bought the Eagles' LP having "Journey of the Sorcerer" on it because I enjoyed THGTTG's theme music. It was a disappointment. Not often that a cover is better than the original.

Yeah, the film was utter shite. Martin Freeman was woefully miscast; he's a decent comic actor but the role calls for a straight man, and Simon Jones basically made it his own.

The radio series for me was perfection. The books came after, and suffered badly from Adams' obsessive rewriting imo, and the less said about the TV series the better. The new ideas in the books would have been better put into something completely new, and the TV series was pretty well ruined by dreadful recasting; Geoffrey McGivern is Ford Prefect, and Susan Sheridan is Patricia Macmillan. Accept no substitutes.
The later radio series are also poor, not even really written by Adams but adapted by one of the original production team from the later novels in the series. Sometimes you just need to let something go, and this is one of them.

[EC8010]

As for Arthur Dent's inability to hold a love interest... no, you are absolutely wrong there; it was literally the entire focus of later books in the series.

Indeed it was, but Arthur floundered everywhere in his relationship with Fenchurch and never really knew what was going on. I suspect I may have a little of Arthur Dent in me; I was informed by my first wife that we were going to be married and told by my second that we ought to be. Come to think of it, I recall a conversation with a girlfriend (before I got married) where she said, "Oh no, I'd decided I was going to have you." I have a threadbare dressing gown, too, although I am informed by SWMBO that it will be replaced once something suitable has been found. There's another similar character for you; Rumpole.