Saturday, April 30, 2005

So long and thanks for all the fish.


Nice family day ;-) Got my tax refund today so off we trotted, well took two buses, to Fort Kinnaird and in the manner of a true Brit bought the kids each a bicycle in Toys-r-us ;-)
I love it when I can do these things, though admittedly not often I just spent so long not being able to afford anything for them and now, being a lowly student on mere student loans I actually lead a better life financially than when I worked two and three jobs, aside from all the time I have to spend with them...
After a good look around Borders, the large bookstore (a scifi mag for me, Maya book for Halldór, a mummy book for Ragnar and a nursery rhyme interactive thingie for Elena ;-) we ... in an extremely accidental way of pure coincidence found ourselves in front of the cinema that just happened to be showing The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy :-D
Needless to say we only just returned home with a very tired and puzzled daugther asking questions about the relevance of flying whales to space ships, an extremly enthusiastic son wanting to know exactly what 42 stands for, a partner with a great big grin of contentment on his face and me.. well I´m me, I´m blogging it ;-P

Must admit to sacrilege though (don´t kill me Svava, Steini, Kjartan and more) I hadn´t actually read the whole thing, ever... It´s one of those things, I´ve never gotten through listening to the whole of the bbc radio series either :-/ Since I´m confessing here, I should add that I´ve never liked the discworld series (can´t finish a whole book), haven´t finished the Lord of the Rings (own the dvds, read the Hobbit at age 6, but never liked the LOTR..?)

So going to see the movie I hoped for the best but had my reservations... Well, I thought it silly, didn´t understand all the refrences, finally understood a "lot" of refrences from friends and didn´t like the main acctress....

I did however near constantly chuckle and my overbearing movie theatre laughter rung out a number of times, so yes, I definitely reccommend the movie :-D Best bits, don´t think, blue whale thougts, the design of the ship, the super computer and dear dear Marvin :-D
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has—or rather had—a problem, which was this: most of the people 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 movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.

6 Comments:

At 6:27 am, Blogger Bob Mottram said...

The Hitchhiker's guide is great. I remember reading it when I was a teenager, much to the dissapointment of my English teacher.

I'll definately go to see the movie. I think they've managed to get Douglas Adams either appearing in it or doing a voice over (posthumously).

 
At 6:50 am, Blogger Lola said...

I've read ALL of them and cannot wait to see the film. It'll probably be this weekend sometime.

 
At 8:11 am, Blogger Svava said...

Heheh, like you see from this bit of text you published here, Douglas Adams really had a way with words. You should read them, and the Dirk Gently books too. Not to mention his lovely travelbook and the dictionaries; The meaning of Liff and The deeper meaning of Liff :-)

 
At 9:08 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

úff ég hélt að ég væri sá eini nógu skrýtinn til að eiga last chance to see og báðar meaning of liff.... En hvílík öfund í þinn garð Gunnella - ég fæ næstum því verki, mig langar svo að sjá þetta. Núna!

 
At 10:12 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

My husband had to explain LOTR to me and I felt so dumb. :-)

 
At 10:53 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

yeah, couldn't agree with you more! i.e. on Discworld and the LOTR books, snooze fest! On the other hand I liked the Hobbit and the LOTR movies...

 

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