From the Maker of the Total Perspective Vortex...

Zaphod and the gang are back on the radio with a new series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on BBC Radio 4-- yes, radio--and you can listen on the web starting September 21.

For those of you who are panicing, Zaphod is the two-headed ex-galactic president who boozes around with his interstellar-hitchhiking slacker pals. They've bumbled their way from the Resturant at the End of the Universe back in time to primitive Earth where early man succumbed to a virus contracted from a dirty telephone only to be replaced by a race of alien middle management executives who crashed here while escaping from their doomed world.

If that's not enough to get you interested, then you might want to know the radio plays are based on a series of best-selling books by the late Douglas Adams.

Adams claimed he came up for the idea for his story back in 1971, when he "lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, thinking about the galaxy and how you might find your way around it. His solution, the 'Guide', was an ingenious device that offered advice about almost any place, object, entity or event you might care to name - all at the convenience of your fingertips. This vision is now approaching reality on the Internet in the form of h2g2."

When most people my age were caught up in reading about the Lord of the Rings and getting hooked on Hobbits, I spent my delinquent years in high school listening to H2G2 on NPR and reading about Arthur Dent's outlandish journey from the end of the world to the end of the universe.

Before Bender joined us on Futurama on television, there was Marvin the paranoid android and Douglas Adams' satire on the radio.

FYI: The H2G2 movie is coming soon. Disney has made a feature film version of H2G2 due out in theaters next summer.

To give you an idea of how much I was into the book, when I was in my voice and diction class in college, I used the H2G2's Chapter on the "Total Perspective Vortex" as my personal selection to present to the class. It was not well received at my small, Amercian Baptist based liberal arts college in West Virginia. Then again, neither was Dr. Who.
I guess it's a cult thing that only Monty Python fans got into. Oops. I almost completed this blog entry without mentioning the number 42. Okay, I'm finished.