What do Star Wars and Mose Allison have in common?

I regisered with e-snips a few moments ago, and uploaded a couple of mp3's created by Star Wars fans. If you care to give an opinion, please let me know if you enjoyed "Star Wars in 30 Seconds" and "My Name Is Darth Vader." I assure you that they were downloaded for free. I don't recall exactly where I got them from, but I am sure they are not copyrighted.

I learned about e-snips from Stephen, who used it to introduce to me the music of Mose Allison. Mose's voice is like silk, he graduated from LSU in 1952 with a double-major in English and Philosophy, and he is a jazz legend! Stephen, I have to tell you that I have become an instant fan! Thank you so much for thinking of me.

His name is even Jewish - he feels like a soul-mate.

I don't know if any of the readers are Star Wars geeks like me, but if you are let me know what you think of the tracks. Also let me know if you didn't get the invitation, so I can send you one.

More Star Wars Nerds

See the applications for membership at the Jedi training academy! There are several really good ones ... I really liked "There is no try." Which one is your favorite?

Towel Day: A Tribute to Douglas Adams

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has a great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you-- daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhichhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost." What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase that has passed into hichhiking slang, as in

"hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

Classic.

I am very fond of the Hichhiker's books, and I miss Douglas Adams. I plan to celebrate Towel Day on the Thursday. Maybe I'll post pics on my photoblog.

Any other fans out there?

*copyright © 1979 by Douglas Adams

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I shall be off the grid for a few days (at least!) so don't worry if you don't see me posting or commenting on the other blogs I frequent. We are moving in to the new apartment and then I will be looking for a second job to tide us over indefinitely.

I remember when life was boring. (No we don't!) I can't stand all this drama, and I want to put it all behind me and just get on with life. (What, are you kidding? What is life without drama? We want life to be an adventure, don't we? Are you tellings us we wants the same old routine, day after day after day? We chose to have a family, we chose to go to college, we chose to move cross-country, all because we don't wants to be like everyone elsesses!)

Ummm ... okay ... who is that? (It's us, it's us! Gollum!)

Ah. I see. Well, I'm not Smeagol, you know, I'm Snaars. Smeagol has his own blog. (We knows, we knows. We were trying to help out and, you know, gollum, gollum, be encouraging. We had the day off and didn't know what else to do.)

Thanks. You know, what you said is true. I just have to roll with it and take the bad with the good.

Jeez, I' can be such a nerd sometimes.

$6 million ... er ... $65 thousand man

We can rebuild him. We have the technology.
We have the capability to make the world's first Bionic man.
Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before.
Better . . . stronger . . . faster.

Look out, Lee Majors!

Store Wars

Click here to discover the ways of the farm!

You'll have to wait for it to load.

It's a kind of ... field! This is great!

The Darth Side

Hello snaars fans! (No cheering, please! Really, please, it's too much! Thank you, thank you! You're very kind, you all are the greatest ... okay, now ... what was that? Haha. Say again? ... Ha ha, no snickering either, that's not fair, haha. What? ... Well if that's the way you feel, I don't ... Now that's just totally unnecessary. I don't know if I should even go on if you're going to-- huh? ... Oh, that's just mean. You can say whatever you like, I'm just going to carry on if you don't mind. Huh, what now? That's it! Security! Security! Sorry about that, folks.)

I've been taking a few days' respite from blogging (and most everything else) while my family has been visiting from up north. Soon I will be catching up and posting like mad. I plan to put up a few pics from the commencement proceedings and the little party afterward.

Yesterday my kids' grandparents took us all to the Baton Rouge zoo. I will post some pics of that as well.

The last few days have been some of the best in my memory, and I look forward to expressing some of my feelings here in the blog.

I also see that I have left inchoate some of the philosophical ideas from previous posts on which I promised to elaborate.

Maybe I should start a second blog for the more philosophical stuff?

Nah, the world's not ready for double the snaars.

In the meantime, I found this hilarious blog, written by Darth Vader. I post this link in honor of Arglor and Trey and Amanda and whoever else going to see Episode III next week. Who knows when or if we'll see each other again after that?

Enjoy!

Death to all Users of the Wheel!

Keith, me, David, and Ronnie 

It was a good night. Ronnie gave me free beer and David endured some good-natured ribbing about some of the difficulties he had in his French class this semester. Keith opened his home and provided 'quality refreshments'.

The party included guitar-playing and a wide selection of 70's-era sci-fi. A bunch of us did the Mystery Science Theater thing and had a lot of fun. We watched a few episodes of a circa-1970 show whose name I already forget ('Aliens' maybe?). It involved a lot of jumpsuits, a car that looked like a really really souped up version of a Chevy Nova my dad had when I was a kid, and some ladies with metallic purple bobs and too much eyeshadow. Then we watched Charleton Heston in Omega Man. I really enjoyed myself.

I would have liked to have played pool with David and Ronnie afterwards but we had a time limit with the babysitter.

Before ...

This is before the movie. You can tell I've been working out. *Sniff* Ayup! Michelle took the picture. She could barely keep her hands off me the whole time. I think those other folks just wanted to be seen with me. I let them stand there next to me there by the wall there. 

Seriously, that's me, David, Gradon (Graydon?), and Lydia. My dearest darling Michelle took the picture. (We really can't keep our hands off each other, though. That part is true.)

... and After

Ah, the memories. Happy looking bunch, aren't we? Hey, I'm wearing that same t-shirt again! I need to change my profile picture. 

A review of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie

Ten thoughts about the Hitchhiker's Guide movie:
1: In my opinion, this was the first (perhaps the ONLY) movie yet released this year with two titular h's side-by-side within the same word.
2: There were a few striking similarities between this movie and a book series I read.
3: It wasn't my imagination - Sam Rockwell, the actor playing Zaphod, is the same actor who played Guy in Galaxy Quest.
4: The chairs were comfy.
5: There sure were a lot of things that happened in the movie!
6: I bet it cost a lot of money.
7: At times, it seemed like some of the characters were very excited about things going on. At other times, I wasn't sure.
8: Aw, who am I kidding? You get the idea by now.

Get Fuzzy and H2G2

Yes! Let's hear it for the freaks! I've heard the movie's not good. I still look forward to seeing it. 

The Get Fuzzy comic strip is by Darby Conley.

What?! Doctor Who?

I just found out that Doctor Who has been revamped as a brand new series and they already have made three new episodes!

Why did no one tell me this? You there! Why didn't you tell me this?

The Doctor Who series had a profound influence on me growing up. My favorite was Tom Baker, but I also loved Pertwee. I enjoyed Hartnell whenever I could but they hardly ever ran those where I lived. There was another Doctor - number two - but I only ever saw him in the episode "The Three Doctors" and then again when they made "The Five Doctors'. I wasn't too keen on most of the Doctors that came after, but I still would watch them whenever I could.

I can't wait to get my hands on some of the new episodes, to see how they measure up. BBC has a fantastic web site for the new series. That's how I discovered it. Check it out.

I can't believe it. A new Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy Movie, and a new Doctor Who series. I feel like I've regenerated into a younger, more vibrant version!

Inspiration for Cyclops? 

I'm having a bad hair day. 

On the lighter side ... H2G2

It's true! The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie is coming soon! Here's a link to the official movie site. Any web search will give you tons of other interesting sites as well. http://hitchhikers.movies.go.com/main.html

I'll add just two more links ... one is a really interesting site, the idea for which was Douglas Adams's own. It is an on-line encyclopedia written by average folks like you and me. Anyone can contribute entries. The idea was to create a real sort of Hitchiker's Guide for earthlings. You can find it at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/. It looks to me as though the contributors tend to take the entries relatively seriously.

And the other is an older, more tongue-in-cheek version of the same thing called Project Galactic Guide. This one was created first, by fans. I don't think it was ever endorsed by Adams. Many of the entries are in imitation of Adams's style - some do it well - many do it abominably poorly. Still, there are many good entries: http://www.galactic-guide.com/.

I've been waiting for a good movie adaptation since ... well, probably half my life! I remember when PBS showed that BBC production, I think it was in the mid- to late- eighties. It wasn't all bad, but it was a disappointment overall. This time, I am expecting something significantly changed from the book. Because of this, I think I will like it better. The previous adaptation tried to follow the book exactly and a lot of things just didn't come through very well because of it.

The movie comes out on May 6th ... That's finals week ... that's perfect!