Pajiba

Oh my God. I get a medal.

"If you’ve read the Dirk Gently novels, then you are a real sci-fi geek. You get a medal and everything."

-What they don't tell you is that the medal is really just a foil covering that when peeled back reveals some rather tasty Cjelli's Belgium chocolate.

I want my frakin medal.
Also, the BBC has a surprisingly good track record with adaptations, they just did a hilarious Terry Pratchett "Going Postal" miniseries.
(Uhoh, does this mean my medal gets withdrawn? Or perhaps I get two for Übergeekdom. With an Umlaut.)

Do you ship medals to Holland?

Going Postal was very cool!

These books have some of my favorite lines of all time... such as "He was as amazed as a man who had thought himself blind all his life, only to suddenly discover he had simply been wearing too large a hat."

I love the Dirk Gently books. I'll be interested in how much of the first book they can get into 60 minutes though.

So long as they keep Russell T "Overblown" Davies away from it. Dirk needs an subtle and nuanced approach.

Errmm...the BBC didn't make the Terry Pratchett adaptations. Murdoch's cable channel Sky One did.

Inquisitive and presumptuous. I do not deny it. But I am a private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous. Not as often or as copiously as I would wish, but I am nevertheless inquisitive and presumptuous on a professional basis."

Tha above? Wonderful! Hilarious! Almost Oscar Wilde in a whole "Remarkable Rocket" kind of way. But how do you bring it to the screen without copious narration?

So Pajiba now has Project Runway recaps and there is a post about a Douglas Adams book. What's next? An article on Judy Garland? It's like it's Mrs. Julien Day up in this bitch!

And now for the fun of it more quotes from the book -

The term "holistic" refers to my conviction that what we are dealing with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

I've had the sort of day that would make St. Francis of Assisi kick babies.

Kate took a hefty swig at her Bloody Mary and brooded silently for a moment while the vodka marched around inside her.

He was, she thought, interesting, entertaining to her, in an eccentric kind of way, but also hideously unattractive to her.

I get a medal too!
Great books. Good be a good show.
I'm hopeful.
And cinekat should get a medal just for using an Umlaut.

Oh, I do hope they do the material justice! Even just the bit about his fridge is among my favourite things ever written:

"It meant that the silently waged conflict between himself and his cleaning lady had escalated to a new and more frightening level. It was now, Dirk reckoned, fully three months since this fridge door had been opened, and each of them was grimly determined not to be the one to open it first. The fridge no longer merely stood there in the comer of the kitchen, it actually lurked. Dirk could quite clearly remember the day on which the thing had started lurking. It was about a week ago, when Dirk had tried a simple subterfuge to trick Elena - the old bat's name was Elena, pronounced to rhyme with cleaner, which was an irony that Dirk now no longer relished - into opening the fridge door..."

Oh man. I love DG way more than Hitchhiker's. The first book is great, the second is better. I have the audiobooks, read by Douglas Adams himself. Please let this be not good, but great.

I tire of receiving accolades...

Oh fine, I'll take it.

I often refer to the 'long dark teatime of the soul.' I think I'm living it right now, in fact. Please send my medal post haste! But I guess going by fenchurch gives away my Douglas Adams nerdiness.

I own both these books, as well as "The Salmon of Doubt" and everything else Douglas Adams wrote. I also have a newspaper cut-out of the Get Fuzzy cartoon paying tribute to Adams after his death, where Satchel and Bucky are both holding towels.

I pictured Garrison Keillor when I read these novels the first time.

"Oooooh, this could be great.

I found some random copy of Long Dark Teatime of the Soul in my bookshelf a few months ago and cackled the entire time I read it.

I still don't know where it came from. It's not mine, I don't remember borrowing it, I've never seen it before. I can only assume that some deity placed it there for my enjoyment, after seeing that I was in a pile of miserable work. Thanks, random deity who sends me books!!" - MyySharona

This is clearly a situation demanding that you stand on your roof for a few hours tonight upsetting your neighbors by shaking your fists at the sky and and shouting at the universe to stop it.

Am I wrong for casting Nick Frost as Dirk Gently in my head? Or how about Anthony Stewart Head as Sergeant Gilks? Simon Pegg could play the electric monk.

And in the H2G2 film, Zooey Deschanel was not playing Trillian. She was playing Kate Schechter playing Trillian. I find this a perfectly acceptable Hollywoodization, but the distinction should be made clear to those who don't know who Kate Schechter is.

Damn you, Douglas Adams.

Listen, everyone: if you are a truly awesome frood and write achingly good and funny and clever stuff, and have a worldwide fanbase that comes as close to worshipping you as is possible to worship an atheist, and you've got a decent enough fortune to invest in health insurance, then get your deadline dreading ass to a good team of doctors and get your shit sorted! 'Cause if you drop dead of a ridiculously avoidable heart attack at a thoroughly inappropriate young age and rob us all of what can only be described as a beacon of light denoting that, yes, there really is intelligent life on Earth, and any contact you have with it'll make you laugh to yourself at embarrassing moments in public at some point later on, then we'll really have a difficult time trying not to hate you for slacking off on taking care of yourself between bouts of missing you more than any other human we've never met. Including Jesus, Elvis, John Lennon, and, preserve us, Peter Steele.

Even if you're not any of that, get checked anyway, 'cause somebody somewhere will miss you.

You had so much left to do, Douglas. So many of us wanted you to do it, too. Somebody else may get it done, but it won't be done the way you'd've done it. The alternate Earth where you're still alive is the best one, for sure.

I am cautiously excited for this.
By which I mean I can't wait and might have ridiculously high expectations, accompanied by jumping around like a teenager.

My medal (which I'm assuming will be shipped here to Australia) will compensate for this I believe.