« Free Sheet Music | Main | UAW Kills Auto Bailout »
December 11, 2008
Bedtime Stories
My mom and dad read to us religiously growing up and it's one of the warmest memories I have of childhood. So Jennifer and I read a lot together. During the day, we play Backgammon but at night, we read ten pages or so together in bed.
Recently, we read "Freddy Goes to Florida", a story about a bunch of farm animals that decide to migrate to Florida for the winter, a favorite of mine from grade school.
After that, we read Peter DeLeo's book Survive! It's not a book I would have picked for her to read, but I told her the story of how he crashed in the Sierra Nevadas in the dead of winter and then hiked out of the mountains two weeks later, when most people had written him off as dead.
Then for a change of pace, I suggested we read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I've never been a big fan of science fiction. I just don't like the genre, in general, for a multitude of reasons. The movies are the worst, with people in gay fake alien costumes. I just can't watch it.
The books are usually too much for me to read....too self indulgent...too pretentious...too gay. But The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was different. It was just so cynical...so radically different than anything else that I'd tried to read that I fell in love with it and read all of the books in the series.
I tried to communicate to Jennifer what the book was about before she agreed to read it. I told her how a towel was the most important thing a person could have when hitchhiking across the galaxy. How the one guy finally realized the world was truly insane when he read the directions on a box of toothpicks. How they sent all the middle managers to another planet ostensibly to prepare for a new colony, but then just left them there to die. How aliens came to Earth and confiscated the most intelligent lifeform(the dolphins) and left behind a note saying "So long and thanks for all the fish".
And that was enough to peak her curiosity. Tonight, we got as far the part where Ford Prefect put a Babel fish in Arthur Dent's ear so he could understand the Vogon's language. We talked about the Tower of Babel and I told her there's a language translation service on the web named after the babel fish and she thought that was pretty cool.
I'm not sure what we'll read after this book, but I'll be pushing for "Freddy the Pilot" (this is the one where Freddy the pig uses a WWII surplus Norden bomb sight to find money in the garden).
Update: Thanks for the info on the adventure game. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game can be played online here.
Posted by Rob Kiser on December 11, 2008 at 9:21 PM
Comments
If you liked those books be sure to check out his Dirk Gently Detective Agency ones too. They're a real hoot.
Also, back in the '80s there was a computer game based on the HGttG. It was an Infocom text only adventure game and it was insane. It seems you can still play it on-line.
Posted by: Enas Yorl on December 14, 2008 at 1:31 PM