Slashdot Mirror
New Trailer For Upcoming Hitchhiker's Episodes
Cally writes "I just heard a new programme trailer on BBC Radio 4 for the the
first time. Some familiar voices... it's Arthur! It's Ford! It's the
new radio
series of Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy!
The first broadcast
goes out on Tuesday 21st September at 6:30pm (UK summertime, which is
an hour off UTC.) Douglas Adams wrote the books in parallel with the two original radio series, which are still regarded as the definitive manifestation of HH-erdom. Hearing Mark Wing-Davey and Simon Jones' voices speaking new
words - albeit new words from 'Life, The Universe and Everything' -
is a spooky feeling. I just hope the sad death of Peter Jones does not
detract from the final result.
Let's hope the Beeb's live streaming media setup can cope with the mother of all Slashdottings!"
Anybody with 42 reference below this post is going to get in some serious trouble. I AM NOT KIDDING.
You think I am kidding? You think I am kidding? Alright. Try it.
I can't wait to see it.
---
I didn't want to leave this space blank.
excellent, I cannot wait to hear that sad, somber, and slightly funny moment where poor sweet Marvin goes to the cliff, and fragment by fragment discovers that he and god think the same way. And then, shortly after seeing that great last message that god left to his creation. passing on in what dignity he could muster, considering that every piece of machinery in him had been replaced several times over... (with the exception of that damn set of diodes on his left side :) )
Yes, Douglas Adams recorded the voice of Agrajag (Arthur's perennial whipping boy) before his death.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
I can't wait. The more I listen to his stuff, the more I wish Mr. Adams had not prematurely left this world.
By the way, was it just me or did the voice of Agrajag sound suspiciously like Douglas Adams himself?
I've listend to a number of his books on tape that he read himself, and it sounds very much like Mr. Adams.
We poor deprived souls Stateside want to hear everything.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
HG2G Movie? Someone must have used the improbability engine for this to happen!
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
Yes
will they play any vogon poetry ?
Having a nationwide radio station that you can turn on at any time of the day or night with a 99% certainty of finding something intellectually stimulating and enjoyable can't be beat. (The other 1% is "The Archers")
For those furriners who don't entirely grok what Radio 4 actually is, it's:
For example, driving several hundred miles each week for a job, I found myself listening to a regular program on vegetables - specifically, the ones you eat. Now I am a geek of the burger+coke variety, and frankly I don't care about this subject one jot. However the program was compulsive listening - it went into depth about, for instance, how the brussels sprout came to be cultivated with lots of (genuinely) interesting historical context.
Listening to radio 4 is rather like visiting a huge combined university, experimental theatre, and comedy club, and wandering blindfolded through the halls, randomly stopping to listen in various rooms.
And I miss it. Thank goodness for web streaming.
HHGTTG was hugely inspirational back in the day here in the UK. Back at the end of the 70's the punk music fashion in music was violent and negative, allbeit exhuberant and youthfull. We were a decade away from the moon landings and were just entering the decade of the Yuppy, power dressing, padded shoulders and the triumph of the Golgafrinchams. But I digress, it was a time when science and the arts were at war and you had to be on one side or the other and HHGTTG was firmly on the side of the female astrophysicist who prefered a boyfriend who could take her on a tour of a black hole to Arthurs feeble small talk ( Notwithstanding the extra arm that said boyfriend "grew specially for you Trillian" )
So to set the scene, HHGTTG was, and possibly still is, the most scientifically friendly work of humour to hit the big time in the last six thousand years. At the time most computers were adressed with punched cards and Adams intuitively understood that a decent computer would look like a WiFi tablet pc hooked to the internet. Something which he described as a book of all known knowledge of the universe with "dont panic" scribed in large friendly letters on the cover - QED.
Even better Adams was of the radical (at that time) opinion that no one was going to tell him "the answer to life the universe and everything", it was patently clear that this was either too vague a question or that you had to figure out the answer step by step for yourself. His attitude was new because it anticeded a movement begun in the sixties to seek answers from gurus or to define oneself entirely in terms of opposition to the "establishment" - Adams rejected that and used humour to point out that it is your job (possibly your entire reason for existing) to figure out things for yourself.
Twenty years after its first incarnation its not going to set the world on fire and probably wont punch the buttons of the future like it did first time around. After all, today we are, the brands we purchase, and watchers of three simultaneous tv channels, and what we are, is clearly defined by what we are not. (If I got that wrong then feel free to explain what is going on these days...). However I have high hopes for this new series of HHGTTG because it was written by a man who liked technology and respectfully took the proverbial micky out of fashion and accepted wisdom.
Remarkably for those cynics amongst us who say that radical youth becomes conservative conservatives without changing a single idea over the passage of time, Adams mockeries still ring true to me in middle age. It is also sobering to realise that his entire lifes work is more or less defined by something like six months work in 1978, and whatever it was, 9 radio programs. This is probably the most important reason to get hold of the radio stream - as an experience the radio play is an order of magnitude more powerfull than the books.
Let me be the first to welcome our new overlord radio transmissions....
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Not only is there a mp3 stream as mentioned, there is also a a 83 MB Quicktime video, which I'm just downloaded at 360 KB/s.
Come on slashdot, the server's still up, what are you waiting for ?
Looking at http://support.bbc.co.uk/support/network/
I don't think they've got too much to worry about
Is that American for GMT?
I assume this is a joke, but for anyone actually interested in time standards (or for those of you who think GMT and UTC mean the same thing), there was a really good discussion in the gnu arch mailing list about this recently. It's a pretty long thread, but very insightful.
s/GMT/UTC/.
Short answer: UTC is based on an atomic clock while GMT is based on the speed of earth rotation (which apparently varies). UTC adds and omits leap seconds to stay within about 0.9 seconds of GMT.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
UTC stands for Universal Time Coordinated, and is the modern version of GMT. It has leap seconds to stay within 0.75 seconds of UT1, which is the (solar) time "kept" by the Earth. IAT (International Atomic Time) is the actual time kept by Atomic clocks. Since the Earth's rotation does indeed vary (because of weather changes and motions in the Earth's core, mostly), UT1 (and thus UTC) is slowly drifting off from IAT.
The politics of international time are dominated by the French, and they took advantage of the changes required by more accurate clocks and also more accurate means of measuring Earth rotation to get "Greenwich" out of the name. Technically, a time system implies a longitude system, and the zero point of longitude implied by IAT/UTC is about 100 meters to the East of the zero longitude strip at Greenwich.
Has anyone thought to warn them?
Warning the BBC that a horde of geeks will be connecting to listen to this series is like warning the Pope that a lot of people will be going to the Christmas mass.