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[This will be posted tomorrow on MacObserver.com]


The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, Douglas Adams dead

It would seem like that if "42" is the answer to Life, the Universe, and
Everything, then "49" might just be the question.

Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is dead on
Friday, May 11, 2001, following a heart attack. He was 49.

Our best hope is that he is taking a year off dead for tax evasion purposes.
As irony would have it, I finished listening to Hitchhiker's as a radio play
on audio CD, on the very same day he died. Did you know that Hitchhiker's
was originally a radio play? It was made as a radio play, written by Adams,
on BBC radio in the late seventies, and became a cult hit despite a very
late time slot. Later it was developed quite faithfully into a novel and its
several sequels. And after that, a TV show. The novels have consistently
sold as one of the best selling SF books of all time. The book is a must
read for anybody who like science fiction and wacky humor. It is not quite
like anything else, at least nothing which came before.

Since for some reason SF authors tend to have long and productive lives,
then I would say that Adams has died at least 40 years too soon. He will be
missed, and so will the hope of more unique books from his hand.

Douglas Adams was also know as a Mac fan. He invented the slogan for Apple:
"Sure, we are not perfect, but at least we knew that the century was going
to end." Of course he was referring to the fact that there was no cause for
"year 2000 panic" in the late nineties amongst Mac users, unlike Windows
users. He was also one of the few people who bought the 10th Anniversary
Macintosh, the first computer to feature an LCD display as standard.

Douglas Adams was also a big fan of Apple's old Newton handheld device, and
in a radio interview talked about how the machine was uncannily like the
fictional electronic book that was the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" in
his books.

Yours, Eolake

eolake@macobserver.com