Damn-Dutch

Not too long ago the following book hit my doorstep… And Another Thing, the “sixth book” in the Hitchhiker’s “trilogy” by Eoin Colfer.

Read it, though not as quickly as I would have liked and well. The only impression it left with me is “this is a radio script”. Now in HHG terms that is not necessarily a bad thing as any HHG fan might know, this is how it started after all. But for a novel, it’s diet-HHG at best. The basic story is pretty entertaining, I’m a fan of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged so that was a decent enough choice. It was also stitched onto the story as it ended in Mostly Harmless. Zaphod has two heads, sort of, as opposed to that horrible pop-up head thing being used in the movie (yeah I know, DNA’s idea. Doesn’t make it a good idea). So all in all, yeah, it’s HHG.

So why do I consider it HHG light rather than fullblown HHG. Why did I call it a radio script rather than a novel? Well. It lacks details. I wasn’t hearing the surroundings in my head. Less descriptions of the look and feel of the tech I suppose. And more importantly it lacks endless diversions and sidetracking into the infinite depths of some random culture on a random planetoid in a random nebula of a random galaxy with a very random history indeed. In short it lacks striking guide narrative. It is there, but they’re pretty short injections of tiny factoids rather than side-stories in a nutshell. Oh and there isn’t a single “dingo’s kidneys” in there. In stead we get “buffa biscuit” which just plain reminded me too much of the Star Wars “Bantha poodoo” remark (at the very least present in SWKOTOR1).

All in all not a bad read though. It’ll make a more entertaining radio play should it ever be produced than it does a novel though, if you’ve read DNA’s books religiously.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/northern-europe-provides-perfect-climate-for-drama-llamas.ars

I laughed, I’m not touching this one with a 10ft flaming pole though.
Stop wasting [insert resource here] BREIN.

Better late than never. I had fallen behind with listening to the Bommel radioplay a bit, so this weekend I spent some time catching up and I was a little saddened by the fact that the last episode was aired March 27th of this year.

Of course the podcasts are still available and that’s a good thing, because damn it, I have grown to love the stories of Olivier B. Bommel and Tom Poes. I was never really a big fan of the comic strip as it appeared in newspapers. I tried reading it but at the time I didn’t appreciate it. I read two or so of the comic books later but they didn’t work for me. More recently I’ve taken another look at the concept of text below the drawn panels (old example). It has its charms!

And what the audioplay did for me was make the stories accessible after I had discarded them in my mind back when I couldn’t appreciate them. I was used to Disney stuff no doubt! How foolish…!

All in all, I’ll enjoy these audioplays for quite some time still, but no more new stories for now. A shame.

Being a semi-regular browser in the bigger Rotterdam bookstores, I recently stumbled across this little 2007 number by Charles Stross called Halting State (the first few chapters). And I can’t say much more other than I haven’t read a book cover to cover like that this year, or last year for that matter.

A great near-future novel with (MMO)RPGs, swanky personal HUDs, a good helping of dialect and technobable. And as what seems to be an hommage to the RPG genre, it’s written in the first person of three characters, which made the read all the more interesting. The only thing it was missing was a bit of a glossary at the end, but maybe that’s because I’m not a native English speaker. Sometimes the acronyms had me scratching my head for a bit.

Over the summer I ordered in some books and CDs. This on its own isn’t out of the ordinary, but one of the objects was a bit quirky as far as I’m concerned and it deserves a little mention.

Through some friends I once ended up listening to the first three series of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio plays. I loved them. In the end I ended up buying pretty much every Douglas Adams book out there. From HHG to Dirk Gently to Last chance to see. Even those silly Meaning and Deeper meaning of Liff books. They were all enjoyable in their own right.

Now that’s all well and good, but I always pooh pooh translations a bit. I find that often jokes and nuances don’t translate well. And then one of those formentioned friends told me there was a Dutch radioplay, of the first series that is. A German one too by the way, which I’m sure I might get one day too. So after some digging around I order in a copy of the Dutch HHG radioplay. Turns out it was done back in 1980, well before this Damn Dutch even existed as two gametes. I ended up listening to the whole thing in two days. I won’t say it’s as good as the original, but it’s a damn good alternative if you don’t get along with the English language much. Some names have been changed, and some places too. So now the story has a Dutch rather than a British background. A lot of jokes work out really well in Dutch and its equivalent to Slartibartfast even adds a bit to his fashionable fjord dialogue, specifically about the Netherlands.

I suppose I should also add that no I have not read the Dutch translations of the book, so I can’t compare it to that, but as far as the English and the Dutch audio- or radioplays go, yeah, I really liked it and it wasn’t at all what I expected.

A damn shame indeed, George Carlin is no more.
The world is short one grade A first class stand-up comedian and dirty bastard.
A tiny salute to the man that brought us the seven dirty words, icebox man and someone I refer to in casual conversation too often.