HHHH Induction Douglas Adams

So what is HHHH you ask? It is the Headley Hauser Hall of Honor (honor is pronounced HAWNor to make it sound cool.) At the risk of stepping on the toes of my sensei, Robin Chalkley and his master blog - , I decided that – even from my perspective – there are great things in America (and those other countries out there.) There are certain people I admire – who have helped change me from a quiet disgusting low-life to a loud obnoxious disgusting low-life. These few – these happy few have set a pattern of excellence in their creative endeavors that I daily try to emulate, and hence soil their reputations.

And so, for the first inductee in the HHHH – I give you (though he’s not really mine to give anyone – especially considering his current circumstances,)

Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams could rightly be listed among our greatest living writers if not for two glaring omissions – one he’s not living, and two he wasn't really that hot when you think about it.

But he was damned funny (and I don’t mean that in an eternal judgement type of way.)

When Adams was in High School he had ambitions to be John Cleese. After all, he was tall enough and thought he was clever. Indeed, many of his schoolmates commented on how tall he was. During his early radio career he managed to meet John Cleese who informed him that the position was taken. Adams was crestfallen, but these radio shows led to his five volume Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy for which he is best known – so it wasn’t a total loss.

He also wrote other piddling stuff like the two Dirk Gently novels and (together with John Lloyd – whoever that is,) the two Meaning of Liff books which are hardly worth your time to consider.

If he were alive today, Adams might claim that these non-Hitchhiker works are under-rated.

Just as well he’s not around.

Adams died in 2001 at an age seven years younger than I am today, which puts him in the ever-increasing class of people that make me feel inferior. Such feeling aside, I have repeatedly felt free to steal the forms of shtick and humor he pioneered, which will become increasing evident if Go Figure Reads gets around to producing the Genre manuscripts I've given them.

And so, for being a comic genius incapable (due to the death thing,) of complaining when I rip him off, Douglas Adams is the inaugural member of the dead guys wing of the Headley Hauser Hall of Honor.

Selected Quotations

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”

“He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped there wasn't an afterlife.”

“He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naïve incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”

“Humans are not proud of their ancestors and rarely invite them round to dinner.”

Here's a vid someone posted this week Douglas would have liked (at least he hasn't said he didn't.)

Creepy Stuff part 2: Secret Societies

This is the second in my series of things that creep me out. If you want to see the first post, Diane Keaton, you’ll find it here .

I went to YouTube and found lots of video on Secret Societies. Most of them were conspiracy videos warning me how Masons were working with Satan, Hitler, and the militant wing of the Captain Commando fan club. That’s why I chose this one (warning – brief nudity.)

What is allegiance, after all? When no one could give me an exact definition in Jr. High, I stopped saying the pledge. The Vice Principal was ready to lower the boom, but after a while he just shrugged his shoulders. “You don’t have to recite the pledge,” he told me, “but I’m confiscating your chess set until the end of the school year.” And so, he added another mystery to my life – the connection between chess sets and civil disobedience.

“You’ll understand when you’re older,” my sister, who was two years older, told me whenever I asked. She’d been saying that for three or four years by then. I smelled a rat.

To this day (and I’m considerably older now,) I don’t understand, pledges, oaths, vows, promises, or pinky shakes. Why would a sane person ever decide to make him/herself less free? Presumably when I turned 18, Uncle Sam could have drafted me into the army, had he had such non-avuncular intentions. Should I have spent twelve years pledging something I didn’t understand, just to make it seem more justified?

Secret societies are for oath enthusiasts. Such organizations lost their charm for me shortly after I realized that a “No Girls Club” might not be such a great idea.

My aversion wasn’t due to lack of exposure. My father was a Mason. I think he was a Grand Mason which left me wondering why our piano was upright. My Mother is Eastern Star, though I still have no idea what that is. I never saw her twinkling off to any celestial meetings. My sisters were each Rainbow Girls, which meant that they got to wear wedding dresses and sashay around in elaborate meetings, and had secret Gideon-bible-looking books that they left around the house.

“Don’t look in that book!” sister #2 warned me.

Of course I looked in the stupid book.

But I wasn’t really curious what it said. I just picked it up when I heard her coming into the room and pretended to read it.

“You can’t be reading that!”

“Then why’d you leave it sitting around?”

If you’ve never been a little brother, you might not understand. It was my duty, my oath-free purpose in life (until I figured out something that makes money – still waiting on that,) to bug my older sister. Rainbow was an organization that made her easier to bug, and that’s about all I saw in it.

“Don’t you want to join Demolay?”

“Why?”

“You learn secrets.”

“If the secrets are all that great, why do you have to keep ‘em secret?”

It was sort of like my allegiance question, except nobody took my chess set.

The silly hats I get, but oaths, secrets, increased vulnerability to little brothers – why does anyone do this? Secret societies creep me out – almost as much as the people who make conspiracy videos about them.