Gaming

I didn't have to spend more than a minute picking at the rediscovered Milliways game to fully remember that I stunk at the original text Hitchhikers game. In the first game, which I played instead of writing papers at William & Mary, I could never get the Babel Fish in my ear.

Possibly, this failure, combined with weak skills in arcade Tetris and Ms. PacMan (honed to mediocrity at the laundromat on Strawberry St.), is why I haven't embraced gaming in libraries like all the true hispter librarians have.

Two other Adams items have been drifting about in the back of my mind: when is Towel Day? (A: May 25), and How could Nick Paumgarten have omitted Douglas's Happy Vertical People Lifters from his piece on elevators in the April 21 issue of the New Yorker? Paumgarten mentions movies, TV, and Colson Whitehead's odd novel The Intuitionist, yet overlooks the elevators that can see into the future and so get where they're needed, faster. Sloppy!

(Okay, and now three: it makes me sad that H2G2 could have been Wikipedia, but misses. Search "Babel Fish" on H2G2 and you get a bunch of links to 2 or 3 sentence sound bites; Wikipedia gives you a quick definition, followed by less geeking out than you'd think.)

Capital City weather: rain