Good Coffee, GREAT Company!

Great day!!!

I woke up with an urge to turn my book-on-tape version of Douglas Adams's masterpiece LAST CHANCE TO SEE into cds.

For my own personal library, of course. I have no desire whatsoever ro traffic in Black Market Douglas Adams books-on-cd!

But I do want to listen to them in my car on my way to work!

Brian was working on something in the living room, so he didn't mind my using his computer for a few hours.

From around 3:30 pm until 7:30 pm I recorded the tapes into the PC. Then Brian and I went over to Traci's, arriving around 8:00 pm. She has a new computer and doesn't like putting things together and doesn't feel competent with computers. (One of the smartest, wisest and most savvy people I know, Traci can quote STAR WARS with the geekiest of geeks, knows music and musicians inside and out, and can not be beat for her Pop Culture knowledge; and yet she has spent less time on a computer than your average 8 year old. Part of her charm.) So Brian and I descended upon her PC parts and had her computer up and running in no time.

Then we three went to one of the few coffee houses I had never been to before, a place called Dolce Vida. Decent enough coffee, but mostly I think you go there for the vibe. Very cool. We sat on the deck -- so Brian and I could smoke -- and talked about Life and the future and science and philosophy and spirituality and whether or not women look hot in overalls, and lost of stuff I can't remember at the moment.

At one point this surprisingly small horse bounded up to our table looking for some affection, with a guy trailing behind it holding onto the very long rein. A second revealed that it wasn't a very small horse but a very large dog, and the rein was actually a leash. The dog's own was the sort of guy that seemed entirely in his element walking a frisky dog on a Sunday night past a coffee house. He was this friendly guy with shorts, a tank-top and a bandanna on his head. He explained, a little apologetically, that his dog -- I forget her name -- was an attention whore, and that she had to be pet by everyone she saw. He went to share that she had a particular interest in the ladies, and particularly women wearing skirts -- she loves to flip up girls' skirts with her nose. He said the ladies don't seem to mind, but the irony was that he's gay, and these girls probably thought he was some hetero perv who taught her to do this. (Actually, he started to say "straight-bot" I think, but then corrected himself and said "straight". I remember this because I hadn't heard that term before and found it hysterical.) After a while of pleasant conversation, the skirt-chasing lesbian dog was ready to move on to some other patrons of the coffee house and the guy explained that he was stoned and just rambling on and the two moved on to the next table.

YA GOTTA LOVE AUSTIN!!! KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD!!!

Brian and Traci and I continued our conversation until midnight, when the coffee house closed. Then we went back to her place and talked until around 2:20 am.

Back home, I put a load of laundry in the apartment complex laundry room and resumed the conversion of my Adams book while Brian crashed on the couch watching STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. I had recorded both sides of both audio cassettes, and now had to find logical breaks in the narative so that the cds would have multiple tracks (as opposed being 2 45-minute tracks per disc).

Turns out this endevour bore unexpected fruit. I was doing it just so I could easily find my place when I had to stop listening mid-cd. But when I was finally ready to burn the discs I discovered that the tapes ran long -- just over 80 minutes per disc; which, I'm sure you know, recordable cds are not setup to handle. So I rearranged my tracks to fit across 3 cds -- something that would have been impossible if I hadn't gone to the extra trouble of dividing the narrative into several tracks -- and was able to burn my cds! (I even converted the tracks into mp3s, in anticipation of the time when I finally break down and buy an iPod.)

I now have a product that NO ONE ELSE HAS: Douglas Adams' LAST CHANCE TO SEE ON CD!!!

...actually, with the proliferation of technology that we enjoy now, I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only cat that owns a cd version of this. But I'm THE only person THAT I KNOW OF that has this! For some stupid-ass reason Sound Editions never bothered to produce a cd version of this book. And the book-on-tape version is out of print. You can still find harback and paperback copies of the book itself, but you'll have to excert some effort.

But the book-on-tape version is read by Adams himself!!!

This is something I've been wanting to do for some time now, because magnetic tape just doesn't last as long as discs. And if you bought THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY book-on-cd now, you wouldn't be able to buy the version read by Douglas!!! Disney apparently bought out the rights to the book-on-cd and had Stephen Fry reread the novel!!! Luckily I have the original version read by Douglas Adams already!!! As well as 2 more of the HITCHHIKER'S books and both the DIRK GENTLY books read by him.

But TRY finding copies of these to purchase now!!! YOU CAN'T! I suspect that Disney just bought the rights to all his stuff, so that if you want to hear the book-on-cd verion you'll have to wait for them to produce it and buy it from them.

And I have spent A LOT of money over the last 15 years collecting Adams's work both on paper and on cassette or cd, and I'm not prepared to give Disney my money to RE-PURCHASE this stuff! PARTICULARLY since none of it will ever be read by Adams again! (Many people don't know that Douglas was just as talented as a performer as he was as a writer! In fact he really started writing so he would have material to perform, in the vein of Monty Python and many other comedians. And no one interprets his work quite the same as he does!)

Anyway, it's almost 7:00 am now and I need to get to sleep.

PEACE!!!