Douglas Adams's widow has asked Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl series of children's books, to write a sixth Hitchhiker's novel. Allow me to officially state my opposition to this sort of thing, for the record, here and now—and I say this as a person who still vividly and mournfully remembers the best dream of my life, a dream about discovering a sixth Hitchhiker's novel called Oh No, Not Again in the back shelves of a library and reading it all in one go before waking up.

The Telegraph has the fifty best cult books. I'm really not sure about a definition of "cult" strained enough to encompass On the Road and To Kill a Mockingbird, but aside from that it's a pretty solid list with a surprising number of personal favorites. Calvino! Adams! Hofstadter! Vonnegut! Someone in a club tonight has stolen my ideas. (via)

This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

Jared Diamond once called agriculture the worst mistake in the history of the human race, but Daniel Ben-Ami at spiked online still thinks we can just invent our way out of scarcity.

But the pervasive cynicism towards popular prosperity still has a negative effect. It makes it harder to enjoy or make the most of what we have got. It is also a barrier against making things better still. In this context, it is important to remember that there are still many billions of people in the world who live in poor countries. And yet the prospect of everyone having access to the best the world has to offer is commonly seen as an environmental nightmare rather than a worthwhile goal.

That there may in fact be practical limits to growth, or that we may be fast approaching those limits, is something Ben-Ami seems not to consider.

And we're back. A number of people asked me if my bosses at TIP made me take the blog down for the month I was teaching, and the answer is no—it was my own call, based upon the near-certainty of my teenage students reading my blog and bad things happening as a result. (Discretion is the better part of valor, etc. etc.)

In any event, we're back, and I have nearly a month's worth of backed-up links to upload in a single hugely massive and largely incoherent posting. So here goes nothing:

* Jaimee's teacher and friend (and former BCR contributor) Isaac Cates has a new blog, Satisfactory Comics, as do my good friends Eric the Red and Jason Haserodt, currently about a third of the way through their 3000-mile bike trip across America.

* While I was gone Tim had a thought-provoking post up about the 9/11 generation that I wanted to gesture towards as well.

* I don't care what sort of reviews it gets, I'm going to see The Darjeeling Limited as soon as I possibly can. The first trailer's out.

* On the subject of Harry Potter, I feel like I regrettably missed the moment to comment on it, so I'll just point to a slightly spoilery sentence from the Salon review that basically says it all:

As for the ending, and the strange, widespread and literarily autistic obsession with who does and doesn't die in it, suffice to say that some sympathetic characters are killed and that everything -- the configuration of the horcruxes, the true colors of Severus Snape, the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort -- turns out in the only way it possibly could if you thought about it for more than two seconds.

If you're feeling especially literarily autistic, however, J.K. has even more unnecessary epilogue for you to chew on.

* There's also something to Megan McArdle's take on the economics of Harry Potter, in which she argues that it's J.K. Rowling's failure to ever really think through the world she's created that keeps the franchise from ever reaching the heights achieved by J.R.R. Tolkien or even C.S. Lewis.

* The State is finally coming to DVD. Toothbrush! You came back to me! And you've started a family.

* Joyce Carol Oates reviews Austerlitz, among other things, in the New York Review of Books, while Geoffrey O'Brien takes on the conclusion to The Sopranos.

* Here's the full text of Alan Moore's awesome proposal for the ultimate D.C. Comics miniseries, Twilight of the Superheroes.

* Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks.

* The American Canon of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, Vol. II.

* They solved checkers.

* Douglas Adams, "Is There An Artifical God?"

* The Murakami Dictionary.

* Post-mortem photography, the absolute creepiest thing the Victorians were up to.

* Awesome maps (as always) from Strange Maps: China's alleged 1418 world map and Inverted World.

* A Brief History of the Lobotomy.

* Say a prayer for Bat Boy, wherever he is: The Weekly World News has shut down.

* Carl "Tinker" West: the most influential New Jerseyan you never heard of.

* Conventional wisdom has it that people who commit suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge travel from around the globe to end their lives in San Francisco Bay, but a new study of death leaps shows that the average jumper is a 41-year-old white man from the Bay Area.

* And, last but not least, some games to waste time by, especially now that you can't play checkers anymore: The Four Color Problem and Gravity Pods.

If you've actually read this far, the only suitable reward is this photo of my Phantom Fiction class, the TIPiest bunch of TIPsters who ever TIPed. You'll note the devil horns; I taught them that.

(Accidentally.)

It's been six years, but man, I still wish Douglas wasn't dead.

All four parts of a three-part 1979 interview with Douglas Adams are up at Darker Matter.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Take heart, recent MFAs!

'I left Cambridge and got in with the Pythons and everyone said "God, he's doing terribly well." Then everything fell down, desperately hard, and I thought "Here I am, aged 24, and I'm totally washed up. This is it."

'At that stage, I felt the last two years or so had been a total waste of time. I hadn't got anywhere and nothing had happened. I thought: "I'm not a writer. I can't survive in this business."'

Via MetaFilter.