A few links I've missed over the last few days.

* xkcd discovers the secret origins of the Kindle.

* RIP, Philip Jose Farmer. More here, especially about Venus on the Half-Shell, the book he published under the name Kilgore Trout. It's not half-bad.

* 'Las Vegas Running Out of Water Means Dimming Los Angeles Lights.'

* Spider-Man is taking a job at McDonald's in these tough economic times.

* And Joss Whedon explains why DC Comics movies don't work. He's right and wrong about this; there's something to be said for the "pain" thesis, but mostly it's a failure of writing and directorial ambition, compounded by corporate cowardice...

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.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Your Astronomy Picture of the Day is this big map of the Milky Way.

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.