May 11th 2001. A day when the world lost one of the greatest writers ever. Yes. It’s the day Douglas Noel Adams (aka DNA) died of a heart attack, age 49. He might not have been Infinitely Prolonged like Wowbagger, but he certainly achieved immortality through his creative works which have gone on to influence so many new generation writers like Neil Gaiman and Samit Basu. His nuggets of wisdom shine on. RAmen.

Wretched, isn’t it?

- Marvin the Paranoid Android

Coming to his works themselves, one of their best characteristics (for me) is that apart from their stupendously funny take on the Whole Sort Of General Mish Mash, they are all inconsistent with each other. Now that’s generally considered to be a bad thing, with everyone from Harry Potter fans to Lord of the Rings fans crying about ‘discrepancies’. For The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy however, it is this same inconsistency that makes it more fun. It has been made into so MANY avatars that if they were all kept the same, it would become a tad boring. And ‘a tad boring’ is EXACTLY what Douglas Adams wasn’t.

Getting a movie made in Hollywood is like trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.

- Douglas Adams, on getting a movie made in Hollywood. After all, the h2g2 movie spent so many years in development hell!

Some stuff you might not have known about Douglas Adams:

• Douglas Adams was an atheist, a ‘radical atheist’ according to him. He said he used to be an agnostic earlier, but after reading The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, he made God vanish in a puff of logic. Richard Dawkins is a biologist well-known for his support of the theory of evolution and atheism. Read his books - they really ARE quite good. Apart from the two mentioned earlier, another nice book by him is The God Delusion. Richard Dawkins was a good friend of DNA, and it was through Adams that Dawkins met his future wife (thanks to Ashwan for pointing out an error in this one!). Richard Dawkins was also a speaker at one of the first Douglas Adams Memorial Lectures. Fans of South Park would also have noticed Dawkins in the episodes Go God Go and Go God Go XII. Note to self: I *must* attend THAT at least once in my life. Think of it as my Mecca.
• Douglas Adams was also quite interested with music. He played the guitar, left-handed, and had quite a collection of left-handed guitars. Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd was his good friends. In fact, Pink Floyd even let Douglas Adams play with them at one of their concerts - as a ‘birthday gift’ on his 42nd birthday. In the h2g2 book series, the band Disaster Area was based on Pink Floyd (because of their extravagant concerts). Also, Michael Nesmith of the band The Monkees was also a good friend of DNA, and was supposed to be the producer of the h2g2 movie (initially).
• Douglas Adams was a big fan of Apple. He is said to be the first guy to buy a Mac in England, with Stephen Fry (the ‘voice of the Hitchhiker’s Guide’) being the second person to buy a Mac. There’s a veiled attack at Microsoft (”overhyped bloatware”), in the Quandary Phase when Ford Prefect (referring to Sirius Cybernetics Corporation) says:
  

  You know how I hate those smug Sirius Cybernetics salesmen, who sell computer operating systems which crash more often than aircars built on the Friday shift.

• ‘Ford Prefect’ is actually the name of a car, released in England in 1970s. In the h2g2 movie, Mos Def is shown trying to shake hands with a car (he thought “cars were the dominant life-form on this planet”) - that car is an actual Ford Prefect.
• DNA was a big environmentalist too. He supported Diane Fossey’s Gorilla Fund, and also the ‘Save The Rhino’ campaign. He even dressed up once as a rhino to raise awareness for this cause.
• ‘h2g2‘ is an actual user-edited encylopedia. One of the first, in fact.
• Although he died in 2001, DNA appears in the 2005 Tertiary Phase radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy made by BBC. He plays the character of Agrajag, who claims that he gets killed in all his incarnations by Arthur Dent. This was done by digitally editing a recording Douglas Adams made for an audiobook of h2g2. His first words as Agrajag in the radio series were: “Bet you weren’t expecting to see ME again, were you?”. He also makes a cameo appearance in the last ever episode, again as an incarnation of Agrajag (who, again, gets killed because of Arthur Dent).
• Other ‘quirky’ appearances in the h2g2 radio series include:
  • Christian Slater (remember that guy from John Woo’s Broken Arrow?), as Wonko the Sane. He was a good actor, and I thought he’d been crushed under a truck in Alabama before hearing him on the radio series.
  • Bruce Hyman, the producer of the new BBC h2g2 radio series, makes a cameo as a dying Arthur Phillip Deodat - again, an incarnation of Agrajag.
  • Fred Trueman and Henry Blofeld, BBC cricket commentators also appear as themselves in the Tertiary phase - in two episodes. And boy are they funny in the second episode of the Tertiary phase as commentators at an Ashes match at Lord’s. “Fred my dear old thing, what on EARTH is that?”. Indeed. The second appearance is a cameo explaining the rules of Brockian Ultra Cricket.
  • Sir Patrick Moore, British astronomer comes in the Quintessential Phase, talking of “high-level talks between Xaxisian diplomats and some iguanas”.
  • Geoffrey Perkins, producer of the first two radio series’, makes an appearance in the Quandary Phase as Arthur Dent’s boss at BBC. Yes, Arthur Dent works at BBC.

Douglas Adams playing at a Pink Floyd concert

May he rest in peace. It’s only this year I’m writing about this because I finally feel that I’ve spread a good level of awareness among peers in my school (and others too) - and that was needed because otherwise this post would have been lost to the audience. Sure, it took a bit of over-the-top promotion of forty two, but I did get the point across. I think.

Got my hands on the latest Grammy-winning (for Best Rock Album) album Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace from the Foo Fighters; courtesy Jimi Hendrix (do check out his nice post on bird watching at JNU). Thought it’d be a nice idea to take a bit of a break in between the school exams to check this out.

I’m most certainly not a hardcore Foo Fighters fan. Damn, I’m not even a ‘lightcore’ fan of them. I do happen to like a few of their songs - like Learn To Fly! By far one of my most favourite songs till now. Even got featured (ahem, on a lot of insistence by me) in the Code Wars 2007 video. I can listen to that again and again again…and yet not get bored. That’s ONE groovy track.

With only that much of a background of an interest in them, I got down to reviewing their album. Trackwise review follows.

Artist: Foo Fighters (Official website / Wikipedia)
Album: Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace
My rating of Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace: 6.7 / 10

1. The Pretender (rating - 4.9 / 5): At first thought, I didn’t like the way they switched from a very slow start to something quite fast; but somewhere down the line, I loved it - because it gels in with the title, The Pretender. And I’m not being sarcastic here. Got some pretty slick music mixing towards the end of the track. The first track is the best out in the whole album. BTW, this was the same song that they played at the Grammy’s. Also won a Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance.
2. Let It Die (rating - 3.1 / 5): A song which is confused about the message it wants to get across. With a VERY abrupt ending too. Soothing in the beginning, it switches track midway to go into a punk rock rant, and ends as abruptly as it switched. As if the singers decided, “Um, just let’s end the song here”.
3. Erase Replace (rating - 2.4 / 5): People like Apoorv who seem to have discovered the phenomenon of beats only recently (bit odd, that) will love this track. Apart from that, nothing much makes this track stand out. You can safely erase and replace this song from your hard drive.
4. Long Road To Ruin (rating - 3.8 / 5): Misses the point again. Too cheerful for something titled such - almost as if looking forward to the ruin. Catchy, in a twisted sort of way, if you can forgive them for that. Especially when you consider the fact that reviewing albums amidst school exams (like I’m doing) IS a long road to ruin.
5. Come Alive (rating - 4.2 / 5): One of the best tracks in the album. Predominantly slow paced, this one’s the sort of stuff you want in a Grammy-winning album.
6. Stranger Things Have Happened (rating - 3.6 / 5): The longest track in the album. Comes closest to old school rock, at least to people like me on this side of the new millenium. Long stretches of instrumental in it.
7. Cheer Up Boys, Your Makeup Is Running (rating - 2.3 / 5): Frankly, I still haven’t figured out what this song is all about; and that is something I don’t like - when a song isn’t clear about what it’s talking about. It’s a very good reason for why I hate ‘that rap shit’ so many people happen to like these days. This song had nothing to do with highly athletic cosmetic products, as far as I can figure out.
8. Summer’s End (rating - 3.0 / 5): Not a bad song, as such, but it didn’t get me excited about it. Weird feeling. Sounds nice, but doesn’t generate excitement.
9. The Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners (rating - 4.3 / 5): Wasn’t looking forward to such an oddly-titled song. It’s completely instrumental. Being a sentient carbohydrate based life-form, even I can look beyond punk rock at times. Liked it.
10. Statues (rating - 3.8 / 5): Idyllic song. Seems like if the track above this one had lyrics, this would be it.
11. But Honestly (rating - 3.5 / 5): But honestly, I’d not have given this song even this much rating, if it wasn’t for the good accompanying instruments. The beginning simply murders the interest of the listener, but the song does try to redeem itself towards the end. Once again, I give it this rating ONLY because of the instrumental bits.
12. Home (rating - 3.9 / 5): Pretty ‘feel good’ note song. Note my cuppa of tea, but I understand that many people will like this sort of stuff. Nice instrumentals too.

Overall, I’d say it’s not a album that I’d wait hours for at a store to buy, nor is it an album which I’ll throw away in disgust the moment I get it. Maybe most of the songs are simply not…my preferred genre. Yes, there were 1-2 brilliant tracks, but that’s hardly redeeming for me. By no means though am I saying it didn’t deserve the Grammy - it did, because it IS good music - just simply that it’s not my type.
Having listened to a whole album now (in its completeness) by the Foo Fighters, I can say now that for me, liking their song is a hit-or-miss affair. Most of their songs comprise a lot of ‘mood swings’ and / or changes in pace. Sometimes it works for me, and wows me. Most of the time, it doesn’t. When it does wow me though, it turns me into an addict of that song. At times, I’ve spent whole days listening to nothing but Learn To Fly in continuous loop.

Not an album to miss if you like the Foo Fighters, or like alternative / soft rock. People more heavier stuff are better off staying away for this one - you won’t hate it, but you won’t like it either.

Lord Vader and his young apprentice Lereze have been going gaga over the past few weeks over Hisham Abbas’ Nari Nari (rejoice, Lord Vader, I linked to the vidddeo!), for reasons not yet clear to anyone on the Code Warriors team. I for one have been listening to Rage Against The Machine’s Renegades of Funk continuously - as in every minute, as in without a gap - on loop for the past two days.

Well, RATM has been one of my favourite bands for quite some time, and that song has been one of my faves too. But I recently sat down to write about our win at Exun 2007, and I just couldn’t stop myself from listening to it. Anyway, at one point even I’d thought of an RATM song for the Code Wars 2007 video, but since the Exun 2007 video had it, and they’d used RATM earlier too in their 2005 vid, we dropped the idea. Can’t have enough of the song though, watch its video below…

I might add here, that this music video was made around the time RATM broke up (boohoo!), which is why it consists of stock footage of renegades from around the world.

The thing about gadgets it that sometimes just to test a feature, it drives you to discover stuff that you didn’t do earlier. Take me for example, who didn’t bother to check FM radio stations earlier until I got my new phone, the LG KG300. Now I was a bit bored listening to the music tracks I’d loaded on phone, so I just switched on the FM player. It met my expectations - a quick auto scan presented me the usual Bollywood crap. I might as well tell that I don’t listen to / like Hindi music, except for a few bands like Euphoria. I was about to give up when *surprise surprise* I run into a station playing Deep Purple!

So I took up, as a challenge, enduring loads of Bollywood crap (no arguments in the comments section on this please, I simply don’t want to listen to more crap suggestions), and finding out more about *good* music choices. Should also tell you beforehand - I simply HATE the RJs. Nothing personal against the kind, but I hate the useless banter, I prefer JUST the music. Internet radio was my fave haunting ground thus, but a few things happened: Yahoo! LAUNCHcast started blocking Firefox (but it’s a bloody good service - and can predict your music tastes real well, apart from having one of the world’s largest online music libraries); Last.fm’s Audioscrobbler needs too time to get things right; music companies started screwing Internet stations and they didn’t play popular music that much, for example, Pandora is no longer accessible for most non-US territories like India; ShoutCast has some good streams, but they’re difficult to find - ditto for Live365. Basically, Internet radio is still getting screwed by the companies. Coming back to Delhi FM radio stations, here’s what I found out.

• Most stations are crap - they play only Bollywood. I don’t understand the fucking reason, because there’s enough of a market for English stuff.
• Specifically, I was disappointed about Radio Mirchi 98.3 FM, because being a Times Group venture I expected it to be more sensible.
• The other sensible FM station at one time was Hits 95 FM, but now they play more Hindi shit, and ‘English songs’ for them has suddenly turned into rap / hip-hop (boy do I hate that genre).
• HT Media’s Fever 104 FM (Rating - 0.6 / 10): Happens to play English songs, but very infrequently, and that too it always happens to be a few selected songs of Akon, Linkin Park and Avril Lavigne. That’s it - that’s where English stuff ends for them.
• AIR 102.6 Rainbow FM (Rating - 8.3 / 10): Surprisingly, the best station is a government offering. Sure, the audio is mono channel, unlike the others which generally have stereo, and also has poor reception at times, but as far as music goes it rocks. The time slot is 8-9 pm daily - and they focus on one genre everyday. So for example you’ve movie soundtracks on one day, classical music on one, rock music on another, rap on one another, old time stuff on some other - you get the drift I guess. And you won’t believe, but this station is the ONLY station which actually has any variety - their music playlists aren’t stagnant, and they aren’t scared to experiment with bands. Also, being AIR, nobody puts ads so less interruptions; but it also means you’ve to listen to irritating government jingles on some new free crop fertilizer scheme. Having said that, their RJs are pathetic. They keep on speaking (when they have to) without reducing the song volume - as a result you get gibberish which you can’t make out anything of. There’s one RJ I especially hate for his fake accent (which he can’t get right). One day I was listening to a Bob Dylan song, and (some other RJ) comes on after the song is over and says the song was by Bob Dhillon. And then there was this gem from the fake accent guy:
  

  And now we have a song by the Irish band Ronan Keating…

  There’s more, after the song was over:
  

  After Ronan’s wife died due to HIS breast cancer problem, he set up an organization to combat breast cancer.

  You’ll get stuff like these pretty frequently, so that makes it a comedy show too. The saving grace is the fact that you get MUSIC on AIR, even though they ask for recommendations using a Gmail account and get excited when an Orkut community they start gets TEN members.

• Radio City 91.1 FM (Rating - 6.8 / 10): They’ve got this pathetically named called slot every weekday called City City Bang Bang from 9-11 pm, complete with sound effects ripped off from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Another fake accent keeps on announcing the cheesy show’s name all the time, and telling that it’s for ‘mature’ listeners. Nothing would even make a grandma blush. There’s a really irritating RJ (keeps on saying how good Amity University is all the time) to boot, who wants to chatter all the time. Thanfully, the music’s OK - they only play old time stuff, and that too they don’t experiment. I mean, fine, play the Beatles but at least change the bloody songs! They seem to have this collection of about 100 songs and they keep on playing that five times a week for three hours. You might stumble across good ones from Deep Purple, U2, Verve, Van Halen, Pink Floyd - but the song list is stagnant and within a few days you’d have memorised the whole list. It’s disappointing why they don’t add new songs. Then again, on Saturday at 9 pm they’ve the World Chart Show, not produced by them (and thus better) and bought from an overseas company. At last, you can listen to some good, sensible, and fresh music. What pisses me off is that every five minutes the RJ butts in to tell her name THROUGHOUT the show. Maybe she gets a kick out of it, but for someone who hates useless chatter on radio shows like me, it’s irritating.

If I’ve missed out anything, please do share it here - and maybe if you have a different take on FM / Internet radio. And in case you’re an FM station exec, I’d like to know why the hell there isn’t any RATM, LP, Marilyn Manson etc on air…