42

Today marks my 'Douglas Adams' birthday - 42. This, of course, means I now am perfectly at one with The Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything. Mind you, as anyone who knows where their towel is can probably guess, I still don't understand the bloody Great Question, rendering it all pretty pointless (an apt metaphor for life, really - puzzling, frustrating, disappointing and pointless). At least I know my Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster from my Old Janx Spirit. I'm not really sure how I come to find myself at this age. On the one hand it seems like just the other year I was a happy mid 20s student drinking my way through college and quite happy, other days it feels like a lifetime ago. I suppose it was. Can't say I especially feel like celebrating; truth be told I don't really give a damn about my birthday, its on such an awkward day its a bit of an afterthought so it hasn't really meant much to me in my adult years, different when you are a kid. And these days it doesn't feel like there's much reason to celebrate.

Happy birthday, mum

Today should be my mum's birthday. I should be hearing her delight at the flowers I always get her for her birthday, instead on a cold, misty winter day dad and I are taking flowers to her grave. I still don't understand why she isn't here, I don't understand how someone you love so much can be ripped away from you just like that. Why is her name on a bloody cold stone?? The world without her I don't care for; it feels like nothing has really gone well since we lost her, just seems to be one thing after another, more strain, more bad things, even someone who was so important to me letting me down very badly and always just under the surface the raw hurt of having her taken from us. There are honestly some days when if it weren't for dad and taking care of the mogs I really wouldn't care if I went to sleep and never woke up again. I don't see anything in the future to inspire me or encourage me and it feels like just waiting for the next bad thing to happen all the time and that really isn't much reason to keep going on, makes you wonder why bother.

Happy 4th birthday, Forbidden Planet blog

The Forbidden Planet International blog I set up a few days after starting work there turned four years old today. Its vastly jumped up the Technorati rankings since it started, had some nice things said about it by a lot of folks, we've posted a ton of reviews on all sorts of comics, graphic novels and SF&F books, news and interviews with authors and artists from those who create in their spare time at home right up to the giants of the medium like Alan Moore, and hopefully we've done something I've always enjoyed doing and that's introducing readers to books and graphic novels they might not have picked up otherwise. I've been a bookseller for years and written about books and comics (and movies for that matter) for about as long but that's still one of the best feelings, when someone tells you they picked up something new that they might not have read because the saw it mentioned and as a result they found something new that they discovered they loved. I still get a buzz from that.

Happy birthday, Edgar Allan Poe

Happy birthday to a writer who has been one of my favourite authors since I was a boy - happy 200th birthday, Edgar Allan Poe, born January 19th 1809 and died October 7th 1849. Or perhaps he didn't die but was simply bricked up alive in a catacomb... Dead for a century and half and still influencing other writers, comics artists, movie makers, not to mention setting out the basic template for the modern detective several decades before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Holmes.

In fact it seems to be quite a year for anniversaries on the literary calendar - there's Poe, of course, its 200 years since Charles Darwin was born too, 150 years since On the Origin of Species was published and 150 years since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born. Conan Doyle's delightful adventure yarn of explorers and dinosaurs, The Lost World, is the central plank of this year's One Book, One Edinburgh campaign in February (Doyle being a local lad - in fact he would have studied not far from where I work), following on from the last two years where Cam Kennedy and Alan Grant created graphic novel adaptations of Stevenson. There will be events, free books, school events and other happenings.

This time it will also extend to Glasgow and ties in with the Darwin 200 events across the UK, including a graphic nove biography of Darwin by Simon Gurr and Eugene Byrne, all of which I hope helps gets younger readers excited and reading and maybe the Lost World will give them an interest in dinosaurs then natural history (so they know to tell 'intelligent design' eejits to feck off when they encounter those brain-damaged idiots). It certainly did for me a kid, leading me to look for factual books on dinosaurs, then geology, evolution, which tied in with interests in astronomy and space exploration, being able to apply that learning to other bodies and... Well, that's kind of the point, once you start a chain of reading like that it sparks off more and more ideas and questions, leading to more reading and a continually growing link of reading and learning that goes with you through life. All from a good adventure yarn and some dinosaurs.

birthdays

Its my birthday today, my age clicking over in time with the ending of the year. I've never cared much for my birthday, always feels sort of squeezed in there as everyone darts around getting ready for New Year and this year I can be bothered even less with it. Dad warned me that my card was one mum picked up ages ago - she had the habit of seeing something she thought perfect for someone for a birthday, Christmas etc and she'd get it then and put it aside, often months and months in advance (or even years - one of my cousins doesn't know it but she had put aside a certain something for her to be given on an upcoming special occasion, its just sitting there ready). So I opened the card today and there it is signed love mum and dad. And I felt as if someone hit me in the chest with a sledgehammer and that was me out of it for quite a while. I'd much rather have it than not, of course, but it was still bloody hard and I was struggling already (birthday is bad enough but New Year is often depressing at the best of times). Goodbye 2008 - you started so well, with the promise of a trip to Paris and I was very happy. Then you became the worst year of my life and I don't even remember half of it going past because even when I think I am functioning okay I don't think I am and am still running on autopilot a lot of the time. Go away 2008, you're not welcome here anymore, although somehow I doubt 2009 will make me feel any better.

Happy birthday, mum

Today should be my mum's birthday; it's the first since we lost her with such awful, shocking, sickening suddenness. Right now I should be getting a delighted phone call from her after she received the big bouquet of birthday flowers I'd always have sent to her. She loved getting that big bunch of birthday flowers and I loved how happy they made her. Sometimes they'd even still be in bloom when I went home for Christmas.

I'll never hear that ever again. Instead I'll be back through to Glasgow with dad and taking flowers to her grave. And I hate this. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. She should be here and she's not. I feel it every single day, a horrible ache inside, a weight on my spirit I can't lift, but this makes it worse and the imminent arrival of the Christmas period lurks around the corner like an unwanted visitor and how I hate the thought of Christmas without her. The world feels very cold and all there seems to be to look forward to is small diversions but no real delight.

Gitmo is six

I missed noticing this until today, but Guantanamo Bay's odious prison camp marked its sixth anniversary on Friday, an event marked by Amnesty International. Gee, I feel so much safer, hasn't the world become a much better place as a result of this place and the rest of Bush's foreign policy (not to mention their State Department announcing that under US law it is legal for them to go to another country, including Britain and kidnap someone they think is a suspect)? If only Gitmo made as much sense as most six year olds... (via Boing Boing)

100 year old twins

Nice story on the BBC about a pair of twins celebrating their one hundredth birthday on New Year's Day. When they were born in 1908 the doctor arrived on horseback. The way petrol prices are going they might be going back to that method of transportation sooner than we think :-). Happy New Year, folks.