Daniel > Recent Status Updates

Finished So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.

Finished Life, the Universe and Everything

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was. It wasn't just that the cave was cold, it wasn't just that it was damp and smelly. It was that the cave was in the middle of Islington and there wasn't a bus due for two million years.

Finished Restaurant.

Finished HHGTTG.

In this American edition, Veet Voojagig's story is about ballpoints instead of biros! It really loses something. 'Biroid life forms' are funny; 'ballpoint life forms' less so.

Wow. David Mitchell is now my favourite living writer.

I'm loving it. My 'book of the year'.

I'm having a Seinfeld flashback, specifically the episode 'The Cheever Letters':

Under her mint-green dress she had on tiny black lace underwear.

'Did your mom buy these for you too?' Tsukuru asked?

'Aren't you afraid of dying?'

'Not really. I've watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it.'

Sparta is surrounded by the erotic aura of the boarding school, the garrison, the gymnasium, the jail. Everywhere there are Mädchen in Uniform, even if that uniform is a taut and glistening skin.

Finished 'The Dying Earth'

'It is thus because it has always been thus. Is not this reason enough?'
'Sufficient possibly for you,' said Guyal, 'but for me the causality is unconvincing. I must acquaint you with the void in my mind, which lusts for knowledge as a lecher yearns for carnality; so pray be patient if my inquisition seems unnecessarily thorough.'

For a certain time, the universe enjoyed an excellent opportunity to gather and elaborate information; and to create it, to bring forth information there where in other circumstances there would have been no one to inform and nothing to inform them about: such was life on Earth, and above all human life, its memory, its inventions for communicating and remembering.

There was a distant roll of thunder, very faint, like a mouse walking across a drum.

Pankow is a sort of Hampstead of East Berlin, comfortable and bourgeois; the dogs wear little overcoats and the kids play without shouting. Fist-sized shrapnel holes pock-marked the grey face of number 238 and as I mounted the wide stone staircase, the smell of Eisbein and fried onion walked alongside me.

Her hair was drawn back tightly from her face and her skin was taut and wrinkle-free like the very finest aerodynamic design. She felt me looking at her and looked at me. I smiled but she did not smile back. She opened a small compartment of her desk. The dispassionate impersonal attitude made her very desirable. 'You are looking pretty damn sexy today, Jean,' I said.

'Thanks,' she said.

Beyond him greenery sprouted between the white gravestones like they were gigantic mustard-and-cress sandwiches.

Above us the tips of the firs almost closed out the stars as we sped down the long claustrophobic track like bugs in a hair-brush.

'He's so irritating,' I said.
'You think he doesn't know that?' said Jean. 'He's just like you; he takes a perverse delight in irritating people.'
'Do you really think so?'
'It's obvious,' said Jean.
'Do you know I never realised that? I'll have to revise my attitude to the chintzy old bastard.' I passed her the message from Cato 16 and began to drink my Nescafe-flavoured hot water.

Across one wall stood a bookcase with glass doors; inside was a shiny leather set of Dickens with only Martin Chuzzlewit missing. Dawlish got the set for twenty-five shillings. Martin Chuzzlewit wasn't one of Dickens's best as Dawlish was always saying.