Share and Enjoy!

For all you bloggers and social networkers out there who have used the Sociable WordPress Plugin:

Did you know where the default heading for the Sociable links, “Share and Enjoy” comes from? (Just look at the bottom of this post.)

It came from one of my all-time favorite authors, Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (TM) books.

In one of the earlier books, when it was still a trilogy (before it became a trilogy of 5 books), automated doors and tea-dispensing machines designed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corp. would encourage their victims to “share and enjoy” as they utterly failed to perform their function. As many Hitchhiker’s Guide fans will know, this had dire consequences on occasion

It seems to me that the Sociable plugin and links are doing an admirable job – you can forward this blog post by email, tweet it, send to facebook, linked-in, sphinn it, even print it out. I love it!

I just wanted to let you folks know about the “Share and Enjoy” relationship to Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Douglas Adams was a genius writer who was taken from us waaaay too soon. He passed away in 2001 from a sudden heart attack (as I understand it). If you have not read the books but took a stab at watching the more recent movie by the same name, PLEASE listen to me. The movie sucked. It did not reflect the books or Adams’ wit in any way. Even I couldn’t sit all the way through it. Lord knows why, but Hollywood has a complete incapacity for translating GREAT sci-fi into movies.

Anyway – read his books!  Get CDs of the original radio play! (I first heard the original radio broadcasts from the BBC when I was a busted bohemian in Cambridge, MA. They are brilliant.)

Douglas Adams not only wrote…. Ok… brilliant again…. sci-fi, he was also a devoted environmentalist and active naturalist. His book Last Chance To See, is about his travels across the planet to document about a dozen species that are right on the brink of extinction. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Adams I would not have heard about Kakapos (New Zealand flightless parrots) or the Lemurs of Madagascar.

In addition to Hitchhiker’s Guide, he also wrote Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Brilliant. Again.

Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. Did I mention Brilliant?

Search for Douglas Adams on Amazon or Wikipedia and find out more about this genius of our time. He may be corporeally gone, but he is still with many of us who will NEVER be able to forget his gift for language, razor-sharp wit, storytelling, and devotion to this home we call planet earth.