Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Farewells -- Old and New

Today is the anniversary of the death of Steve Irwin (and surely you know all about him -- played with crocodiles and venom-spewing snakes for a living). I remember hearing the news two years ago and feeling absolutely amazed. He had always been a spark in my life; nobody to whom I paid a tremendous amount of attention but who I liked and who had always been there to make people laugh and smile and freak out over how utterly messed up a person had to be to do what he did, but still, he always came out all right .... and life seemed different without him; I was disturbed in a distant but lingering manner that still returns sometimes. I don't know. Steve Irwin was just so cool and really should be alive today.

(Once, at the age of ten, I was watching him and decided I wanted to be just like him. At that point my mind was changing pretty quickly -- never really settling on any one particular goal, whether it was getting the laundry into the dryer or going to the beach or becoming a novelist. I didn't think too long about taking on a role like Steve Irwin's, but I think I'll always remember that.)

I learnt from http://journal.neilgaiman.com (thanks to Dan Guy the Webgoblin, caretaker of the blog for now) that Geoffrey Perkins, producer of the marvelous BBC radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was killed in a road accident on August twenty-ninth.

This makes me truly sad -- because I can hardly emphasize how much better I always felt about anything and everything after listening to the voices of Simon Jones, Geoffrey McGivern, Mark Wing-Davey, and everyone else who helped to shape the wild but wholesome world of Douglas Adams.

So I guess I'm off to gag down my daily dose of algebra (because, you know, I have to). Keep Geoffrey Perkins and Steve Irwin in mind.

~Emily