As some of you may know by now I’m a big fan of Douglas Adams. In particular I like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy very much. Both the printed and the radio version. The TV version a bit less so.
I know the radio episodes of the first two series quite well as I sometimes listen to them on my car on the way home. Now I don’t actually know why , but I’ve always assumed the introduction music for the episodes was an original.
Cut to YAPC::Europe::2004 where a speaker (in a lightning talk, if I’m not mistaken) demonstrated a clever usage of Perl scripts for controlling it’s Xmms while listening to an Internet radio station.
The radio station the speaker used as an example was Radio Paradise. After the conference I’ve started listening to it out of curiosity and I actually ended up liking it quite a lot and I’ve been spending my days connected to it.
So now the funniest thing happens: I am working along, listening to the radio when suddenly I start to hear the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Or rather, the musical intro to it.
And then I find out that no, it isn’t actually the intro to another episode but rather a music by The Eagles which is called “Journey of the Sorcerer”. Complete with the high pitched ending of the chorus section and all, the one that sounds just like the eighties high tech type sound that fitted so well in the radio episodes.
Funny old world, isn’t it?