The Pursuit of Happiness

Recently there has been a flurry of activity in regards to gay marriage. New Hampshire and Maine passed legislation legalizing it, leaving New York and as the only states that still have nothing on the books to defend this right. New York is struggling to get it passed, and even Democrats are wary of supporting a bill unless it is likely to pass. We're still not certain if it does or not.
In Russia, a lesbian couple applied for a marriage liscence, and though they were denied within an hour (it usually takes ten business days for a couple to recieve a ruling), it was declared illegal for them to be denied the opportunity to apply. After being denied, they went to Canada, where marriages are performed regardless of nationality. They're hoping that since Russia doesn't have any laws directly stating that out-of-the-country marriage is invalid, their Canadian license will be recognized.
Last but not least, as Rachele has already mentioned, there's the problem of Miss California, who stated her opinion that marriage is for heterosexual couples only. While this comment was preceeded by the statement that she's proud to live in a country where everyone shares equal freedom, the most vocal people in support of gay marriage are tearing into her. That's bad news, something we can't ignore even when good things are happening. Attacking a girl who was stating a personal opinion could bring the movement to a grinding halt.
We're getting somewhere. Massachusetts, Iowa, Vermont, Maine, Conneticut, and New Hampshire have legalized gay marriage, three of them quite recently. That's more than ten percent now. We have to be careful not to take things too personally and be grateful we're moving forward. Things can change, especially in the twenty-first century.

Trippy fish out of its habitat

This week, off the coast of Britain, a fisherman caught a fish called sarpa salpa. Though it is easily identifiable by those who know about it, the fisherman had no idea what it was. That's because it's native to the coast of Africa, and this particular fish was far out of its normal range. It could have simply been caught up in another shoal of fish, but it's also possible that it is one of many that are expanding north as water heats up due to climate change. The sarpa salpa in particular is a risk to uninformed Brits, because eating certain parts of it (the head in particular) causes svere halluncinations. People have been hospitalized with auditory hallucinations and dramatic nightmares as a result of eating unhealthy parts of the sarpa salpa.
As for the fisherman who caught this specimen, he says if he'd known what it was, he'd have taken it to a club and sold it.

"Hyperlocal" News Sites

In this current economic crisis, many people have stopped buying newspapers. The news industry is in decline, suffering cuts just as severe as any other market's. Many people, short on cash, are turning to the internet for their information because it's usually free. Now, a trend in this on-line media has surfaced: the obsession with local news. These "hyperlocal" news sites are concerned with only a limited area, disregarding even national news that affects the local, like swine flu, in favor of a block-by-block investigation of one town or county. Most of these news sites are manned by volunteers, and so the information is questionable. Trained journalists are changing that, though, starting their own hyperlocal news sites, then recruiting and training area volunteers on the proper way to investigate, find facts, and present controversial topics without bias. These local newsmen then go into the community and report on topics that would never be noticed by a larger paper. One newspaper volunteer was able to uncover a case of police brutality in their small town which had gone uninvestigated by any other source.
While the news industry is struggling, the operators of these hyperlocal papers are more optimistic. They believe that the culture of media is changing, and they are adapting well and coming up with new ideas about how to fund newspapers and decide what to present (one paper allows its readers to choose which stories they want to pay for, thus tayloring the paper to the local demand). The world may be ending like all the large papers say, these locals believe, but there's more to it than that, and there will always be a news source to report on it all.

Young Iranian Voters Know Their candidates.

Iran is a democracy on the surface. In truth, it is controlled by an Islamic regime. The people elect the president and his parliment, but candidates are selected and approved by the Ayatollah. Also, the people are often uninformed voters due to the lack of information about the presidential and parlimentary candidates which is presented to them by the government. But many young Iranians have found a way around this information gap: facebook. The revolution in Iran took place before most Iranians who know how to operate facebook were born, and they are more likely to encounter a wide range of views through their exposure to the internet. Many democratic nations are hoping that these well-informed voters will realise that their vote doesn't count as much as it could, and will mount some kind of rebellion against the theocratic state. Maybe it'll work. If any change does come to Iran, that should be the way it happens.

Food Shortages

How important is food? We take it for granted, but many a government has been brought down by people rioting for want of bread. Now, some scientists fear that the combined forces of population growth and global warming will decrease the already insufficient food supply and wreak havoc on poor nations.
Population growth stresses the water supply. In order to provide more water, deeper wells must be produced. This uses energy, and since fossil fuels are the cheapest and most readily aviable, sources of energy, these are most likely the ones which will be uses. This will spur clilmate change. Climate change will lead to droughts and floods, and these will lead to the loss of topsoil because of wiind and water. Also, the heat will kill many crops which are grown. Population growth is linked to loss of topsoil and rising temperatures along with being a food problem in itself, making it the leading cause of food shortages. But loss of topsoil is also caused by clearcutting and other man-made disruptions of the environment, and the countries which use the highest levels of fossil fuels also tend to be the countries with the lowest population growth rates.
If poor countries suffer from food shortages, chaos will soon follow. And poor nations, especially the wildly unstable ones, are more likely to spread diseases (like AIDS), and the sale of drugs and weapons tends to increase. Also, unstable nations are more likely to accept extremist govenments and leaders, leading to extreme conflicts.
There are several basic, if not simple solutions to this problem. Planting trees would reduce the loss of topsoil and the amount of CO2 in the air (and growing fruit or nut trees would help directly, at least to some extent). Creating cheap, sustainable energy will help slow climate change. Increased water management, including conservation and recycling, would ease the strain on the water supply. And healthcare, at least on a basic level, combined with a reasonable sex education and family planning program, would ease the burden on large and poor populations.

Migrant Worker's Song

As the world's population moves from the country to the city, many people worry that rural culture will be lost. However, there is a culture in China which is forming around this transition. Migrant workers who come into Chinese cities often leave homes that have been kept by their families for generations. They leave a more natural land and work they know well to find opportunity. To commemorate their loss, they write songs. This sort of tradition is seen all over the world. Now, Chinese migrant workers have begun to record it. They've created a new strain of folk song, and it appeals to Chinese city-dwellers, particularly youth (perhaps because of the feeling of wandering and alienation that is the feature of many of the songs). Even audiences outside of China are taking notice, and while they can't understand the lyrics, they can hear the emotion. We know these people and what they feel, and their culture is being preserved by the progress which has caused them to lose their way of life.

Lost in space

The space program fascinates people. Rocket science is almost incomprehensible. The shuttles are a sublime depiction of the power of controlled physics. But sometimes I wonder what it has contributed to us, and so do a lot of others. I asked someone what the space program had given us, and they replied, "Velcro." There was tremendous resentment when the space program began, because the taxes of the poor were being spent on programs that didn't really benefit them, while very little was being done to improve their standard of living (see "Whitey on the Moon," for example).
When you dig into it a bit, the space program has some benefits. Solar panels were developed by NASA. Also, the lens used for the Hubble telescope was converted into an imaging technology for breast biopsy that can examine a tumor so closely it can determine whether it is malignant or not without surgery. Also, there are a tremendous amount of jobs generated by the space programs and the companies that produce the supplies it uses. I don't think NASA will solve world hunger (although they might come up with something through their plant research), but there are benefits, no matter how little-known they are.

California's on fire again.

I didn't even hear about it this time. There's a website with five hundred photos of these most recent wildfires, but no one's talking about it around here. Are we just used to it by now? I wonder if Californians talk about it. How often can something happen before you just get used to it?
Yesterday we got out of school early because of the threat of tornados. Tornados didn't even cross my mind as I realized I could go back to my room on the (unsafe in a tornado) third floor and work on all the projects I have due before the semester ends. Some people grumbled that they hoped the housing staff wouldn't lock us in the theatre again, but that was the biggest concern we had. Tornados are old hat. Even when a tornado hit a high school near where I lived and killed some students, the next time a storm rolled around, no one really cared. There are exceptions (a friend of mine covers the furniture in plastic so it won't get ruined if something happens to the roof, then demands that enveryone gather their precious belongings and huddle in the basement), but for the most part, severe weather isn't that interesting. Natural death threats are a pain, not a worry. Even airport security, an unnatural phenomenon, is annoying.
Death does not disturb us. Is that instinct, or are we simply used to it?

Nuclear Ethics

My girlfriend came to me fuming one day about a debate she'd had in her history class. The topic of discussion had been whether or not it was ethical to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Almost everyone in her class said that absolutely it was. "This was war," they told her, "It would never end if you were soft." Their thought was that American soldiers would have died in droves if we hadn't forced the Japanese into submission with the bombs. Her thought was that those soldiers joined the military knowing that they might die, while the Japanese civilians simply had the unfortunate distinction of being Japanese.
After September eleventh, I heard a few people say that we should just nuke the whole Middle East and be done with it. That always made me angry, but as a sixth grader unused to having opinions of my own, I couldn't articulate why. Now I think it's because I'm a civilian. My government it at war, some of my friends are in the military, but I don't have anything to do with it. In the fraction of a second before I was vaporized, I'd be rather offended that another country was taking out their anger on me when I haven't personally done anything to them.
I read somewhere that fighting people simply have no imagination; they can't stop and imagine what their fist is going to do to someone's face, and therefore they can't put themselves in that person's place and figure they probably wouldn't like that too much. Perhaps ethics is simply an excess of imagination. We don't do bad things to others because we imagine it wouldn't be fun if they did it to us. We need creative people to be in charge of nuclear weapons. Maybe then they wouldn't be used.

Hydroponics

In the 1980's, a man who made antivenom for snakes in Australia was telling Douglas Adams (as related in Last Chance to See), that the future was in hydroponics. Almost thirty years later, he might just be correct. But very few people seem to know it. Hydroponics is a way of growing plants in little or no soil. Systems can be very complicated and mechanized or as simple as a well-monitored tomato plant in a mason jar. There have been recent developements in the mechanized area, where farming units are available. These machines can grow several acres of plants in a single unit, because the plants are given a perfectly-balanced portion of light, darkness, and water by being rotated in a circular hydroponic planter. The plants are also slightly larger and grow somewhat faster. How does this sound as a solution to world hunger or the demand for ethanol?

Swine Flu

Cough cough.
No matter what, someone's going to say something about swine flu. Coughing isn't even one of the symptoms, but they'll say it anyway. And have you heard the joke about Obama? I heard about swine flu while I was lying on the back seat of my grandmother's car, just about ready to die of fever, so of course my first thought was that I had it. I was dramatizing the thing before the radio report was half finished.
"What's the big deal with all this?" I asked one of the other dorm girls. "It sounds just like regular flu to me."
"Nothing really. It's just different. And some people have died."
But people die of the regular flu all the time. Granted, there are news reports during flu season, but the president doesn't worry himself about it.
"Haven't people died from swine flu?"
"In Mexico, yeah," I answered another girl the next day, "but not here."
That was a Friday. I'd already had my SAT postponed because there was an outbreak of swine flu at the highschool that was hosting the test. I still don't quite believe it. An epidemic in teh high school my mother graduated from.
On Monday, the girl I'd talked to on Friday told me that a baby had died of swine flu. "You were saying nobody was going to die here, and now someone has. It's like karma."
"I didn't want the baby to die!" I wailed. She tried to assure me that wasn't what she meant, but it was too late. The whole thing just wasn't funny anymore.
I still make jokes about swine flu. But I can't shake the fact that we're laughing about something that kills people. It probably won't kill me, but does that matter? I can't decide. If people didn't laugh about it, they'd just freak out. But is making jokes disrespectful to the dead?

A friend of mine told me yesterday that he has his own religion: himself. He says that he is his number one priority, and he surrounds himself with people who feel the same about themselves. He doesn't expect anyone to love him so much that he overpowers their own needs.
In a culture that seems to be obsessed with self (youtube, myspace, itunes), the people who want change advocate selflessness. Many claim that the youth of today are too ego-centric, that they're arrogant and don't care about anyone. And yet doctors like Gerald L. Klerman are seeing an upward trend in young people with depression and low self-esteem. The symptoms are "less psychotic" but more common. Perhaps youtube isn't catering to an already inflated ego, but simply providing a shaky foundation for what little self-confidence that young people have. Perhaps consumer culture doesn't run on the greased gears of people assuming their entitlement but on the backs of those who are so stooped over from shame that they consume blindly because they are lost in a haze of self-hatred. Like Jack, when told he looked harmless, sped to the mall and bought everything in sight, are we simply trying to make up for the self-esteem and true substance that we lack?
My friend is a self-acknowledged narcissist. He also doesn't have much, and he doesn't seem driven by the consumer machine. He shows no sign of depression; he's one of the happiest people I know. He's just one example, but he's a positive one. Perhaps we should all convert to his religion.

Toxic Bonds

I listened to a long NPR opinions session about a new movement from the government to help the economy. The plan is that the government will buy shares in "toxic bonds" (bad mortgages and investments), and then sell them to the public in a manner similar to the liberty bonds from WWII. The idea is that these toxic bonds will recover as the economy gets back on its feet, which it can do with the money investors spend to buy these bonds. Not all bonds will make money, but some certainly will, and the people who own them will make a killing.
As I listened to the debate, in which professionals from both sides of the issue fielded questions and opinions from people who called into the station. The only thing I really understood was that a lot of what determines the safety of these toxic bonds is the price at which their sold. I couldn't help but wonder how many Americans really do understand this thing, and how many are just faking it or ignoring it. What percentage of the population truly understands the economy?
And who comes up with these ideas?

Pet-keeping Safety

Where do people buy tigers and chimps as pets? What are they thinking when they decide to go to these places? Maybe there's some sort of thrill in it, like Orest in White Noise. Maybe owning an exotic pet is their purpose in life. Most people agree, whatever the buyer's reasoning, that the owners of dangerous pets are insane.
But humans all over the globe work with dangerous, exotic animals every day. Zoo keepers deal with lions and gorillas, and circuses have tigers. These people are in direct contact with carnivores much larger than they are, and very few accidents are reported. What's the difference between these professionals and people like Orest or the woman who owned the 200 pound chimp? I think the non-professionals, the ones who get hurt, are the ones who forget that these animals are not humans.
The woman who owned the chimp who recently attacked a woman had an odd relationship with the animal. He slept in her bed, ate at her table, and accompanied her wherever she went. She gave the chimp muscle relaxers when he seemed tense; while this helps humans, scientists say the medication could have the opposite affect on chimps, which would aggravate him further.
Also, the famous attack in 2003, when Roy Horn of Sigfried and Roy was attacked by a tiger. Sigfried claimed that the cat was trying to protect Roy from some percieved danger. Many professionals who work with big cats state that the tiger was going for the jugular, an obvious attempt to kill.
Animals are not dangerous as long as you recognize them for what they are. Tigers are huge carnivors and should be kept at a distance. Chimps are primates like us, but they are not pets, and they certainly are not humans. Only realizing this will keep our interactions with other living creatures safe.

Youtube Copyright

Youtube is a perpetual source of entertainment for many people, myself included. I don't know what I would do on the weekends if I couldn't sit and watch a pirated movie in ten-minute segments online.

There was one movie in particular that I'd grown fond of, and I'd watched it several times. One day I opened it up, however, and was told that the video had been removed due to copyright infringement. I was indignant. How dare they take away what I was so used to stealing?

Copyright infringement and piracy are the norm nowadays. It's a crime, always has been. There are laws against it, threatening hefty fines and even time in jail. I remember a time when people were truly afraid that such laws would be enforced, but that fear has long since faded. When did we develop the notion that everything belongs to us? Media is created for our entertainment, but that doesn't mean that it is by nature free. It costs money and energy to create music and movies, and asking a price for the result is perfectly fair.

Of course, there is a limit. If something costs wildly more for a comsumer than for the ones who produce it, then something is out of balance. But the piracy trend seems just as bad, as far as honor and fairness go. Maybe it just doesn't matter because movie producers and famous musicians have more money than we could wrap our heads around. Maybe not.

The missing concept, in either direction, is what we earn. Who has a right to entertainment? Those who work hard. Those who produce it. Those who pay for it.

On the other hand, here's the first in a series called "Piracy is Good?" presented on a TV station in Australia.

Wetlands Edge

For two years during middle school, I was involved with a program called Wetlands Edge. After school, I would get on a buss with the other students in the program and ride out to the fringes of Decatur, where there were indeed wetlands. There was a building there, splint in half; on one side, freshwater animals, on the other, salt water.
We started out with an introduction to biodiversity. I learned that Alabama is the most biodiverse state in the nation, and it is in danger of losing many of its precious species. We brushed over the reasons why this was important, but I intuited most of it. It was one of the few classes I was fully and consistently engaged in. We were given waterproof notebooks for our observations, and then they dragged us out into the water.
A quarter mile or so from the main building, there was a pond. I made an art of catching tree frogs in the cattails on one edge of it and the tiny toads that hopped across the trails, and I searched fruitlessly day after day for the muskrat that lived on the far bank. As a group, we trolled the area and swiped around with individual nets, catching dragonfly larvae and sunfish, freshwater turtles, and a fair amount of algae. We also explored the grasses around the pond and tried to make connections between the terrestrial organisms and the aquatic ones that the program was so invested in. The greatest disturbance to the natural environment was the time that I stepped in a hole at the bottom of the pond and sunk into the mud. I got out, but my left shoe didn’t. We spent days digging for it with our nets, but we never fished it up.
This was one of the most valuable classes I have ever taken. I’m not sure if it’s still running or not. No one talks about it, it’s not advertised. When I was involved, I had to explain what I was talking about to almost everyone I told. There are programs with amazing possibilities, but they go largely unnoticed. That’s why when we went off the Wetlands Edge property and explored some of the other watersheds in the area, there was almost nothing to catch. People just don’t know. We’re made of water, but we don’t take enough time to look at it. Wetlands Edge knows how to set this right, but like my shoe, it lies at the bottom of the pond, unfindable and forgotten.

Comfortably Numb

This week at the lunch table, I told my friends that I might have ADD. No surprise there, I have memory issues, am distracted by the most negligable of details, stare into space often, and fiddle with my hands constantly. But Anna snapped to attention and said with a tinge of alarm, "Don't get medicine." She's been reading a book called Comfortably Numb, about how wildly over-medicated America is. Of course, you don't have to read a book on it to know that's probably true; just turn on the tv or open a magazine, and someone'll be there, trying to sell you a disease... I mean, a drug. Still, Anna didn't need to worry about me. The last time I took asprin, I had a headache so bad I tossed my cookies. And I latched onto the line on the official ADD website that said the disorder can be treated successfully without medicine. While other Americans are scrambling for drugs, there are plenty of people like me running just as fast in the other direction.
But I'm not sure that's a good thing, either. My dad doesn't take his depression medicine regularly because he says it doesn't work, and any mention of new or combination drugs turns him green. While there are people who are overmedicated for disorders they may not even have, how many people are there like my dad, who insist that drugs won't help them and continue to suffer needlessly? It's hard to deny that drug companies often go too far in marketing their products and harming healthy people in the process, but how many others are left unhelped?
Somewhere in all this mess is a balance. Even when people do take drugs, that doesn't cure them. ADD treatment involves a heavy dose of organizational skills, and depression doesn't go away when you pop a pill. Diet pills don't work if you continue to eat and sit around like you used to, and heartburn is going to hang around if you keep pouring on the hot sauce. But balance isn't comfortable, it's a strain. Being numb is easier. Somehow we need to keep people on their toes when it comes to medicine, before this goes to far and the scales are tipped for good.

And now for something completely different.

Have you ever heard someone say that our constitution provides freedom of religion, not freedom from religion? The first time I heard this, I was dumbfounded. It seems obvious that this shows a complete disregard for what freedom actually means, but I couldn't articulate why. I've thought about it for a while now, and here's what I came up with. It involves extending that lack of "from" to all other parts of the bill of rights. For example, freedom of speech. Going with the from/of idea, people do not have the freedom to hold their peace. So a boy is walking home from school, and some other boys start shouting, "Hey, are you a bright? Are you a faggot?" The boy ignores them, thinking they'll go away. They jump him, and he is seriously injured. His parents sue for damages and lose because there is no constitutional protection for those who do not speak. And then there's freedom of the press. Does this mean that not subscribing to a newspaper is unconstitutional? And which press qualifies as constituitional press? Which stories are constitutionally news? Coming back to religion, what does the freedom of religion cover? Deists are theists, spiritual people, but they are not religious. Is this unconstitutional?
My first encounter with this picky way of wording things was in an on-line video that I stumbled upon. Hopefully I can find it again. Meanwhile, I've discovered the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which might be interesting to those of you whom I haven't offended with this post.

"This Blessed House"

The Webster's defintion of "blessed" is: 1) held in reverence, honored 2) of or enjoying happiness 3) bringing pleasure, contentment, or good fortune.
What part of this house is blessed? Do a bunch of little Jesus statues really bring about honor and happiness? It seems to me that all those things were forgotten about, stuffed in drawers and under the sink and covered in bird droppings behind a bush. If the previous owners left each item in the hope that their successors would convert, they made a rather shabby effort. Or perhaps the house is blessed because Twinkle says it is. She gets her way every other time.
Naturally, the first reason given for keeping all of these oddments is that "It could be worth something. Who knows?" When did people start buying blessings? Since there was money to buy them with. And nowadays it comes in porcelain, wood, and color-by-numbers. It's worth about twenty dollars or so on ebay (http://cgi.ebay.com/Porcelain-Figure-of-Jesus-Beautiful-And-Collectible_W0QQitemZ110337782301QQcmdZViewItemQQptZDecorative_Collectibles?hash=item110337782301&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1240%7C66%3A2%7C65%3A12%7C39%3A1%7C240%3A1318%7C301%3A1%7C293%3A1%7C294%3A50). *
Sanjeev and Twinkle are not blessed. Plastic Jesus brings out the differences between them, and there is no negotiation. Sanjeev threatens and Twinkle cries. By the end of a few weeks, Sanjeev is ready to lock everyone in his life in the attic, just so he can have peace for a little while. The most valuable thing in the house is not love or even marriage. Twinkle is willing to leave just because Mary is headed for the dump. A silver Jesus head that neither of the owners can carry is the best they can produce. That is only the shadow of a blessing.
People bless things left and right, at funerals and when they get lucky. You can say anything about anyone in the South as long as you tack on a "bless their heart." Waiters who do a favor for my dad are bound to hear "God bless you" at least once. The word is packaged in cellophane. We have blessed each other so much that we're all back where we started, without honor and unable to purchase happiness with the lint in our pockets.

*I will gladly bless anyone who can show me how to attach a link to a word so that I don't have to post those crazy seven-line web addresses.

I was told this would be easy...

Right now I'm not so sure. I think computer operation is one of my 21st century challenges.

The first problem you guys might have with this blog is what in the world my title means. Often I've heard the phrase "as the crow flies," meaning an estimated distance. If someone tells you this, they don't know for certain how far you are from where you're going or when you're ever going to get there. That sounds about right for me in this century. In truth, I'm not quite sure I know where I'm going, let alone how close I am to it.
But this thing isn't called "As the Crow Flies." So what's a kakapo? It's a very fat green parrot. Native only to New Zealand, there are about ninety of them left in the world. Originally New Zealand had no predators, and there was plenty for the birds to eat, so the kakapo gave up its ability to fly because it wanted to stuff itself. (The trouble with this is that the kakapo seems to forget sometimes that it can't fly, and so they have been known to leap from trees, flapping their inadequite wings the whole time they're falling.) To prevent over-population, the birds developed an elaborate mating ritual. Males construct a "track and bowl system," a shallow hole with several trails leading off from it, and then they settle into the bowls and boom, or make calls so deep that humans can barely hear it. This noise, helped by pitch and the tracks leading out from the bowl, can travel for miles, attracting every eligible female on the island. The trouble is, it's difficult to know which direction such deep booms are coming from. Douglas Adams, in his book Last Chance to See, described the conversation between a male and female kakapo as something like this:
Male: Come and get me!
Female: Where are you?
Male: Come and get me!
Female: Where the heck are you?
Male: Come and get me!
Female: Oh, go stuff yourself!
To make things a bit more difficult, females are only prepared to reproduce when a particular tree (which I believe is now also endangered) is bearing fruit. This tree does not blossom every year. But even with all this difficulty, the kakapo did well on the islands of New Zealand.
The trouble started when humans came ashore, bringing rats, cats, and stoats. Kakapos had lived for centuries (at least) without a single preadator, and when faced with a cat, they didn't even have a fight-or-flight instict. They became easy prey to the mainland invaders, as many island species do.
If you're interested (and trust wikipedia), here's an article with a lot more detail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakapo .
Also, I learned about the kakapo from a fantastic book (previously mentioned) called Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. The BBC followed these two men as they trekked around the world trying to see endangered animals in the wild, and here's a site that has exerpts from that radio broadcast: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/dna/lastchance.shtml . I believe there are also free audiobook downloads available, but it would probably be against blog rules to encourage file sharing.

That's all I've got for now. Here's hoping this works correctly.