Sane Magazine is the fault of quite a few people. Some people may prefer to call them influences, we prefer to blame it on them. Displaced responsibility, if you will.
Possibly the most at fault was Douglas Adams.
He just never knew when to stop did he, and look what he's gone and done, by proxy and without his consent.
I know that I, personally, have a little over ten years' worth of fiction since coming away from a reading/laughing of one of the Hitchhiker's books with the ineluctable feeling that I, too, could do that. 'That' being the filling of lots and lots of pages with words, scores of commas and parentheses, occasionally illiciting the odd chuckle from the reader. Ah, apologies, actually, with our particular scheme of blame, he has over ten years' worth of fiction (most of it terrible, as well) for which he's to answer. And he was considerably less funny whilst taking the blame for my stuff.
He also had some extremely dodgy haircuts and wore some appalling clothes in that timespan. And still has yet to learn which kinds of plaid clash with which other kinds of plaid.
All right, perhaps I can't go quite that far. I'll take responsibility for the poor fashion sense, then. Which, I have to say, is big of me, considering the fashion sense is, in a contest, the loser of the two offences.
So I suppose, for this one glaring fault, I'm simply asking you to be a bit easy on him, being largely unaware of this particular transgression. He's still the guy you would wander into Waterstone's, looking up and down the first few bookshelves in the Fiction, Science Fiction, and Detective sections for, in the hopes that he'd put something new out without telling anyone about it. And then you'd pop round the Computer section, in the hopes that maybe a store clerk misplaced a copy of his new book, which you'd neither been told about, read anything about anywhere, or had any sensible reason to believe even existed, in the Computer section. That exercise failing, you'd then return to the Fiction section, take down Richard Adams' Watership Down, and though you'd read it and knew it didn't contain any Douglas Adams-related things, you'd flip through the first couple pages to see if someone at the printer hadn't mistakenly printed a new, hitherto unannounced and unexpected Douglas Adams book inside a Watership Down jacket. And, for good measure, give the shelves in the 'D' section a good going over, in case the store clerks had mistakenly thought it was a new book by an author named Adams Douglas. After all of which you'd sadly trundle out of the shoppe, and down to W.H. Smith's, where they just might have a secret copy of Douglas Adams' newest book that's he's not told anyone about just yet, even though it's already been through the printers and shipped out to a select few shoppes...
So for bearing the brunt of the blame and for all of it, thanks, Douglas.
from The Meaning of Liff, by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd
ELY (n.)
The first, tiniest inkling you get that something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong.
