The worst poetry in the Universe...

Message:

Is by Paul Neil Milne Johnston or Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings, depending on if you have the original radio version before Pauk NM Johnston sued Douglas Adams (a classmate) for making fun of him on radio.

Anyways, the 1981 TV series guide entry prints out the "worst poem in the universe."

"The dead swans lay in the pond.
They lay.
They rotted.
They turned about occasionally.
Bits of flesh dropped off from time to time
and sank into the murky mire.

They also smelt a great deal."

Vogon poetry is mild in comparison.

(Too much otherwise useful brain storage holds large segments of Hitch-Hiker's.)

My final theater sound design was for unstaged readings of the first six episodes of the radio series. I'd not worked in OC theater for 18 months prior - I was lured "out of retirement" by a director/producer team who hated me. My demands: 1) my normal $500 fee - to be donated back to the theater (this was to maintain my established rate). 2) Admit publicly they wanted me because no one else in OC theater could pull it off (this was me being a dick back at people who'd been bad-mouthing me for six years). 3) I play Deep Thought from the audio booth. I also insisted on running it (usually I was design and a house tech did the operation) because I KNEW I wasn't going to be able to train anyone on a 2.5 hour wall-to-wall monstrosity in three tech rehearsals. This wasn't some play with scene change music and a few spot SFX, but H2G2, with non-stop audio.

Fun design. The radio scripts had notes on the music used, so, where possible, I used the original music, pulled a lot of the original sound effects from the radio series and TV show (had to piece together the Vogon ship ambience from multiple clips to create the loop), and mixed the whale hitting Magrathea as a ridiculously long surround sound effect where the chunks of whale fell over and around the audience (director wanted it cut, I refused with "trust me, it will get a laugh - and it did, every night!). I was running four minidiscs and three CDs, and my Q sheet went from A to FFFFFFF.

Yours,