Douglas Adams 61st Birthday on Google Doodle
Google Visitors found something exciting today, as today Google celebrated the 61st birthday of noted author and humorist Douglas Adams' in Adams' own Style.
The Doodle displays his legacy and life with an animated doodle. He was born on 11 March 1952 in Cambridge. Adams well-known for his work "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" - a comic science fiction series with its movie adaptation in 2005. Douglas Adams wrote some of the best English novels at his time, with some of his books selling more than 15 million copies worldwide. He showed a flair for writing from an early age and went to graduate in English literature in 1974. After graduation, he moved to London. He began his career in radio broadcasting at one of the BBC Radio stations. His work for the UK radio industry earned him a place in the hall of fame of the UK Radio Academy. A music aficionado who played guitar and piano, Adams was an environmental activist who championed the cause of wildlife conservation. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was born as a science-fiction comedy series for the radio. 
The first series - consisting of six episodes - was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March and April 1978, and received an excellent response. A seventh episode was broadcast on 24 December 1978. The first four episodes of the series were adapted into the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was first published in 1979, initially in paperback, and reached number one on the book charts in only its second week. The book sold over 250,000 copies within three months of its release. A second series of five episodes was broadcast one per night, during the week of 21-25 January 1980. Four more books followed, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe and Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984) and Mostly Harmless (1992). Adams also wrote 3 episodes of popular TV series Doctor Who. Adam' cult classic book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the inspiration for Google's Doodle today. You can find stars passing by through the tiny window in the top right and to the left-side is an elevator with a robot, as your co-pilot. The doodle has a device featuring the words "Don't panic" written on it. In the series, Don't Panic is a phrase written in large letters on the cover of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The doodle includes a spate of clickable elements of Adams' famous novels. When clicked, the doodle also plays sound in the background which can be turned off which a click of a mouse. A cup of tea in doodle has also been included as well, which brings the remembrings one of Adams' Dirk Gently detective novels, named The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul. The doodle also features a robotic character when clicked on the liftdoor. The robot, named Marvin, is one of the several characters from Adam's novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It also has a towel, an item Adams always would mention as an essential thing when travelling in space. 
Here is how Adams explains the importance of towels in the third chapter of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough."
When you click on lift door on the doodle, one of the characters, Marvin the paranoid android, from Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, is seen. Douglas Adams was an avid technologist, and a Macintosh user from the time the original Mac came out in 1984 until his death in 2001. His very last post to his own forum was in praise of Mac OS X and the possibilities of its Cocoa programming framework. His fans celebrate Towel Day every year on May 25 to show their appreciation his books. Douglas Adams had always intended a follow-up to the fifth book, which he felt was an unnecessarily bleak ending to the comic, cosmic tales of Arthur Dent, but he died in 2001 before he could write it. He died in 2001 at the age of 49 in Santa Barbara, California after a heart attack. He had also hoped to finish the series with a sixth novel.Read more...
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