User Help and Genre Discrepancy

Two things:

1. For all of you who are enjoying your cookies, please send me a message as to whether or not you are seeing your special messages at the top of the journals. I am trying to make a system where I can leave you all unique messages that you can then respond to. So step one is to have the messages show up for you. The only problem is, I have no way of testing this (except for the message I left for myself, but that is only one positive user test). So if you would all be so kind as to send a yea or nay, I would much appreciated.

2. As you may have noticed, I am reading Doug Adams’ “The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.” I have been putting it off for some time as this is, sadly, the last Doug Adams book I’ll ever get to read for the first time. Anyway as I was reading this last night and fighting sleep (this is the part where you are reading the same paragraph repeatedly without ever taking anything in) I had a curious thought.

I started thinking about “The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and wondered why, for the love of Jack Lord, is that book always in the science fiction section? True, the setting is outer space, but that does not, by default, make any story a science fiction story. If anything, “Hitchhiker’s Guide” is a character study about overcoming paradigms, much like “Barton Fink”…it just also happens to be brilliantly hilarious.

So then I thought, Barnes and Noble (a former employer) are certainly not going to make a “character study about overcoming paradigms, much like ‘Barton Fink'” section, but perhaps “Hitchikers’ Guide” would better fit in the “Comedy” section. And there it is. Book stores don’t have a Comedy section. There is a “Humor” section, but that is usually quite small and consists of Garfield comics and anecdotal drivel by sitcom comedians.

My question then (it can be argued that I have no point) is this: what happens when media travels between film to literature that causes Comedy and other categories to lose translation? Drama becomes Fiction, Adventure become Mystery, Horror becomes Fantasy…the only genre that does hold true is Science Fiction, the very same category that started this whole diatribe.

I apologize for wasting your time. I will try and keep my “limbo thoughts” to myself in the future.