Grateful Dead

grdaed73 actually most of Kerouac's books are part of a series describing his life in semi -autobiographical form. But I think On the Road is the most exciting and fresh with the pure joy of living before he sank into the despair of an alcohol addiction. Other good ones are Desolation Angels and the Subterraneans My own favorite besides On The Road is The Dharma Bums which describes the beats in San Francisco and their interest in Buddhism and mountains and so much more and the beginning of the 60's counterculture (though there have always been countercultures). The hero of The Dharma Bums is Gary Snyder. Many of the people mentioned in Kerouac’s books are fairly well known if not famous writers. If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. William Blake

"on the road", been meaning to read it for three decades. yes, yes,,i do procrastinate slightly. kids got it for me for my b-day, i'm 3 years older than the book. it's unbelievable how it parallels life(s) that i('ve) know(n). and now i know the rest of the story! is there a sequel, i'd really like to see how the other my life turns out? ;)))

The Fabulous furry Freak-Brothers (not allways politically corecct hehe) The Stories of WonderWartHog

Let the Dead Bury Their Dead I feel kind of like I'm on Reading Rainbow: Very interesting spiritual short stories, check it out. Oh, its not a Dead book. PEACE

My son, who will be 12 tomorrow, just discovered the series of books. I had forgotten how much fun they are, and we are having a great time reading them aloud (while am here, that is, am leaving again the day after his birthday)********************************** Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you will still exist, but you have ceased to live. Samuel Clemens

it freaked me out BAD! No chemicals involved. Later in life we got along better.

I remember going to that movie quite a few times in 1969 with my buddies, and every time we went we tried a different chemical. I guess we wanted to make sure we didn't miss anything.

As one of my friends says "he ( meaning me) has been hearing that for 40 years", but it still makes me smile when I hear it knowing that the person is 2001 fan and my name is part of it. Released in 1968, what an amazing year. If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. William Blake

I guess the cosmic pod bay doors have opened...

Writer Arthur C. Clarke Dies at 90Mar 18, 2008 (7:24p CDT) By RAVI NESSMAN (Associated Press Writer) COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, an aide said. He was 90. Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died at 1:30 a.m. after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De Silva said. Co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey," Clarke was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer. He was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits. He joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite as commentator on the U.S. Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s. Clarke's non-fiction volumes on space travel and his explorations of the Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science, and in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. But it was his writing that shot him to his greatest fame and that gave him the greatest fulfillment. "Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered," Clarke said recently. "I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer." From 1950, he began a prolific output of both fiction and non-fiction, sometimes publishing three books in a year. He published his best-selling "3001: The Final Odyssey" when he was 79. Some of his best-known books are "Childhood's End," 1953; "The City and The Stars," 1956, "The Nine Billion Names of God," 1967; "Rendezvous with Rama," 1973; "Imperial Earth," 1975; and "The Songs of Distant Earth," 1986. When Clarke and Kubrick got together to develop a movie about space, they used as basic ideas several of Clarke's shorter pieces, including "The Sentinel," written in 1948, and "Encounter in the Dawn." As work progressed on the screenplay, Clarke also wrote a novel of the story. He followed it up with "2010," "2061," and "3001: The Final Odyssey." In 1989, two decades after the Apollo 11 moon landings, Clarke wrote: "2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined." Clarke won the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1972, 1974 and 1979; the Hugo Award of the World Science Fiction Convention in 1974 and 1980, and in 1986 became Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He was awarded the CBE in 1989. Born in Minehead, western England, on Dec. 16, 1917, the son of a farmer, Arthur Charles Clark became addicted to science fiction after buying his first copies of the pulp magazine "Amazing Stories" at Woolworth's. He read English writers H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon and began writing for his school magazine in his teens. Clarke went to work as a clerk in Her Majesty's Exchequer and Audit Department in London, where he joined the British Interplanetary Society and wrote his first short stories and scientific articles on space travel. It was not until after the World War II that Clarke received a bachelor of science degree in physics and mathematics from King's College in London. In the wartime Royal Air Force, he was put in charge of a new radar blind-landing system. But it was an RAF memo he wrote in 1945 about the future of communications that led him to fame. It was about the possibility of using satellites to revolutionize communications - an idea whose time had decidedly not come. Clarke later sent it to a publication called Wireless World, which almost rejected it as too far-fetched. Clarke married in 1953, and was divorced in 1964. He had no children. He moved to the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka in 1956 after embarking on a study of the Great Barrier Reef. He discovered that scuba-diving approximated the feeling of weightlessness that astronauts experience in space, and he remained a diving enthusiast, running his own scuba venture into old age. "I'm perfectly operational underwater," he once said. Clarke was linked by his computer with friends and fans around the world, spending each morning answering e-mails and browsing the Internet. At a 90th birthday party thrown for Clarke in December, the author said he had three wishes: for Sri Lanka's raging civil war to end, for the world to embrace cleaner sources of energy and for evidence of extraterrestrial beings to be discovered. In an interview with The Associated Press, Clarke once said he did not regret having never followed his novels into space, adding that he had arranged to have DNA from strands of his hair sent into orbit. "One day, some super civilization may encounter this relic from the vanished species and I may exist in another time," he said. "Move over, Stephen King." If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. William Blake