1-2-1
Created | Updated Jun 21, 2003
This week we learn a bit more about...Mustapha, the Universe and Everything.
Mustapha was born on December 4, 1972 in New Plymouth, New Zealand and named, by his parents, Glen Simmers. He currently resides in his town of birth where, after earning his degree, he launched a career as a freelance journalist. Mustapha has no pets but does admit that his neighbour's cat regards his place as his own (once again, people don't own cats, cats own people). One of his great hobbies is going to the cinema and is amazed to this day that the local cinema hasn't made a medium coke and popcorn the 'Simmers Special'.
While surfing the BBC website one day he happened across the transcript of a Douglas Adams interview and the associated links. Being a fan of DNA he just had to 'pop' over and see what h2g2 was about. Mustapha has now been a researcher for several months and is growing to enjoy the facility that GuideML affords him. He has always liked the generally friendly nature of
the discussions. Some of the debates have become a bit heated but nothing that would scare the vicar, as it were. There is really nothing that he terribly dislikes about the site other than the normal slow servers, long wait times for entries/replies and so on. Since these are things you really can't do much about, he has just learned to accept them. However he does wish that there could be a way for him to see if anyone has replied to his Guide Entries (esp. unapproved entries) without having to load the page every time he wanted to check. Something in the vein of: '2 threads, latest 11 hours ago'. He has occasionally left comments on other
researchers' entries, but unless they actually checked them every day they would have no way of knowing.
While contributing to the guide he noticed a great deal of interest in his entry on the Merovingian Dynasty. This clearly demonstrated a real interest in
history, especially since the Merovingians are a fairly obscure part of it.
Seeing this interest he decided to set up the h2g2
Historical Society. During its infancy, while the group was forming, Gargleblaster
asked to be added to the h2g2 Historical Society so he was, and that was how it grew into what it is today, a topic that did not drift. It continues to grow and evolve, now having four additional wings (with their own pages) devoted to subjects that have grown too large for the main page, including American, English and Musical History, along with his favourite, The History of Food and Drink. The h2g2 Historical Society aims to be as fresh as possible, not only does it include links to as many historical entries he can find, every week he will put up not one but two external links to any news story he can find with an historical angle. This is because history is a constantly changing beast and new things are being discovered every day. He plans on moving the prominent people section into
a Wing of its own (as it's quite a length at the moment) and possibly
adding a newsletter.
Sounds like we will have lots of new and interesting reading to look forward to out of Mustapha for a long time to come. On a side note, he also has future plans in h2g2 of becoming a sub Editor growing in his brain, but says he will just have to wait and see if they bear any fruit. From what I have seen so far on his page, I for one feel he would make a great addition to the Sub Editor team.
Mustapha would like to take a moment to 'thank the Academy. As one who routinely goes through a lot of international news, h2g2 has been an oasis of borderline sanity in which to discuss some of these things. It's soared to the heights of egalitarianism and generosity, everyone here has a voice and everybody has been given the opportunity to let that voice sing, do bird impressions or belch, if they so choose. Kudos from Mustapha to all the Researchers.
For more dirt on Mustapha, I suggest you take a look at
Zarquon's biography on him, having already read through it I can tell you that you will find it to be quite thorough and interesting:
A275825.
