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Hey, Guys, Gals, and other assorted Dwarfers! I just picked up the latest edition of my college campus' newspaper, and my article about Red Dwarf was in the Entertainment section! How cool is that?! If any of you want to read the article, I still have it saved on my computer, and can put it in a subsequent post in this thread.

Ok, here it is!!!



Tell me if this word means anything to you: Jozxyqk. No? Didn’t think so. If you don’t know what this means, don’t be alarmed. You’re just like most people who have never heard the Cat Language. Yes, Cat Language. Or more specifically, the language of Felis sapiens, which evolved from cats, on the British television show Red Dwarf.
Red Dwarf ran for eight seasons from 1987 to 1999, though not continuously. On this show, anything can happen, and quite possibly has already. And by anything, I mean things like Shakespeare being a female named Wilma, Time running backwards, and Wilma Flintstone being considered the sexiest woman alive. All these and more have happened in the show’s continuity.
The show takes place mainly on the Jupiter Mining Corporation ship Red Dwarf, but for a couple seasons takes place mostly in the smaller ship Starbug. There are five/six main characters, the sixth replacing one of the original five in season 7. The original five are Dave Lister, the last human being in existence; Arnold Rimmer, the hologram of Lister’s dead bunkmate; the Cat, of the previously mentioned Cat race that evolved from Lister’s pet cat Frankenstein; Holly, the ship’s computer who originally has an I/Q of 6,000; and Kryten, a humanoid robot, or mechanoid, originally designated for sanitation duties, but assumes the role of the ship’s science officer. The fifth crew member, Navigation Officer Kristine Kochanski, is Lister’s ex-girlfriend from an alternate dimension.
The crew get themselves in and out of wacky adventures, sometimes revealing philosophical truths in the process, but usually just trying to make it to the next curry (Lister absolutely loves Indian food, especially vindaloos). The show is akin to a kind of British The Odd Couple in space, but with more main characters. The show starts off in the not-quite-distant future of the 21/2200s, but quickly moves three million years later. There is a good reason for this. Lister was put in suspended animation, or Stasis, for bringing his cat Frankenstein on-board ship without quarantining it first. When he is given the choice of either going into stasis for 18 months without pay, or let the cat be taken to the ships medical lab and dissected and inspected for diseases, he chooses stasis. Frankenstein, who happens to be pregnant, is put in the ships hold, and Lister is put into stasis. Meanwhile, Lister’s roommate Rimmer is supposed to replace a drive plate on the ship’s engines, but not having Lister there to help him, he botches the job, exposing the rest of the crew and himself to deadly levels of Cadmium-2 radiation, which vaporizes everyone but Lister, who was in stasis, and the cat, which was safely in the hold, which is radiation-proof. Three million years pass before the radiation levels reach a safe enough background level for Holly to let Lister out of stasis, during which time Holly has gone computer-senile, and Frankenstein’s descendants have evolved from housecats into Cats, or Felis sapiens, a humanoid race of cat-like people. Cats are extremely vain, not that intelligent, and easily amused. Later on, Lister and crew recruit Kryten to the band.
This series might be hard to follow at first for newcomers, but trust me, once you start watching, you most likely will get hooked. I know I did. You can find all eight seasons on DVD, and they aren’t that expensive, if I remember. They might be a little hard to find though. There are also four novels, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, Better Than Life, Backwards, and Last Human, and those will probably be even harder to get hold of. And in case you were wondering, Jozxyqk is the Cat word for what you say when you get your…um…sexual organs trapped in something, leading me to believe that it’s a Cat expletive.

Thanks! I actually wrote it in about half an hour to an hour. I was in an almost religious fervor while writing it.