The Official Heart of Gold Memorial Ford Prefect Thread #42

Actually, I just read "And another thing" on my kindle.

I agree with the review you've quoted. It's a good book with all the characters one knows. But it's just a little step below the excellent texts that Douglas Adams had come up with.

I really could not imagine anybody equalling Adams. One must be seriously warped to do that. It is akin to anybody else reprising a Peter Sellers role. Good, certainly; equal, never happen!

It is infinitely improbable that Eoin Colfer knew that you needed to deepen your knowledge of the lost chapters of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so he drove at a infinitely improbable speed into the next dimension (the one that Ford Prefect lost his towel in) to retrieve them for you. Fortunately for him (and you) the Heart of Gold spaceship was passing through a near enough dimension that he was able to hitchhike a ride back to this dimension. And as improbable as it seems, somehow he ended up back on 21st Century Earth. The story of how that happens must wait for the 17th book in the Trilogy (the time/space continuum can only handle so much bending before it breaks.)

[Ford in a bubble-bath at the spa with a squid doing the treatments, talking to him]: I was studying advanced kazoo, you know? Ford couldn't resist a lead-in like that. Advanced kazoo? How advanced can kazoo studies be? The squid was wounded. Pretty advanced when you can play a thousand of them at the same time. I was in a quartet. can you imagine?

Only Dirk Gently might really answer that question?!

Knowing Where One's Towel is....

... a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Don't Panic towel:



And it's available on the web:
http://www.royal-plus.de/dna/indexE.html

"There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."

Well this is weird.

And, for the most part, it is intended to be weird.

42

Don't be silly, that's a quote.

I cannot find "don't be silly, that's a quote". I find numerous equally inane debated between Zaphod, but nto this one. I am panicing. Please explain. I have my towel, but I still am in risk of panic.

Does it worry you that you don't talk any kind of sense?

Doesn't bother me

But thanks for all the fish

In preparation for post # 42 of this thread, I would like to share
"the answer to life, the universe and everything":

The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

But you have made a good move in that you have post # 42.

Applause for Funtodoimpossible, please

"A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have."

from the Guide

"I'll hum for you...follow the humming"

In honor of your most excellent post #42, for which I am eternally, more or less, grateful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(number)

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

May I remind you that you have now been in that bath for over three years?

It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.