The indoctrinationtraining has begun…the kid’s got promise.
Tag: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Page 1 of 3
(updated and revised this 5/25/24)
I’ve been trying for a few years now to come up with a tribute to Adams. This isn’t quite what I had in mind, but it’s a start. In my mind, this is a work in progress, but I’m posting it anyway. Next year’s version will be better—or at least more complete.
Some time in 7th or 8th grade (I believe), I was at a friend’s house and his brother let us try his copy of the text-based Hitchhiker’s Guide game, and we were no good at it at all. Really, it was embarrassing. However, his brother had a copy of the first novel, and we all figured that the novel held the keys we needed for success with the game (alas, it did not help us one whit). My friends all decided that I’d be the one to read the book and come back in a few days as an expert.
I fell in love with the book almost instantly and I quickly forgot about the game. Adams’ irreverent style rocked my world—could people actually get away with saying some of these things? His skewed take on the world, his style, his humor…and a depressed robot, too! It was truly love at first read. As I recall, I started re-reading it as soon as I finished it—the only time in my life I’ve done that sort of thing.
It was one of those experiences that, looking back, I can say shaped my reading and thinking for the rest of my life (make of that what you will). Were my life the subject of a Doctor Who or Legends of Tomorrow episode, it’d be one of those immutable fixed points. I got my hands on the next three books as quickly as I could (the idea of a four-volume trilogy was one of the funniest ideas I’d encountered up to that point), and devoured them. I do know that I didn’t understand all of the humor, several of the references shot past me at the speed of light, and I couldn’t appreciate everything that was being satirized. But what I did understand I thought was brilliant. Not only did I find it funny, the series taught me about comedy—how to construct a joke, how to twist it in ways a reader wouldn’t always expect, and when not to twist but to go for the obviously funny idea. The trilogy also helped me to learn to see the absurdity in life.
Years later when the final volume (by Adams) was released, I’d already cemented what I thought about the books from these frequent re-reads. I’m not sure that <b>Mostly Harmless</b> changed things much (except for making me think for the first time that maybe I didn’t want him to write more in this series). His non-Hitchhiker’s work illustrated that he was capable of making you see things in a new light–either with a smile or a sense of regret—even when he wasn’t writing the trilogy, even when he was writing non-fiction. It was never the setting or the genre—it was Adams.
But here on Towel Day—as with most of the time I talk about Adams (but I need to change that), it comes down to where I started—the Trilogy. I read the books (particularly the first) so many times that I can quote significant portions of them, and frequently do so without noticing that I’m doing that. I have (at this time) two literary-inspired tattoos, one of which is the planet logo* featured on the original US covers. In essence, I’m saying that Adams and the series that made him famous have had an outsized influence on my life and are probably my biggest enduring fandom. If carrying around a (massively useful) piece of cloth for a day in some small way honors his memory? Sure, I’m in.
So, Happy Towel Day You Hoopy Froods.
* I didn’t know it at the time, but Adams didn’t like that guy. Whoops.
(updated 5/25/24)
There’s a great temptation here for me to go crazy and use so many quotations that I’d get in copyright trouble. I’ll refrain from that and just list some of his best lines . . .*
* The fact that this list keeps expanding from year to year says something about my position on flirting with temptation.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
This must be Thursday. . . I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
“You’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”
“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
“You ask a glass of water.”
(I’m not sure why, but this has always made me chuckle, if not actually laugh out loud. It’s just never not funny. It’s possibly the line that made me a fan of Adams)
He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centuari. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before . . .
“Look,” said Arthur, “would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
<
blockquote>“Space,” [The Guide] says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space, listen…”
He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85 percent of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N-N-T’Nix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian “chinanto/mnigs” which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan “tzjin-anthony-ks” which kills cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.
Reality is frequently inaccurate.
Life is wasted on the living.
Life, the Universe, and Everything
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of flying. 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.
(It goes on for quite a while after this—and I love every bit of it.)
“One of the interesting things about space,” Arthur heard Slartibartfast saying . . . “is how dull it is?”
“Dull?” . . .
“Yes,” said Slartibartfast, “staggeringly dull. Bewilderingly so. You see, there’s so much of it and so little in it.”
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Of course, one never has the slightest notion what size or shape different species are going to turn out to be, but if you were to take the findings of the latest Mid-Galactic Census report as any kind of accurate guide to statistical averages you would probably guess that the craft would hold about six people, and you would be right. You’d probably guessed that anyway. The Census report, like most such surveys, had cost an awful lot of money and told nobody anything they didn’t already know—except that every single person in the Galaxy had 2.4 legs and owned a hyena. Since this was clearly not true the whole thing eventually had to be scrapped.
Here was something that Ford felt he could speak about with authority. “Life,” he said, “is like a grapefruit.”
“Er, how so?”
“Well, it’s sort of orangy-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It’s got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.”
“Is there anyone else out there I can talk to?”
Arthur had a swordfish steak and said it made him angry. He grabbed a passing waitress by the arm and berated her. “Why’s this fish so bloody good?” he demanded, angrily.
“Please excuse my friend,” said Fenchurch to the startled waitress. “I think he’s having a nice day at last.”
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyways, so their opinion can and should be discounted.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.
Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
(I’ve often been tempted to get a tattoo of this)
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.’
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.
She stared at them with the worried frown of a drunk trying to work out why the door is dancing.
It was his subconscious which told him this—that infuriating part of a person’s brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.
As she lay beneath a pile of rubble, in pain, darkness, and choking dust, trying to find sensation in her limbs, she was at least relieved to be able to think that she hadn’t merely been imagining that this was a bad day. So thinking, she passed out.
“So what do we do if we get bitten by something deadly?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I were stupid. “You die, of course. That’s what deadly means.”
I’ve never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I’ve seen a few and they’re never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you’re in the right frame of mind, which is usually around lunchtime.
I have the instinctive reaction of a Western man when confronted with sublimely incomprehensible. I grab my camera and start to photograph it.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
The aye-aye is a nocturnal lemur. It is a very strange-looking creature that seems to have been assembled from bits of other animals. It looks a little like a large cat with a bat’s ears, a beaver’s teeth, a tail like a large ostrich feather, a middle finger like a long dead twig and enormous eyes that seem to peer past you into a totally different world which exists just over your left shoulder.
One of the characteristics that laymen find most odd about zoologists is their insatiable enthusiasm for animal droppings. I can understand, of course, that the droppings yield a great deal of information about the habits and diets of the animals concerned, but nothing quite explains the sheer glee that the actual objects seem to inspire.
I mean, animals may not be intelligent, but they’re not as stupid as a lot of human beings.
The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
And a couple of lines I’ve seen in assorted places, articles, books, and whatnot
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
A learning experience is one of those things that says, “You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”
The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.
Solutions nearly always come from the direction you least expect, which means there’s no point trying to look in that direction because it won’t be coming from there.
(updated and revised this 5/25/24)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, 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 hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker 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.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
Towel Day, for the few who don’t know, is the annual celebration of Douglas Adams’ life and work. It was first held two weeks after his death, fans were to carry a towel with them for the day to use as a talking point to encourage those who have never read HHGTTG to do so, or to just converse with someone about Adams. Adams is one of that handful of authors that I can’t imagine I’d be the same without having encountered/read/re-read/re-re-re-re-read, and so I do my best to pay a little tribute to him each year, even if it’s just carrying around a towel.
In commemoration of this date, here’s most of what I’ve written about Adams. I’ve struggled to come up with new material to share for Towel Day over the years, mostly sticking with updating and revising existing posts. But I do have a couple of new things coming today. But let’s start with the old material. A few years back, I did a re-read of all of Adams’ (completed) fiction. For reasons beyond my ken (or recollection), I didn’t get around to blogging about the Dirk Gently books, but I did do the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, The Universe and Everything
So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish
Mostly Harmless
I had a thing or two to say about the 40th Anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I took a look at the 42nd Anniversary Illustrated Edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I should also point to a posts I wrote about Douglas Adams’ London by Yvette Keller and 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams edited by Kevin Jon Davies—both are great ways of illing-out one’s understanding of Adams and his work. I have to mention the one book that Adams/Hitchhiker’s aficionado needs to read is Don’t Panic by Neil Gaiman, David K. Dickson and MJ Simpson. If you’re more in the mood for a podcast, I’d suggest The Waterstones Podcast How We Made: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—I’ve listened to several podcast episodes about this book, and generally roll my eyes at them. But this is just fantastic. Were it available, I’d listen to a Peter Jackson-length version of the episode.
I’ve only been able to get one of my sons into Adams, he’s the taller, thinner one in the picture from a few several years ago. 
(although I did get he and his younger siblings to use their towels to make themselves safe from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal a few years earlier:)
You really need to check out this comic from Sheldon Comics—part of the Anatomy of Authors series: The Anatomy of Douglas Adams.
Lit in a Nutshell gives this quick explanation of The Hitchiiker’s Guide:
TowelDay.org is the best collection of resources on the day. One of my favorite posts there is this pretty cool video, shot on the ISS by astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti.
Even better—here’s an appearance by Douglas Adams himself from the old Letterman show—I’m so glad someone preserved this:
Love the anecdote (Also, I want this tie.)
I’ve been trying for a few years now to come up with a tribute to Adams. This isn’t quite what I had in mind, but it’s a start. In my mind, this is a work in progress, but I’m posting it anyway. Next year’s version will be better—or at least more complete.
Some time in 7th or 8th grade (I believe), I was at a friend’s house and his brother let us try his copy of the text-based Hitchhiker’s Guide game, and we were no good at it at all. Really, it was embarrassing. However, his brother had a copy of the first novel, and we all figured that the novel held the keys we needed for success with the game (alas, it did not help us one whit). My friends all decided that I’d be the one to read the book and come back in a few days as an expert.
I fell in love with the book almost instantly and I quickly forgot about the game. Adams’ irreverent style rocked my world—could people actually get away with saying some of these things? His skewed take on the world, his style, his humor…and a depressed robot, too! It was truly love at first read. As I recall, I started re-reading it as soon as I finished it—the only time in my life I’ve done that sort of thing.
It was one of those experiences that, looking back, I can say shaped my reading and thinking for the rest of my life (make of that what you will). Were my life the subject of a Doctor Who or Legends of Tomorrow episode, it’d be one of those immutable fixed points. I got my hands on the next three books as quickly as I could (the idea of a four-volume trilogy was one of the funniest ideas I’d encountered up to that point), and devoured them. I do know that I didn’t understand all of the humor, several of the references shot past me at the speed of light, and I couldn’t appreciate everything that was being satirized. But what I did understand I thought was brilliant. Not only did I find it funny, the series taught me about comedy—how to construct a joke, how to twist it in ways a reader wouldn’t always expect, and when not to twist but to go for the obviously funny idea. The trilogy also helped me to learn to see the absurdity in life.
I read the books (particularly the first) so many times that I can quote significant portions of them, and frequently do so without noticing that I’m doing that. I have (at this time) two literary-inspired tattoos, one of which is the planet logo* featured on the original US covers. In essence, I’m saying that Adams and the series that made him famous have had an outsized influence on my life and are probably my biggest enduring fandom. If carrying around a (massively useful) piece of cloth for a day in some small way honors his memory? Sure, I’m in.
So, Happy Towel Day You Hoopy Froods.
* I didn’t know it at the time, but Adams didn’t like that guy. Whoops.
Douglas Adams’ London
DETAILS: Publisher: Herb Lester Associates Publication Date: April 15, 2023 Length: 2 pgs. Read Date: May 6, 2023
What’s Douglas Adams’ London?
This is a map of important locations (42 of them, of course) in London for Douglas Adams, the Dirk Gently series, and/or the Hitchhiker’s Guide series.
The reverse side explains why the locations were selected and gives some biographical information about Adams’ relation to each spot. I loved learning something about Hotblack Desiato, Fenchurch’s apartment, the pizza place Dirk Gently talked about, and so on.
The Design/Art
The map itself has some nice little bits of art scattered throughout—cartoonish little sketches of things like a dolphin, a sperm whale, and a certain depressed android. Just fantastic illustrations that made an already interesting map into something you want to come back to time and again.
The people at Herb Lester Associates who put this together did a simply wonderful job.
So, what did I think about Douglas Adams’ London?
I’ve already given up on my dream of wandering around London—but, boy, howdy, this makes me want to go even more.
Keller is described as “the planet earth authority on Douglas Adams literary tourism,” and will soon publish a travel guide to London. Who better to put something like this together?
Douglas Adams’ London is a gem—even if you never get the chance to put this information into action, it’s great to have.
This post contains an affiliate link. If you purchase from it, I will get a small commission at no additional cost to you. As always, the opinions expressed are my own.
(updated 5/25/23)
There’s a great temptation here for me to go crazy and use so many quotations that I’d get in copyright trouble. I’ll refrain from that and just list some of his best lines . . .*
* The fact that this list keeps expanding from year to year says something about my position on flirting with temptation.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
This must be Thursday. . . I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
“You’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”
“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
“You ask a glass of water.”
(I’m not sure why, but this has always made me chuckle, if not actually laugh out loud. It’s just never not funny. It’s possibly the line that made me a fan of Adams)
He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centuari. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before . . .
“Look,” said Arthur, “would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85 percent of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N-N-T’Nix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian “chinanto/mnigs” which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan “tzjin-anthony-ks” which kills cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.
Reality is frequently inaccurate.
Life is wasted on the living.
Life, the Universe, and Everything
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of flying. 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.
(It goes on for quite a while after this—and I love every bit of it.)
“One of the interesting things about space,” Arthur heard Slartibartfast saying . . . “is how dull it is?”
“Dull?” . . .
“Yes,” said Slartibartfast, “staggeringly dull. Bewilderingly so. You see, there’s so much of it and so little in it.”
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Of course, one never has the slightest notion what size or shape different species are going to turn out to be, but if you were to take the findings of the latest Mid-Galactic Census report as any kind of accurate guide to statistical averages you would probably guess that the craft would hold about six people, and you would be right. You’d probably guessed that anyway. The Census report, like most such surveys, had cost an awful lot of money and told nobody anything they didn’t already know—except that every single person in the Galaxy had 2.4 legs and owned a hyena. Since this was clearly not true the whole thing eventually had to be scrapped.
Here was something that Ford felt he could speak about with authority. “Life,” he said, “is like a grapefruit.”
“Er, how so?”
“Well, it’s sort of orangy-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It’s got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.”
“Is there anyone else out there I can talk to?”
Arthur had a swordfish steak and said it made him angry. He grabbed a passing waitress by the arm and berated her. “Why’s this fish so bloody good?” he demanded, angrily.
“Please excuse my friend,” said Fenchurch to the startled waitress. “I think he’s having a nice day at last.”
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyways, so their opinion can and should be discounted.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.
Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
(I’ve often been tempted to get a tattoo of this)
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.’
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.
She stared at them with the worried frown of a drunk trying to work out why the door is dancing.
It was his subconscious which told him this—that infuriating part of a person’s brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.
As she lay beneath a pile of rubble, in pain, darkness, and choking dust, trying to find sensation in her limbs, she was at least relieved to be able to think that she hadn’t merely been imagining that this was a bad day. So thinking, she passed out.
“So what do we do if we get bitten by something deadly?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I were stupid. “You die, of course. That’s what deadly means.”
I’ve never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I’ve seen a few and they’re never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you’re in the right frame of mind, which is usually around lunchtime.
I have the instinctive reaction of a Western man when confronted with sublimely incomprehensible. I grab my camera and start to photograph it.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
The aye-aye is a nocturnal lemur. It is a very strange-looking creature that seems to have been assembled from bits of other animals. It looks a little like a large cat with a bat’s ears, a beaver’s teeth, a tail like a large ostrich feather, a middle finger like a long dead twig and enormous eyes that seem to peer past you into a totally different world which exists just over your left shoulder.
One of the characteristics that laymen find most odd about zoologists is their insatiable enthusiasm for animal droppings. I can understand, of course, that the droppings yield a great deal of information about the habits and diets of the animals concerned, but nothing quite explains the sheer glee that the actual objects seem to inspire.
I mean, animals may not be intelligent, but they’re not as stupid as a lot of human beings.
The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
And a couple of lines I’ve seen in assorted places, articles, books, and whatnot
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
A learning experience is one of those things that says, “You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”
The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.
Solutions nearly always come from the direction you least expect, which means there’s no point trying to look in that direction because it won’t be coming from there.
(updated and revised this 5/25/23)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, 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 hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker 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.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
Towel Day, for the few who don’t know, is the annual celebration of Douglas Adams’ life and work. It was first held two weeks after his death, fans were to carry a towel with them for the day to use as a talking point to encourage those who have never read HHGTTG to do so, or to just converse with someone about Adams. Adams is one of that handful of authors that I can’t imagine I’d be the same without having encountered/read/re-read/re-re-re-re-read, and so I do my best to pay a little tribute to him each year, even if it’s just carrying around a towel.
In commemoration of this date, here’s most of what I’ve written about Adams. I’ve struggled to come up with new material to share for Towel Day over the years, mostly sticking with updating and revising existing posts. But I do have a couple of new things coming today. But let’s start with the old material. A few years back, I did a re-read of all of Adams’ (completed) fiction. For reasons beyond my ken (or recollection), I didn’t get around to blogging about the Dirk Gently books, but I did do the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, The Universe and Everything
So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish
Mostly Harmless
I had a thing or two to say about the 40th Anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I took a look at the 42nd Anniversary Illustrated Edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Also, I should mention the one book Adams/Hitchhiker’s aficionado needs to read is Don’t Panic by Neil Gaiman, David K. Dickson and MJ Simpson. If you’re more in the mood for a podcast, I’d suggest The Waterstones Podcast How We Made: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—I’ve listened to several podcast episodes about this book, and generally roll my eyes at them. But this is just fantastic. Were it available, I’d listen to a Peter Jackson-length version of the episode.
I’ve only been able to get one of my sons into Adams, he’s the taller, thinner one in the picture from a few years ago.
(although I did get he and his younger siblings to use their towels to make themselves safe from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal a few years earlier:)
You really need to check out this comic from Sheldon Comics—part of the Anatomy of Authors series: The Anatomy of Douglas Adams.
Lit in a Nutshell gives this quick explanation of The Hitchiiker’s Guide:
TowelDay.org is the best collection of resources on the day. One of my favorite posts there is this pretty cool video, shot on the ISS by astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti.
Even better—here’s an appearance by Douglas Adams himself from the old Letterman show—I’m so glad someone preserved this:
Love the anecdote (Also, I want this tie.)
(updated 5/25/22)
There’s a great temptation here for me to go crazy and use so many quotations that I’d get in copyright trouble. I’ll refrain from that and just list some of his best lines . . .*
* The fact that this list keeps expanding from year to year says something about my position on flirting with temptation.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
This must be Thursday. . . I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
“You’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”
“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
“You ask a glass of water.”
(I’m not sure why, but this has always made me chuckle, if not actually laugh out loud. It’s just never not funny. It’s possibly the line that made me a fan of Adams)
He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centuari. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before . . .
“Look,” said Arthur, “would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85 percent of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N-N-T’Nix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian “chinanto/mnigs” which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan “tzjin-anthony-ks” which kills cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.
Reality is frequently inaccurate.
Life is wasted on the living.
Life, the Universe, and Everything
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of flying. 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.
(It goes on for quite a while after this—and I love every bit of it.)
“One of the interesting things about space,” Arthur heard Slartibartfast saying . . . “is how dull it is?”
“Dull?” . . .
“Yes,” said Slartibartfast, “staggeringly dull. Bewilderingly so. You see, there’s so much of it and so little in it.”
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Of course, one never has the slightest notion what size or shape different species are going to turn out to be, but if you were to take the findings of the latest Mid-Galactic Census report as any kind of accurate guide to statistical averages you would probably guess that the craft would hold about six people, and you would be right. You’d probably guessed that anyway. The Census report, like most such surveys, had cost an awful lot of money and told nobody anything they didn’t already know—except that every single person in the Galaxy had 2.4 legs and owned a hyena. Since this was clearly not true the whole thing eventually had to be scrapped.
Here was something that Ford felt he could speak about with authority. “Life,” he said, “is like a grapefruit.”
“Er, how so?”
“Well, it’s sort of orangy-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It’s got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.”
“Is there anyone else out there I can talk to?”
Arthur had a swordfish steak and said it made him angry. He grabbed a passing waitress by the arm and berated her. “Why’s this fish so bloody good?” he demanded, angrily.
“Please excuse my friend,” said Fenchurch to the startled waitress. “I think he’s having a nice day at last.”
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyways, so their opinion can and should be discounted.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.
Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
(I’ve often been tempted to get a tattoo of this)
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.’
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.
She stared at them with the worried frown of a drunk trying to work out why the door is dancing.
It was his subconscious which told him this—that infuriating part of a person’s brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.
As she lay beneath a pile of rubble, in pain, darkness, and choking dust, trying to find sensation in her limbs, she was at least relieved to be able to think that she hadn’t merely been imagining that this was a bad day. So thinking, she passed out.
“So what do we do if we get bitten by something deadly?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I were stupid. “You die, of course. That’s what deadly means.”
I’ve never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I’ve seen a few and they’re never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you’re in the right frame of mind, which is usually around lunchtime.
I have the instinctive reaction of a Western man when confronted with sublimely incomprehensible. I grab my camera and start to photograph it.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
The aye-aye is a nocturnal lemur. It is a very strange-looking creature that seems to have been assembled from bits of other animals. It looks a little like a large cat with a bat’s ears, a beaver’s teeth, a tail like a large ostrich feather, a middle finger like a long dead twig and enormous eyes that seem to peer past you into a totally different world which exists just over your left shoulder.
One of the characteristics that laymen find most odd about zoologists is their insatiable enthusiasm for animal droppings. I can understand, of course, that the droppings yield a great deal of information about the habits and diets of the animals concerned, but nothing quite explains the sheer glee that the actual objects seem to inspire.
I mean, animals may not be intelligent, but they’re not as stupid as a lot of human beings.
The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
And a couple of lines I’ve seen in assorted places, articles, books, and whatnot
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
A learning experience is one of those things that says, “You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”
The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.
Solutions nearly always come from the direction you least expect, which means there’s no point trying to look in that direction because it won’t be coming from there.
(updated and revised this 5/25/22)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, 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 hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker 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.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
Towel Day, for the few who don’t know, is the annual celebration of Douglas Adams’ life and work. It was first held two weeks after his death, fans were to carry a towel with them for the day to use as a talking point to encourage those who have never read HHGTTG to do so, or to just converse with someone about Adams. Adams is one of that handful of authors that I can’t imagine I’d be the same without having encountered/read/re-read/re-re-re-re-read, and so I do my best to pay a little tribute to him each year, even if it’s just carrying around a towel.
Some time in 7th or 8th grade (I believe), I was at a friend’s house and his brother let us try his copy of the text-based Hitchhiker’s Guide game, and we were no good at it at all. Really, it was embarrassing. However, his brother had a copy of the novel, and we all figured that the novel held the keys we needed for success with the game (alas, for us it did not). My friends all decided that I’d be the one to read the book and come back in a few days as an expert.
I quickly forgot about the game. Adams’ irreverent style rocked my world—could people actually get away with saying some of these things? His skewed take on the world, his style, his humor…and a depressed robot, too! It was love at first read.
It was one of those experiences that, looking back, I can say shaped my reading and thinking for the rest of my life (make of that what you will). Were my life the subject of a Doctor Who or Legends of Tomorrow episode, it’d be one of those immutable fixed points. I read the books (particularly the first) so many times that I can quote significant portions of it, and frequently do so without noticing that I’m doing that. I have (at this time) two literary-inspired tattoos, one of which is the planet logo*. In essence, I’m saying that Adams has had an outsized influence on my life and is probably my biggest enduring fandom. If carrying around a (massively useful) piece of cloth for a day in some small way honors his memory? Sure, I’m in.
* I didn’t know it at the time, but Adams didn’t like that guy. Whoops.
One of my long-delayed goals is to write up a good all-purpose Tribute to Douglas Adams and his work post, and another Towel Day has come without me doing so. Belgium. Next year . . . or later. (he says for at least the 8th straight year, a work ethic I like to believe Adams would endorse).
In the meantime, here’s some of what I’ve written about Adams. A few years back, I did a re-read of all of Adams’ (completed) fiction. For reasons beyond my ken (or recollection), I didn’t get around to blogging about the Dirk Gently books, but I did do the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, The Universe and Everything
So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish
Mostly Harmless
I had a thing or two to say about the 40th Anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Last year, I took a look at the 42nd Anniversary Illustrated Edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Also, I should mention the one book Adams/Hitchhiker’s aficionado needs to read is Don’t Panic by Neil Gaiman, David K. Dickson and MJ Simpson. If you’re more in the mood for a podcast, I’d suggest The Waterstones Podcast How We Made: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—I’ve listened to several podcast episodes about this book, and generally roll my eyes at them. But this is just fantastic. Were it available, I’d listen to a Peter Jackson-length version of the episode.
I’ve only been able to get one of my sons into Adams, he’s the taller, thinner one in the picture from a few years ago.
You really need to check out this comic from Sheldon Comics—part of the Anatomy of Authors series: The Anatomy of Douglas Adams.
TowelDay.org is the best collection of resources on the day. One of my favorite posts there is this pretty cool video, shot on the ISS by astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti.
Even better—here’s an appearance by Douglas Adams himself from the old Letterman show—I’m so glad someone preserved this:
Love the anecdote (Also, I want this tie.)