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June 15, 2014 - May 22, 2015
For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope.
Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?
“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. “For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?”
“But you don’t understand,” said Ford, his expression slowly ripening from a little taken abackness into rank incredulity, “this is the American Express card. It is the finest way of settling bills known to man. Haven’t you read their junk mail?”
“We have never,” he said with muted savagery, “heard of this thing.” This was hardly surprising. Ford had only acquired it through a serious computer error toward the end of the fifteen-year sojourn he had spent on the planet Earth. Exactly how serious, the American Express Company had gotten to know very rapidly, and the increasingly strident and panic-stricken demands of its debt collection department were only silenced by the unexpected demolition of the entire planet by the Vogons, to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. He had kept it ever since because he found it useful to carry a form
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“It seemed to me,” said Wonko the Sane, “that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.”
