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December 7, 2022 - May 24, 2023
Arthur remained very worried. ‘But can we trust him?’ he said. ‘Myself, I’d trust him to the end of the Earth,’ said Ford. ‘Oh yes,’ said Arthur, ‘and how far’s that?’ ‘About twelve minutes away,’ said Ford. ‘Come on, I need a drink.’
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.
This seems redundnt to say lol- interesting choice by author to make this comparison.
Every hi-fi set in the world, every radio, every television, every cassette recorder, every woofer, every tweeter, every mid-range driver in the world quietly turned itself on.
Note word choice: "quietly" - process seems almost soft in nature...
He steered with an extra arm he’d recently had fitted just beneath his right one to help improve his ski-boxing.
It might not even have made much difference to them if they’d known exactly how much power the President of the Galaxy actually wielded: none at all. Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.
The robot camera homed in for a close-up on the more popular of his two heads and he waved again.
‘this is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn’t previously aware of.’
I like the wording here.
‘I said forget it.’ Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet.
Great movement
He turned it over in his hands with a shrug and tossed it aside carelessly, but not so carelessly that it didn’t land on something soft.
The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
and, more to the point, he knew how to hitch rides on flying saucers.
Nor did he know exactly how the occupants of the Heart of Gold were spending the last three minutes and thirty seconds of life they had left to spend. Quite how Zaphod Beeblebrox arrived at the idea of holding a seance at this point is something he was never quite clear on. Obviously the subject of death was in the air, but more as something to be avoided than harped upon.
Nevertheless, he felt much more comfortable with them on. They were a double pair of Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses, which had been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.
‘What have I done to deserve this?’ he said. ‘I walk into a building, they take it away.’
‘If I ever meet myself,’ said Zaphod, ‘I’ll hit myself so hard I won’t know what’s hit me.’
The voice was deep and quiet. In other circumstances it would even be described as soothing. There is, however, nothing soothing about being addressed by a disembodied voice out of nowhere, particularly when you are, like Zaphod Beeblebrox, not at your best and hanging from a ledge eight storeys up a crashed building.
The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically one of them not being worth all the bother. On Earth – when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass – the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another –
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People who can supply that amount of fire power don’t need to supply verbs as well.
Looking over his shoulder Arthur saw that he was twiddling with knobs on a small black box. Ford had already introduced this box to Arthur as a Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic, but Arthur had merely nodded absently and not pursued the matter.
The major problem – one of the major problems, for there are several – one of the many major problems with governing people is that of who you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
‘Look at it this way,’ Ford Prefect had said, ‘fruit and berries on strange planets either make you live or make you die. Therefore the point at which to start toying with them is when you’re going to die if you don’t. That way you stay ahead.
He leapt to his feet and demanded silence. After a while he got it, or at least the best silence he could hope for under the circumstances: the circumstances were that the bagpiper was spontaneously composing a national anthem.
‘Oh, I’ve heard of worse,’ said Ford. ‘I read of one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole. Killed ten billion people.’
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was. It wasn’t just that the cave was cold, it wasn’t just that it was damp and smelly. It was the fact that the cave was in the middle of Islington and there wasn’t a bus due for two million years. Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy.
‘The Guide says that there is an art to flying,’ said Ford, ‘or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.’
Outside the refreshment tent, the sun was shining on a happy crowd. It shone on white hats and red faces. It shone on ice lollies and melted them. It shone on the tears of small children whose ice lollies had just melted and fallen off the stick.
A roar of excitement thrilled through the crowd and obliterated whatever it was that Ford said in reply to this piece of information.
they appeared to contain jets which allowed these curiously civilized robots to fly down from their hovering spaceship and start to kill people, which is what they did. ‘Hello,’ said Arthur, ‘something seems to be happening.’
‘What I need,’ shouted Ford, by way of clarifying his previous remarks, ‘is a strong drink and a peer-group.’ He continued to run, pausing only for a moment to grab Arthur’s arm and drag him along with him. Arthur had adopted his normal crisis role, which was to stand with his mouth hanging open and let it all wash over him.
Han Wavel is a world which consists largely of fabulous ultra-luxury hotels and casinos, all of which have been formed by the natural erosion of wind and rain. The chances of this happening are more or less one to infinity against. Little is known of how this came about because none of the geophysicists, probability statisticians, meteoranalysts or bizzarrologists who are so keen to research it can afford to stay there.
He started to speak. ‘ – . . .’ is as far as he got.
At some distance down the corridor it seemed suddenly as if somebody started to beat on a bass drum. He listened to it for a few seconds and realized that it was just his heart beating. He listened for a few seconds more and realized that it wasn’t his heart, it was somebody down the corridor beating on a bass drum.
He paused for effect. As far as Arthur was concerned there was already quite enough effect going on.
It was huge. It was horrific. It had a Statue in it. We will come to the Statue in a moment.
None of these facts, however strange or inexplicable, is as strange or inexplicable as the rules of the game of Brockian Ultra-Cricket, as played in the higher dimensions. A full set of rules is so massively complicated that the only time they were all bound together in a single volume, they underwent gravitational collapse and became a black hole.
he soon satisfied himself that he was not badly hurt, but just bruised and a little shaken, as who wouldn’t be? He couldn’t understand what a building would be doing flying through the clouds.
Arthur started to choke violently on his drink. ‘What a wonderfully exciting cough,’ said the little man, quite startled by it, ‘do you mind if I join you?’ And with that he launched into the most extraordinary and spectacular fit of coughing which caught Arthur so much by surprise that he started to choke violently, discovered he was already doing it and got thoroughly confused.
The best way to pick a fight with a Silastic Armorfiend of Striterax was just to be born. They didn’t like it, they got resentful.
Trillian stared at them and thought. ‘Trillian,’ whispered Ford Prefect to her. ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Thinking.’ ‘Do you always breathe like that when you’re thinking?’ ‘I wasn’t aware that I was breathing.’ ‘That’s what worried me.’
There was a moment of pure fear, a frozen second before anyone fired again. And at the end of the second nobody fired.
He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.
The courtroom was an austere place, a large dark chamber clearly designed for Justice rather than, for instance, for Pleasure. You wouldn’t hold a dinner party there – at least, not a successful one. The decor would get your guests down.
Arthur could feel that it was one of those sorts of moments. The air seemed to stand still around them, waiting. Arthur wished that the air would go away and mind its own business.
Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.
He grappled her from above, and fumbled for a tight grip on her shoulders. He got it. Fine. They were now falling together, which was all very sweet and romantic, but didn’t solve the basic problem, which was that they were falling, and the ground wasn’t waiting around to see if he had any more clever tricks up his sleeve, but was coming up to meet them like an express train.
‘You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?’ ‘No,’ said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, ‘nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.’ ‘Odd,’ said Arthur, ‘I thought you said it was a democracy.’ ‘I did,’ said Ford. ‘It is.’ ‘So,’ said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, ‘why don’t people get rid of the lizards?’ ‘It honestly doesn’t occur to
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One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can’t. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
MISPWOSO (the Maximegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious).
If his accounts supervisor didn’t start to hyperventilate and put out a seal-all-exits security alert when Ford handed in his expenses claim then Ford felt he wasn’t doing his job properly.
you are as dead as you think you are.
