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February 20 - February 26, 2023
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change,
His voice was a low soft purr, like the low soft purr made by the opening of an ICBM silo.
I was all for suing the CIA, but a lawyer friend of mine said it would be like trying to attack a lunatic asylum with a banana, so …”
Arthur watched it go, as stunned as a man might be who, having believed himself to be totally blind for five years, suddenly discovers that he had merely been wearing too large a hat.
He almost danced to the fridge, found the three least hairy things in it, put them on a plate and watched them intently for two minutes. Since they made no attempt to move within that time he called them breakfast and ate them. Between them they killed a virulent space disease he’d picked up without knowing it in the Flaigathon Gas Swamps a few days earlier, which otherwise would have killed off half the population of the Western Hemisphere, blinded the other half, and driven everyone else psychotic and sterile, so the Earth was lucky there.
He phoned the BBC and asked to be put through to his department head. “Oh, hello, Arthur Dent here. Look, sorry I haven’t been in for six months but I’ve gone mad.” “Oh, not to worry. Thought it was probably something like that. Happens here all the time. How soon can we expect you?” “When do hedgehogs start hibernating?” “Sometime in spring, I think.” “I’ll be in shortly after that.” “Righty-ho.”
He paused and maneuvered his thoughts. It was like watching oil tankers doing three-point turns in the English Channel.
There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.
He hadn’t realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers to the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones until it now said something it had never said to him before, which was “yes.”
“I know it sounds crazy, and everybody says it was hallucinations, but if that was hallucinations then I have hallucinations in big screen 3D with 16-track Dolby stereo and should probably hire myself out to people who are bored with shark movies.
“Life,” he said, “is like a grapefruit.”
This man is the bee’s knees, Arthur, he is the wasp’s nipples. He is, I would go so far as to say, the entire set of erogenous zones of every major flying insect of the Western world.
“Who are we,” she was saying, “to say he’s mad?”
“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.”
See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.
Let’s be straight here. If we find something we can’t understand we like to call it something you can’t understand, or indeed pronounce. I mean if we just let you go around calling him a Rain God, then that suggests that you know something we don’t, and I’m afraid we couldn’t have that.
their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.”
They in turn were surrounded by a cordon of police, though whether they were there to protect the public from the army or the army from the public, or to guarantee the giant ship’s diplomatic immunity and prevent it getting parking tickets was entirely unclear and the subject of much debate.
