Mostly Harmless (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #5)

by Douglas Adams

The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.

“You have a nice day now,” said the receptionist. Tricia didn’t particularly want to have a nice day. She was busy.

In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important. It’s just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people.

This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (the MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious).

“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”)

all office buildings were required to have windows that opened, even if only a little bit. Another, unexpected result was a dramatic lowering of the suicide rate. All sorts of stressed and rising executives who had been forced, during the dark days of the Breathe-O-Smart tyranny, to jump in front of trains or stab themselves could now just clamber out onto their own window ledges and leap off at their leisure. What frequently happened, though, was that in the moment or two they had to look around and gather their thoughts they would suddenly discover that all they had really needed was a breath of air and a fresh perspective on things, and maybe also a farm on which they could keep a few sheep.

The insurance business is completely screwy now. You know they’ve reintroduced the death penalty for insurance company directors?” “Really?” said Arthur. “No, I didn’t. For what offense?” Trillian frowned. “What do you mean, offense?” “I see.”

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

There were about three other customers in the place, sitting at tables, nursing beers. About three. Some people would say there were exactly three, but it wasn’t that kind of a place, not the kind of a place that you felt like being that specific in.