Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly 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.
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| — | Douglas Adams (via bingoparaphernalia) |
You can’t be an astrophysicist properly if you’ve actually met someone from another planet who’s got a second head that pretends to be a parrot. You just can’t do it.
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| — | Douglas Adams (via thebaffled) |
If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
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| — | Douglas Adams (via withlovebryanna) |
Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds.
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| — | Douglas Adams (via kari-shma) |
A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.’
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| — | Douglas Adams (via rememo) |
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
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| — | Douglas Adams (via kari-shma) |
In one of its less-reported actions last week, Nasa’s LCROSS lunar mission last week gave Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the extra-planetary exposure it has always deserved. A Twitter feed from the satellite sent crashing onto the moon’s surface on Friday channelled the voice of an improbably created sperm whale that discovers itself hurtling towards a different outer-space collision in Adams’s much-loved story.
Published 30 years ago, the classic novel features two missiles, aimed at Zaphod Beeblebrox’s spaceship the Heart of Gold, turned into a whale and a bowl of petunias by the vessel’s Improbability Drive (at an Improbability Factor of 8,767,128 against). The whale spends the last few minutes of its life pondering its existence - “Ahhh! Woooh! What’s happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I?” - before it crashes into the surface of the planet Magrathea.
As Nasa’s LCROSS spacecraft travelled towards the moon at more than 9,000 kilometres per hour on Friday afternoon, it tweeted in the whale’s words: “And what’s this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round … it needs a big wide sounding name like ‘Ow’, ‘Ownge’, ‘Round’, ‘Ground’! … That’s it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it’ll be friends with me?”
Then it crashed into the moon, unfortunately failing to produce the 10km plume of dust and rock which could have been scanned for evidence of frozen water. Nasa made no mention of Adams’s bowl of petunias, which thought only “Oh no, not again” as it tumbled towards Magrathea.
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| — | (source) |
Last Chance to See: is a book written by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine first published in 1990, as a companion to the BBC radio series of the same name. The theme of documentary was to feature animal species which were endangered or threatened with extinction. A BBC television remake of the series, with Stephen Fry replacing the late Adams, is airing in 2009.
All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.
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| — | Douglas Adams (via cleversimon) |
Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.
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| — | Douglas Adams in a speech on religion (via precarious-peace) |
‘Coming back, after all this time, to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I found myself completely floored. It was like when you’ve had a dream that you can’t make head nor tail of, until you start telling someone about it, at which point it all becomes suddenly, embarrassingly obvious: “As our story begins, Arthur Dent is no more aware of his destiny than a tealeaf is aware of the East India Company…” Whether or not its author ever noticed, the story is just one massive post-colonial metaphor, in which the nice-but-dim English gentleman is dethroned, diminished, lost in space — caught, not exactly with his pants down, but dressed only in his pyjamas; his house, his planet, flattened by aliens; his anthropocentrism about to be exploded, and so on. Or, as Zaphod Beeblebrox puts it, why not replace Arthur’s brain with an electronic one? “You’d just have to programme it to say What? and I don’t understand and Where’s the tea? Who’d know the difference?”’
A very fine essay on Douglas Adams by the very fine Jenny Turner.
(via marginalgloss)
