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R Is A Velocity Of Measure, Defined As A Reasonable Speed Of Travel That Is Consistent With Health, Mental Well-being, And Not Being More Than, Say, Five Minutes Late. It Is Therefore Clearly As Almost Infinite Variable Figure According To Circumstances, Since The First Two Factors Vary Not Only With Speed As An Absolute, But Also With Awareness Of The Third Factor. Unless Handled With Tranquility, This Equation Can Result In Considerable Stress, Ulcers, And Even Death.

-Douglas Adams

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R Is A Velocity

Douglas Adams

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R Is A Velocity Of Measure, Defined As A Reasonable Speed Of Travel That Is Consistent With Health, Mental Well-being, And Not Being More Than, Say, Five Minutes Late. It Is Therefore Clearly As Almost Infinite Variable Figure According To Circumstances, Since The First Two Factors Vary Not Only With Speed As An Absolute, But Also With Awareness Of The Third Factor. Unless Handled With Tranquility, This Equation Can Result In Considerable Stress, Ulcers, And Even Death.

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There Was 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.

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Marvin Was Humming Ironically Because He Hated Humans So Much.

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The Dew Has Fallen With A Particularly Sickening Thud This Morning.

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He Had Extracted Himself From The Cambridge One-way System By The Usual Method, Which Involved Going Round And Round It Faster And Faster Until He Achieved A Sort Of Escape Velocity And Flew Off At A Tangent In A Random Direction, Which He Was Now Trying To Identify And Correct For.

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Most Of The Time Spent Wrestling With Technologies That Don't Quite Work Yet Is Just Not Worth It For End Users, However Much Fun It Is For Nerds.

Oh Dear,' Says God, 'i Hadn't Thought Of That,' And Promptly Vanishes In A Puff Of Logic.

Democracy Is All About Not Electing The Wrong Man-eating Lizard.

Listen, Three Eyes," He Said, "don't You Try To Outweird Me, I Get Stranger Things Than You Free With My Breakfast Cereal.

He Had A Tremendous Propensity For Getting Lost When Driving. This Was Largely Because Of His Method Of “zen” Navigation, Which Was Simply To Find Any Car That Looked As If It Knew Where It Was Going And Follow It. The Results Were More Often Surprising Than Successful, But He Felt It Was Worth It For The Sake Of The Few Occasions When It Was Both.

But Nowadays Everybody's A Comedian, Even The Weather Girls And Continuity Announcers. We Laugh At Everything. Not Intelligently Anymore, Not With Sudden Shock, Astonishment, Or Revelation, Just Relentlessly And Meaninglessly. No More Rain Showers In The Desert, Just Mud And Drizzle Everywhere, Occasionally Illuminated By The Flash Of Paparazzi.

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The Bowler Approached The Wicket At A Lope, A Trot, And Then A Run. He Suddenly Exploded In A Flurry Of Arms And Legs, Out Of Which Flew A Ball.

I Think A Nerd Is A Person Who Uses The Telephone To Talk To Other People About Telephones. And A Computer Nerd Therefore Is Somebody Who Uses A Computer In Order To Use A Computer.

Radio Did Not Kill Books And Television Did Not Kill Radio Or Movies - What Television Did Kill Was Cinema Newsreel. Tv Does It Much Better Because It Can Deliver It Instantly. Who Wants Last Week's News?

Assumptions Are The Things We Don't Know We're Making.

I'm So Great Even I Get Tongue-tied Talking To Myself.

I'm Up To Here With Cool, Okay? I Am So Amazingly Cool You Could Keep A Side Of Meat In Me For A Month. I Am So Hip I Have Difficulty Seeing Over My Pelvis.

In The Stillness, A Fly Would Not Have Dared Clear It's Throat.

Many Words And Expressions Which Only A Matter Of Decades Ago Were Considered So Distastefully Explicit That, Were They Merely To Be Breathed In Public, The Perpetrator Would Be Shunned, Barred From Polite Society, And In Extreme Cases Shot Through The Lungs, Are Now Thought To Be Very Healthy And Proper, And Their Use In Everyday Speech And Writing Is Evidence Of A Well-adjusted, Relaxed And Totally Un****ed-up Personality.

Don't Blame You," Said Marvin And Counted Five Hundred And Ninety-seven Thousand Million Sheep Before Falling Asleep Again A Second Later.

The Universe, As Has Been Observed Before, Is An Unsettlingly Big Place, A Fact Which For The Sake Of A Quiet Life Most People Tend To Ignore.

The Longest And Most Destructive Party Ever Held Is Now Into Its Fourth Generation And Still No One Shows Any Signs Of Leaving. Somebody Did Once Look At His Watch, But That Was Eleven Years Ago Now, And There Has Been No Follow Up.

If There Was One Thing Life Had Taught Her It Was That There Are Times When You Do Not Go Back For Your Bag And Times When You Do. It Had Yet To Teach Her To Distinguish Between The Two Types Of Occasion.

Well, I Mean, Yes Idealism, Yes The Dignity Of Pure Research, Yes The Pursuit Of Truth In All Its Forms, But There Comes A Point I'm Afraid Where You Begin To Suspect That The Entire Multidimensional Infinity Of The Universe Is Almost Certainly Being Run By A Bunch Of Maniacs. And If It Comes To A Choice Between Spending Yet Another Ten Million Years Finding That Out, And On The Other Hand Just Taking The Money And Running, Then I For One Could Do With The Exercise.

He Actually Caught Himself Saying Things Like "yippee," As He Pranced Ridiculously Round The House.

I Teleported Home Last Night With Ron And Sid And Meg Ron Stole Meggy's Heart Away And I Got Sidney's Leg.

If I Were Not An Atheist, I Think I Would Have To Be A Catholic Because If It Wasn't The Forces Of Natural Selection That Designed Fish, It Must Have Been An Italian.

"what's So Unpleasant About Being Drunk?" "ask A Glass Of Water."

On The Delivery Plate Of The Nutri-matic Drink Synthesizer Was A Small Tray, On Which Say Three Bone China Cups And Saucers, A Bone China Jug Of Milk, A Silver Teapot Full Of The Best Tea Arthur Had Ever Tasted And A Small Printed Note Saying "wait.

He Was A Man Who Was Charged With The Work He Did In Life Because He Was Not One To Ask Questions — Not So Much On Account Of Any Natural Quality Of Discretion As Because He Simply Could Never Think Of Any Questions To Ask.

There Are Two Things In Particular That It [the Computer Industry] Failed To Foresee: One Was The Coming Of The Internet(...); The Other Was The Fact That The Century Would End.

There Is No Problem So Complicated That You Can't Find A Very Simple Answer To It If You Look At It Right.

The Longest And Most Destructive Party Ever Held Is Now Into Its Fourth Generation And Still No One Shows Any Signs Of Leaving. The Problem Of When The Drink Is Going To Run Out Is, However, Going To Have To Be Faced One Day. The Planet Over Which They Are Floating Is No Longer The Planet It Was When They First Started Floating Over It. It Is In Bad Shape

It Was His Subconscious Which Told Him This - That Infuriating Part Of A Person's Brain Which Never Responds To Interrogation, Merely Gives Little Meaningful Nudges And Then Sits Humming Quietly To Itself, Saying Nothing.

There Was A Point To This Story, But It Has Temporarily Escaped The Chronicler's Mind.

The Difference Between Us And A Computer Is That, The Computer Is Blindingly Stupid, But It Is Capable Of Being Stupid Many, Many Million Times A Second.

What Is The Point? We Assume That Every Time We Do Anything We Know What The Consequences Will Be, I.e., More Or Less What We Intend Them To Be. This Is Not Only Not Always Correct. It Is Wildly, Crazily, Stupidly, Cross-eyed-blithering-insectly Wrong!

I Have Always Been Absurdly, Ridiculously Tall. To Give You An Idea- When We Went On School Trips To Interesting And Improving Places, The Form-master Wouldn't Say "meet Under The Clock Tower," Or "meet Under The War Memorial," But "meet Under Adams.

The Last Ever Dolphin Message Was Misinterpreted As A Surprisingly Sophisticated Attempt To Do A Double-backwards-somersault Through A Hoop Whilst Whistling The 'star Spangled Banner', But In Fact The Message Was This: So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.

Mark Carwardine's Role, Essentially, Was To Be The One Who Knew What He Was Talking About. My Role, And One For Which I Was Entirely Qualified, Was To Be An Extremely Ignorant Non-zoologist To Whom Everything That Happened Would Come As A Complete Surprise.

The World Is A Thing Of Utter Inordinate Complexity And Richness And Strangeness That Is Absolutely Awesome. I Mean The Idea That Such Complexity Can Arise Not Only Out Of Such Simplicity, But Probably Absolutely Out Of Nothing, Is The Most Fabulous Extraordinary Idea. And Once You Get Some Kind Of Inkling Of How That Might Have Happened ' It's Just Wonderful. And . . . The Opportunity To Spend 70 Or 80 Years Of Your Life In Such A Universe Is Time Well Spent As Far As I Am Concerned.

The Moment At Which Two People, Approaching From Opposite Ends Of A Long Passageway, Recognize Each Other And Immediately Pretend They Haven T. This Is To Avoid The Ghastly Embarrassment Of Having To Continue Recognizing Each Other The Whole Length Of The Corridor.

I Really Didn't Foresee The Internet. But Then, Neither Did The Computer Industry. Not That That Tells Us Very Much Of Course--the Computer Industry Didn't Even Foresee That The Century Was Going To End.

We Are Stuck With Technology When All We Really Want Is Just Stuff That Works. How Do You Recognize Something That Is Still Technology? A Good Clue Is If It Comes With A Manual.

In Fact There Was Only One Species On The Planet More Intelligent Than Dolphins, And They Spent A Lot Of Their Time In Behavioural Research Laboratories Running Around Inside Wheels And Conduction Frighteningly Elegant And Subtle Experiments On Man. The Fact That Once Again Man Completely Misinterpreted This Relationship Was Entirely According To These Creatures’ Plans.

I Don't Believe It. Prove It To Me And I Still Won't Believe It.

If There's Anything More Important Than My Ego Around, I Want It Caught And Shot Now.

He Inched His Way Up The Corridor As If He Would Rather Be Yarding His Way Down It, Which Was True.

I Am Rarely Happier Than When Spending Entire Day Programming My Computer To Perform Automatically A Task That It Would Otherwise Take Me A Good Ten Seconds To Do By Hand.

The Seat Received Him In A Loose And Distant Kind Of Way, Like An Aunt Who Disapproves Of The Last Fifteen Years Of Your Life And Will Therefore Furnish You With A Basic Sherry, But Refuses To Catch Your Eye.

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, A Girl Sitting On Her Own In A Small Café In Rickmansworth Suddenly Realized What It Was That Had Been Going Wrong All This Time, And She Finally Knew How The World Could Be Made A Good And Happy Place. This Time It Was Right, It Would Work, And No One Would Have To Get Nailed To Anything.

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.

Siamese Cats Have A Way Of Staring At You. Those Who Have Walked In On The Queen Cleaning Her Teeth Will Know The Expression.

One Day Old Thrashbarg Said That Almighty Bob Had Declared That He, Thrashbarg, Was To Have First Pick Of The Sandwiches. The Villagers Asked Him When This Had Happened, Exactly, And Thrashbarg Said It Had Happened Yesterday, When They Weren't Looking. 'have Faith,' Old Thrashbarg Said, 'or Burn!' They Let Him Have First Pick Of The Sandwiches. It Seemed Easiest.

I Wanted To Be John Cleese. It Took Me Some Time To Realise That The Job Was Taken.

I Think Fish Is Nice, But Then I Think That Rain Is Wet, So Who Am I To Judge?

Was There A Reason Behind It? There Would Be No Point In Asking Zaphod, He Never Appeared To Have A Reason For Anything He Did At All: He Had Turned Unfathomability Into An Art Form. He Attacked Everything In Life With A Mixture Of Extraordinary Genius And Naive Incompetence And It Was Often Difficult To Tell Which Was Which.

A Learning Experience Is One Of Those Things That Says, 'you Know That Thing You Just Did? Don't Do That.

The Gorillas Are Not Yet Sufficiently Advanced In Evolutionary Terms To Have Discovered The Benefits Of Passports, Currency-declaration Forms, And Official Bribery, And Therefore Tend To Wander Backward And Forward Across The Border As And When Their Beastly, Primitive Whim Takes Them.

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 And Repair.

If You Really Want To Understand Something, The Best Way Is To Try And Explain It To Someone Else.

The Complexities Of Cause And Effect Defy Analysis.

Cause And Effect

The System Of Life On This Planet Is So Astoundingly Complex That It Was A Long Time Before Man Even Realized That It Was A System At All And That It Wasn't Something That Was Just There.

It Is Known That There Are An Infinite Number Of Worlds, Simply Because There Is An Infinite Amount Of Space For Them To Be In. However, Not Every One Of Them Is Inhabited. Therefore, There Must Be A Finite Number Of Inhabited Worlds. Any Finite Number Divided By Infinity Is As Near To Nothing As Makes No Odds, So The Average Population Of All The Planets In The Universe Can Be Said To Be Zero. From This It Follows That The Population Of The Whole Universe Is Also Zero, And That Any People You May Meet From Time To Time Are Merely The Products Of A Deranged Imagination.

Come On,” He Droned, “i’ve Been Ordered To Take You Down To The Bridge. Here I Am, Brain The Size Of A Planet And They Ask Me To Take You Down To The Bridge. Call That Job Satisfaction? ’cos I Don’t.” He Turned And Walked Back To The Hated Door. “er, Excuse Me,” Said Ford Following After Him, “which Government Owns This Ship?” Marvin Ignored Him. “you Watch This Door,” He Muttered, “it’s About To Open Again. I Can Tell By The Intolerable Air Of Smugness It Suddenly Generates.

The Only Moral It Is Possible To Draw From This Story Is That One Should Never Throw The Q Letter Into A Privet Bush, But Unfortunately There Are Times When It Is Unavoidable.

Fiordland, A Vast Tract Of Mountainous Terrain That Occupies The South-west Corner Of South Island, New Zealand, Is One Of The Most Astounding Pieces Of Land Anywhere On God's Earth, And One's First Impulse, Standing On A Cliff Top Surveying It All, Is Simply To Burst Into Spontaneous Applause.

It's Reassuring To Realize That Everybody Is As Stupid As You Are And That All We Are Doing When We Are Standing In The Kitchen Wondering What We Came In Here For Is "woking.

Insofar As She Recognized At All That She Was Dreaming, She Realized That She Must Be Exploring Her Subconscious Mind. She Had Heard It Said That Humans Are Supposed Only To Use About A Tenth Of Their Brains, And That No One Was Really Clear What The Other Nine Tenths Were For, But She Had Certainly Never Heard It Suggested That They Were Used For Storing Penguins.

I Am Rarely Happier Than When Spending An Entire Day Programming My Computer.

Their Minds Sang With The Ecstatic Knowledge That Either What They Were Doing Was Completely And Utterly And Totally Impossible Or That Physics Had A Lot Of Catching Up To Do.

They Wouldn’t Even Lift A Finger To Save Their Own Grandmothers From The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast Of Traal Without Orders Signed In Triplicate, Sent In, Sent Back, Queried, Lost, Found, Subjected To Public Inquiry, Lost Again, And Finally Buried In Soft Peat For Three Months And Recycled As Firelighters.

We Talked About How Easy It Was To Make The Mistake Of Anthropomorphizing Animals, And Projecting Our Own Feelings And Perceptions On To Them, Where They Were Inappropriate And Didn't Fit. We Simply Had No Idea What It Was Like Being An Extremely Large Lizard, And Neither For That Matter Did The Lizard, Because It Was Not Self-conscious About Being An Extremely Large Lizard, It Just Got On With The Business Of Being One. To React With Revulsion To Its Behavior Was To Make The Mistake Of Applying Criteria That Are Only Appropriate To The Business Of Being Human.

He Spent A Lot Of Time Flying. He Learnt To Communicate With Birds And Discovered That Their Conversation Was Fantastically Boring. It Was All To Do With Wind Speed, Wing Spans, Power-to-weight Ratios And A Fair Bit About Berries. Unfortunately, He Discovered, Once You Have Learnt Birdspeak You Quickly Come To Realize That The Air Is Full Of It The Whole Time, Just Inane Bird Chatter. There Is No Getting Away From It.

I Only Know As Much About Myself As My Mind Can Work Out Under Its Current Conditions. And Its Current Conditions Are Not Good.

Dirk Turned On The Car Wipers, Which Grumbled Because They Didn't Have Quite Enough Rain To Wipe Away, So He Turned Them Off Again. Rain Quickly Speckled The Windscreen. He Turned On The Wipers Again, But They Still Refused To Feel That The Exercise Was Worthwhile, And Scraped And Squeaked In Protest.

Time Is An Illusion. Lunchtime Doubly So.

Ford Carried On Counting Quietly. This Is About The Most Aggressive Thing You Can Do To A Computer, The Equivalent Of Going Up To A Human Being And Saying "blood...blood...blood...blood...

A Mobile Phone Needs A Manual In The Way That A Teacup Doesn't

The More Susan Waited, The More The Doorbell Didn't Ring. Or The Phone.

It Was None The Less A Perfectly Ordinary Horse, Such As Convergent Evolution Has Produced In Many Of The Places That Life Is To Be Found. They Have Always Understood A Great Deal More Than They Let On. It Is Difficult To Be Sat On All Day, Every Day, By Some Other Creature, Without Forming An Opinion About Them.

Mc Donalds He Thought. There's No Longer Any Such Thing As A Mc Donalds Hamburger. He Passed Out. When He Came Around Seconds Later He Found He Was Sobbing For His Mother.

He Would Have Felt Safe If Alongside The Dentrassis' Underwear, The Piles Of Sqornshellous Mattresses And The Man From Betelgeuse Holding Up A Small Yellow Fish And Offering To Put It In His Ear He Had Been Able To See Just A Small Packet Of Cornflakes. But He Couldn't, And He Didn't Feel Safe.

The Problem Is, Or Rather One Of The Problems, For There Are Many, A Sizeable Proportion Of Which Are Continually Clogging Up The Civil, Commercial, And Criminal Courts In All Areas Of The Galaxy, And Especially, Where Possible, The More Corrupt Ones, This. The Previous Sentence Makes Sense. That Is Not The Problem. This Is: Change. Read It Through Again And You'll Get It.

Numbers Written On Restaurant Bills Within The Confines Of Restaurants Do Not Follow The Same Mathematical Laws As Numbers Written On Any Other Pieces Of Paper In Any Other Parts Of The Universe. This Single Fact Took The Scientific World By Storm.

I Think The Problem, To Be Quite Honest With You, Is That You've Never Actually Known What The Question Is.

‎if You Ever Find You Need Help Again, You Know, If You're In Trouble, Need A Hand Out Of A Corner..." "yeah?" "please Don't Hesitate To Get Lost.

But The Reason I Call Myself By My Childhood Name Is To Remind Myself That A Scientist Must Also Be Absolutely Like A Child. If He Sees A Thing, He Must Say That He Sees It, Whether It Was What He Thought He Was Going To See Or Not. See First, Think Later, Then Test. But Always See First. Otherwise You Will Only See What You Were Expecting.

'totally Mad,' He Said, 'utter Nonsense. But We'll Do It Because It's Brilliant Nonsense.'

...and The Universe, ... Will Explode Later For Your Pleasure.

My Own Strategy Is To Find A Car, Or The Nearest Equivalent, Which Looks As If It Knows Where It's Going And Follow It. I Rarely End Up Where I Was Intending To Go, But Often I End Up Somewhere I Needed To Be.

I Am Fascinated By Religion. (that's A Completely Different Thing From Believing In It!) It Has Had Such An Incalculably Huge Effect On Human Affairs. What Is It? What Does It Represent? Why Have We Invented It? How Does It Keep Going? What Will Become Of It? I Love To Keep Poking And Prodding At It. I've Thought About It So Much Over The Years That That Fascination Is Bound To Spill Over Into My Writing.

Even Light, Which Travels So Fast It Takes Most Races Thousands Of Years To Realize That It Travels At All, Takes Time To Journey Between The Stars.

You May Not Instantly See Why I Bring The Subject Up, But That Is Because My Mind Works So Phenomenally Fast, And I Am At A Rough Estimate Thirty Billion Times More Intelligent Than You. Let Me Give You An Example. Think Of A Number, Any Number.” “er, Five,” Said The Mattress. “wrong,” Said Marvin. “you See?

Bypasses Are Devices That Allow Some People To Dash From Point A To Point B Very Fast While Other People Dash From Point B To Point A Very Fast.

Finding Your Path

Don't Believe Anything You Read On The Net. Except This. Well, Including This, I Suppose.

Woking (vb.) To Enter The Kitchen With The Precise Determination To Perform Something Only To Forget What It Is Just Before You Do It.

If They Don’t Keep Exercising Their Lips, He Thought, Their Brains Start Working.

The Only Person For Whom The House Was In Any Way Special Was Arthur Dent, And That Was Only Because It Happened To Be The One He Lived In.

The Answer To The Great Question... Of Life, The Universe And Everything... Is... Forty-two,' Said Deep Thought, With Infinite Majesty And Calm.

Life Is Wasted On The Living.

What Do You Get If You Multiply Six By Nine?" "six By Nine. Forty Two." "that's It. That's All There Is." "i Always Thought Something Was Fundamentally Wrong With The Universe

Ford... You're Turning Into A Penguin. Stop It.

Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy

Hitchhikers Guide

If It Looks Like A Duck, And Quacks Like A Duck, We Have At Least To Consider The Possibility That We Have A Small Aquatic Bird Of The Family Anatidae On Our Hands.

Earth: Mostly Harmless

What Is This? Some Sort Of Galactic Hyperhearse?

Zaphod Beeblebrox

Even The Evil-looking Bird Perched On A Rod In The Bar Had Stopped Screeching Out The Names And Addresses Of Local Contract Killers, Which Was A Service It Provided For Free.

Beethoven Tells You What It's Like To Be Beethoven And Mozart Tells You What It's Like To Be Human. Bach Tells You What It's Like To Be The Universe.

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