h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Terrific article. I loved it.
And not a chip in sight!
Well done

yes, v informative. i like pototatoes- + i'm bringing sexy back.

wattaray

SWL™ - What a ride! Erudite, audacious, downright wicked, and I learnt a thing or two. Are you available for lecture tours? After-Dinner Speeches? Radio shows? Is there a one-man show in the offing? (They have a little shindig in Aul' Reekie every August, which you might care to take by storm.)Fab!

Wyatt...... Is he always like this?

All I can say is wait for the cats

Eh?

Currently in PR A18190749

Forgive me- what do u mean by PR ( I take it to mean, thru one's bottom)

Wattaray

PR = Peer Review

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/PeerReview

All I can say is wait for the cats

Gratuitous fave poem posting! In one of our Christmas concerts, when I was at school, a group of students did a big section from 'A Child's Christmas in Wales' by Dylan Thomas. The one phrase that has remained in my head, in tones of wicked Welsh schoolboy anticipation is, "waiting for cats....".

The whole piece is just wonderful, and I have a little butter-yellow paperback version illustrated with perfect atmospheric woodcuts by Ellen Raskin. Fortunately, it's also online (http://www.bfsmedia.com/MAS/Dylan/Christmas.html)

Enjoy! (I hope!!)...preferably in your best Sunday-go-to-meeting Welsh accent.....(and this is where we establish the word limit on H2G2....).

It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared.

We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows - eternal, ever since Wednesday - that we never heard Mrs. Prothero's first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden. Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like the far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbor's polar cat. But soon the voice grew louder.
"Fire!" cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.

And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii. This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded into the house, laden with snowballs, and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.

Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing in the middle of the room, saying, "A fine Christmas!" and smacking at the smoke with a slipper.

"Call the fire brigade," cried Mrs. Prothero as she beat the gong.
"There won't be there," said Mr. Prothero, "it's Christmas."
There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr. Prothero standing in the middle of them, waving his slipper as though he were conducting.
"Do something," he said. And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke - I think we missed Mr. Prothero - and ran out of the house to the telephone box.
"Let's call the police as well," Jim said. "And the ambulance." "And Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires."

But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?"

Very good

I'm bringing sexy back + as serious as a heaRT ATTACK. Take it to the bridge.

Nice story - sorry the ravings of a mad man, bought on by too much of the good stuff.......yeah c'mon. Wear galsses on tip of nose + dance.

Wattaray Bro

Just found this article and loved it. I am sorry though, the last but one paragraph just brought this to mind and made me laugh:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0YF_oNyQXE&feature=related




Websailor