3-7 June 1999 :

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Competition news


As promised far too long ago, 42 lucky researchers from the 3000 who joined on the day we launched each receive a copy of 'The Illustrated Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' signed by Douglas himself. Since those frenetic first minutes live on BBC 1's Tomorrow's World over ten thousand of you have registered, and our servers report a whopping one-and-a-half million page hits. (Please - no more jokes about pains in all the diodes down their left
hand sides :-)



If you weren't lucky enough to win one of the glittering prizes, don't
panic. There will be more opportunities to get your hands on a copy
personally defaced by Douglas, as Randy Bohn discovered - read how he spookily suggested the forthcoming "Share And Enjoy" feature mere hours after we'd decided to implement it.

8 June 1999 :
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It's not a curry house or a famous bluesman, it's the most romantic building in the cosmos, and even the hordes of tourists can't spoil that. We salute everything about the Taj Mahal, from the sludgy Yamuna River with its friendly swarms of malarial mosquitoes to the ancient but worryingly persistent saleswoman outside the main gate who insists on selling leather whips to every tourist in the city, despite her being a Hindu who believes that cows are gods.



Ah, India: once you've gone once you just have to keep going back. Not unlike the cuisine, it repeats on you.

11 June 1999 :
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We're sometimes accused of sarcasm. This is completely unfounded, it's just that sometimes, when we're being serious, people think we're not.



For example, we truly love life insurance salesmen. We often engage them in friendly conversation when they come round at 9am on a Sunday morning, as we do with Jehovah's Witnesses and the man trying to sell us cable. What lovely people.



And mobile phones. We love them. Really. Especially when we're jammed into someone's conversation on the rush-hour train while he talks endlessly about last weekend's footy match with his mate on the other end. We can't think of a nicer way to spend the early evening.



Sarcastic? What us?

14 June 1999 :

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All you need is love

Love, like Work and Edna, is a four-letter word, and that's about the most sensible definition anyone can give. If there's one thing that has created more grief than anything else, it's love, or the lack of it. There have been entire movements based round love, whole concept albums centred round it, and more plays, books, poems and TV costume dramas about love than is healthy for a species who can't even agree on whether the 1960s was an illusion or not.



And now, just to add to the confusion, there's a guide entry too.

15 June 1999 :
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Enough for two?

Duvets are confusing. In England they used to call them eiderdowns before realising that a French word would be far more sensible, in Australia they call them "doonas" - not to be confused with the kebabs, which they call "souvlaki" to avoid sticky moments in bed - and in the tropics they call them completely unnecessary.



But they're responsible for one of the most common disputes between consenting adults, that of "pulling the duvet over to your side". This is all the more surprising because extensive research has shown that duvets have no opinions and never side with anyone, but they do have one annoying habit, as described in the guide.



You have been warned.

16-17 June 1999 :
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Go on, take a holiday. You owe it to yourself...


These days, if you want to go abroad on holiday, it's a minefield. Having reached the airport and braved the unholy ritual of the airport check-in desk, you'll end up in some costal resort where you do exactly what you did last year: sit in the bar with a bunch of other tourists drinking tequila slammers until the return flight.



The Victorians, however, never believed in all this mucking around. If they wanted to go abroad, they did it properly, colonising the entire country and turning it into a corner of this world that is forever England... until they got kicked out. Which is not unlike the present day situation on the Costa del Sol.

18 June 1999 :
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Douglas Adams at the JavaOne Conference


Douglas Adams is speaking today at the JavaOne conference about the business of innovation. If you're one of the 7000 who saw him speak, thanks for coming here. Pull up a chair, make yourself comfortable, register (it's free, no strings, all we ask is your email address) and start reading.



You might like to start with this article about Java programming. Or, for a dissenting view, read one person's opinion about the dark side of Java.


Stick 'em up


For this hobby you will require a stocking, a getaway car, a plastic gun and at least five years during which you weren't planning to do anything constructive anyway.


Bank robbery is generally regarded as illegal when referring to customers stealing money from banks, but when performed the other way round not only is it legal, it is socially acceptable. Those who hate the thought of banks charging ridiculous amounts of money for sending out menacing letters should consider keeping their savings under their mattresses, but should bear in mind that recent studies have shown mattresses to be poor security guards. Most mattresses do precisely nothing when confronted with a man, a crowbar, a black-and-white stripy top and a bag with "swag" written on it. Banks, however, do tend to react when presented with similar circumstances.

20-21 June 1999 :

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This is no wind up


In celebration of the fact that you can now buy wind-up radios, we would like to put out an appeal to all crackpot inventors out there to come up with the following hand-powered items:

• Hand-powered career prospects
• Hand-powered Monday mornings
• Hand-powered folk singers
• Hand-powered one night stands

22 June 1999 :
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The Final Frontier


Though the centre of the space travel is often thought to be Cape Canaveral, in fact every city has its own local version. A good example is King's Cross in London.



If you approach the locals in these areas and ask about space travel, the reply will both be informative and friendly, though whether it will make any sense is another matter. The conversation will end as your new friend tries to peer into your soul through your eye sockets before stumbling off with cries of "Wow, swordfishtrombone rattling in the noonday sun, goo goo ba joob!"



Space travel is probably best left to the experts.

24 June 1999 :
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Shake your moneymaker

Swing dancing is just one form of dancing that we highly recommend everyone try. While exploring the delights of dancing there are many stages you can progress through, from dancing like your Dad while thinking that Saturday Night Fever had some groovy moves in it, all the way up to joining in with ten thousand other people in a field in the middle of nowhere dancing to music that will ring in your ears for five days afterwards.



One thing we do not recommend is Dirty Dancing. It will either produce hard-to-shift stains on your clothes that even the most potent biological washing powder will not remove, or it will send you into a deep coma for just over one-and-a-half hours, depending on which format you choose to experience it in. Don't say we didn't warn you.

25-30 June 1999 :
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More Tea, Vicar?


"The socially correct way of pouring tea is to put the milk in after the
tea. Social correctness has traditionally had nothing whatever to do with reason, logic or physics" - Douglas Adams.


Douglas's entry on tea has quickly become one of the most popular entries in the guide, and according to our logs, over half of all you registered researchers have read it!



As an homage to the original television series, our talented animation
department offers you a Flash animation illustrating the mind-bendingly difficult physics involved in making a cup of tea.



Share and enjoy.