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

If the warewolf is a tiny step in the right direction, and previously you said he didn't want it to turn into a circus....

Was it the words that he said that were funny? Or was there a real possibility that a public funeral would turn out in a particular way?

I don't know about anyone else but my brain's beginning to stall with this one and I could do with a clue or some slack or something to help.

B

OK, here's a big clue then, since nobody seems to be thinking along those lines at the moment:

By keeping his funeral private, which person(s) was he trying to prevent from attending?

The Media? but I think that has already been established hasn't it?

Did he have a string of ex wives fighting over inheritance and wanted to make it clear who he considered his real family to be?

His colleagues? I wondered briefly if we were talking about one of the Marx brothers, but they were all born in the US.

On the subject of ex wives: True story I heard from one of the women involved - let's call her Anna.

Anna was the second wife of a very successful business man who travelled a lot. (You know where this is going, but you don't know how far it's going). Whenever he came back from a trip he gave her a gift of Estee Lauder's White Linen perfume. His pet name for her was Hazel.

She was pretty sure that he was having an affair with his secretary. But he was an attractive and successful man.

Anyway - this attractive and successful man had a heart attack and the doctors warned Anna that he might well die in the next couple of days. Anna decided that it was only fair if his ex wife knew so she rang her and after a slightly frosty conversation his ex wife came over. Anna also rang the secretary and sure enough she was having an affair with the man and she came over. The ex wife then suggested they contact his former mistress and she came over. So the four women were sitting down by this chap's hospital bedside, listening to the bleeps and comparing notes. It turns out that he called all of them Hazel, and gave them all White Linen. They never found out who the original Hazel was.

Anyway, this chap wakes up and sees his ex wife, his former mistress, his current wife and his current mistress all gathered around his bed, all getting on very well indeed.

Anyway, he recovered and married his secretary, but Anna remained firm friends with the ex-wife and the secretary.

<>

he didn't want his mother-in-laws turning up

That reminds me of my own family... my parents got married one month after I was born, the day my father got his divorce. His ex-wife, 23 years older than my mother, was their witness and the only one present at their wedding. She also became my godmother, I was named after her, and she and her daughters moved in with us (there were a few more half-siblings, and my maternal grandmother who lived with us as well). This lasted 12 1/2 years until my father died, and never a bad word between his ex and my mother. They were also grandmothers to the same children, because one of the ex's daughters (my half-sister) eventually married my mother's son from a previous marriage (my half-brother).
My mother soon remarried, but the ex was still very much part of that family, too, until she died at 94.
Hey, that's QI, too bad I can't give myself points for this!

Back to our celebrity - he actually did have several exes and a bunch of children, but that was not the reason, all seems to have been quite amicable there.

No mothers-in-law either. But a nice, shiny for Taff!

Can you diagram that Yarreau?

You know how many times I've been asked that?
It's quite easy, actually - I have two double-half nieces, their father is also their uncle and his own brother-in-law, and their mother is their aunt and my sister-in-law as well as my sister... while their daughters are descended from two of my father's wives and two of my mother's husbands...

Not from Norfolk, are you?

Nope, not Norfolk - Northeim.

Scraping the bottom of the barrel with werewolves - listen I'm through the barrel, and the cellar floor and I've just had a complaint from some red guy with a beard about the noise from my tunnelling machine.

My wife has often said she thought I'd reached the bottom, but she'd under-estimated my tenacity.

He didn't want his dog to know where he'd been buried because he thought he might keep up a vigil by his grave. A La Greyfriars Bobby A14455334

Death?

Like the story about meeting Death in Persepolis?

Now is a good one, and worth +3... although I don't think he owned a dog himself, or at least I don't know if he did.

he owed a lot of money and had it burried with him to prove you can take it with you and he didn't want his creditors to know where he was buried incase they dug him up to recover the loot

Erm... no.

he valued his privacy

He willed his earthly remains to the dog food factory ?

Do I get a point for exery time I had to repeat in this thread that he had a REGULAR funeral, apart form the fact that it was a private affair?

re: post 89
are you a member of the Royal family by any chance?