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

No, you didn't read the post. All women being crazy doesn't equal all men being crazy.

All men being crazy doesn't even make sense.

If all men were crazy, some women would be sane (according to the crazy men). Since we know all women are crazy, we KNOW, for sure, all men can't POSSIBLY be crazy, because some woman would say one of them were sane or crazy, which instantly nullifies the argument.

All women are crazy. All men make mistakes. A woman could say a man doesn't make mistakes, but that's okay, because we all know she's crazy.

Dig?

I rather really like your insights. You're a smart gal, EMR! What do you think of my "Toes" entry???

Having had long experience of the damaging emotional, psychological and physical effects of close association with a sufferer of mental illness, as well as having experienced the destruction of a family due to that mental illness, and having experienced life-threatening situations due to that person's mental illness, I find it very uncomfortable to consider the labelling of all women 'insane' as some sort of joke. It is an unfortunate minimisation of the tragedy that is mental illness as well as being an intollerable bigotted generalization akin to such wonderful jokes as all Jews are money-grubbers, all Spaniards are lazy, all Americans are stupid and overweight, or all French people are cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

That having been said, it was pointed out some time ago that this entry is not suitable for the Edited Guide and should likely be removed from Peer Review. It continues to be unsuitable and still should be removed.

That sums it up for me. If the author is still refusing to rewrite the entire piece then I propose a move back to entry on grounds of unsuitability.

I really do find the opening sentence disturbing in the extreme. Does anyone suppose that this would have been left un-yikesed for several weeks if it 'joked' that 'all black people are insane' or 'the Chinese are psychotic'?

I don't think it was HD24s intention to offend, all the same, I'd be happy to see this finally removed from PR. Can you do that for us please HisDaddy24.

Emmily

I second Oojakapiv's motion, with all provisions heretofore proposed.

Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled."- Santayana

Obviously then, insanity must be rationality put to bad uses and dreams must be reality uncontrolled.

Look around. Insanity, as defined above is a an almost universal male trait, with the exception of perhaps Congoleesa Rice. Who decided to use the medicine Lithium to manufacture hydrogen bombs, for example?

While women in general may be mad (with good reason) they are definitely not insane.

"... in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected; it is recognised and obeyed." -Santayana

Keep looking, BigDaddy, and learn to obey.

It's not so much refusing, so much as this site has becoming *incredibly* boring over the last 3 years. When I first visited here, it was a fun place to write AND capture at the same time. You know, perspective was as important as fact.

Nowadays, it sounds like people only want to write an Encyclopedia Gallactica. Well that's fine, could you buy the URL www.E1G1, and go there?

Losing the spirit of Douglas Adams' writing in the h2g2 is like asking Shakespeare to read the Bible verbatim. You want to know what's going on in Cannes? Visit the Cannes Tourism web site. You want to read about Cannes on h2g2, you should expect humor and fun, and the unexpected, while still remaining somewhat (maybe) factual.

And please, don't have included in your name "I have a firm grip on reality -- now I can strange it", when you argue that you're a woman, and all women aren't insane. Rather dulls the attack, really.

I didn't have "I have a firm grip on reality -- now I can strange it", in my name tag when I posted the all women are not insane post, I had "One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor" and previous to that I had "I'm not a complete idiot; some parts are missing" which was just after I had "Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else…" that was after I got bored with "Roses are red, Peas are green, My face is a Laugh, but your is a scream" I would have used "Most computer problems are caused by a loose nut between the chair and the keyboard." but it was too long to be accepted. I haven't decided on my next addition to my name tag, but I hope that too will indicate that I don't tend to take life too seriously.

The Edited Guide is one part of h2g2, you can still have your Entry on h2g2, but in it's present state, it's just not suitable for the Edited Guide, which is meant as an informative guide.

Imagine Joe Bloggs wants to find out about dating women, he's nervous, shy and inexperienced, he's looking for advice and tips on communicating and interacting with the opposite sex. He inserts 'dating women' in the search engine, and gets your Entry. Instead of the constructive advice and tips he was hoping to find, he finds an article stating that all women are insane, it's likely to put him off dating women forever.

You do have a chioce HisDaddy, you can leave your Entry as it is, and remove it from Peer Review, it will still be found by anyone inserting 'dating women' in search engine.

Or you can change your Entry's contents so that it is informative, you can still have the humour, providing it is balanced.

Emmily

The most important thing to remember for whites who are planning on dating blacks is that all blacks are insane. . .


The most important thing to remember for gentiles who are planning on dating jews is that all jews are insane. . .




'you should expect humor and fun, and the unexpected, while still remaining somewhat (maybe) factual.'

Your little piece has no humor, no fun, has nothing unexpected since it is just a rehash of tired old misogyny and it does not remain at all factual. Not only does it not follow the writing guidelines for the Edited Guide, it doesn't follow your own guidlines.


Please remove it from Peer Review.

We welcome criticism here at h2g2, so long as - like submissions to the Edited Guide - they have some basis in fact and reality. The facts don't really bear your argument out here though. In the last three years we've seen loads of interesting entries enter the Edited Guide, but we've also seen the creation of the UnderGuide to cater for exactly this point. The Edited Guide *is* the encyclopaedic section - that's the purpose of it - and writing allegedly comic pieces isn't going to change or add to the value of it. Especially ones like this.

Now, here's the thing, I didn't work alongside Douglas; he died before I joined the team. But some of the original team do still work in the same office as we do and they remember all too well some of Douglas's reactions to entries in the very early days. I can assure you this entry would never at any stage have been suitable material for the Edited Guide. In that, nothing has changed in the last three years.

From what the old team tell me of Douglas, he didn't see h2g2 as a community of clones copying his writing style. He wanted it to be a practical guide to real life. I imagine he'd have loved that we now also have the Post and the UnderGuide because that caters for different skills - just as the Artists, Subs, Scouts and other volunteer groups allow Researchers to specialise.

In short - you've posted this material to the wrong forum. Please don't react as if that's somehow our fault.

Regards,

A boring editor

I was going to say how tired I am of people trying to tell us how intimate they are with the thoughts, dreams and wishes of Douglas Adams, and how they know far better than we do what he wanted for this website, but Jims has put it far more eloquently than I could. Thanks mate

Ah, it was 'the Editors', not necessarily Jimster.

any reason why this is still here ?

tjm

To put it bluntly, not that I can think of.

Mostly because I was so disgusted with the temperament here I simply walked away to cool off, and wonder if it were worth coming back.

I guess I was hoping that something was there that resembled The Guide of the fiction of an author we've all read. Sure, I expected the expectations of the editors here to vary -- depending upon the book, your entries could have been edited from many pages to two words, or you could have been published simply because you showed up.

Blogs, wikis, and online services have completely beat H2G2 to the punch of having strictly-factual guides. Even about.com hires content editors. What's the point of H2G2? What's it's "uniqueness"? What makes it special, if it's simply a factual guide?

Sure, maybe even Dali drove a Volkswagen at one point, but limiting all of Dali's work to his time while driving a Volkswagen is mind-boggling. So, maybe when the Internet was a young place, and online databases were new, DNA tried to build the first Wiki, or the first About.com. He missed.

At this point, the best thing we can all do, the definitely the most meaningful to *all* of us, is to inspire that part in all of us that loves factual and fun. That can mingle strange perspectives with solid points of reference.

That's H2G2. That's why i showed up. If I'm wrong, I'm terribly sorry, and truly, I respect all of you, and am rather sorry if I'm stumbled upon a community in which I do not belong. DNA's writing is a huge inspiration to me, and I get giddy thinking about this site. Only, when I've arrived here as of late, I feel like I'm in a Tom Clancy novel.

So, pat me on the head, and send me away, never to return. But that's why these things are still here, because I think the point was missed (maybe initially), but now that a factual guide is redundant, what's the point of this site? What will make it fun, enjoyable, and really inspiring and unique is creating a place where great ideas from travellers can be shared (with as little editing as possible) in the words and mindsets of those travellers.

www.kevinglennon.com
(where you can reach me if I don't show up right away)

Okay, let me try to explain this one as best I can.

I'm sorry h2g2 isn't what you expected it to be, but we're not just here to be a fan site for Douglas Adams or to provide a parody of his work. We really do want to be a Guide to Life, the Universe and Everything, and that means setting up certain content standards for the Edited Guide, the <./>writing-guidelines</.>.

But that being said, everything you write on h2g2 is still part of the general Guide, and can be read by anyone and found via the search engine. You submitted your entry to PeerReview, and in doing so you stipulated that it followed the writing guidelines for the Edited Guide. It turned out that it didn't in the end, but that's okay - you're certainly not the only person to submit something to the wrong forum to start out.

So perhaps you could make a fresh start - try Writing-Alternative, a review forum especially for entries that *don't* follow the writing guidelines. These entries are featured on the Front Page once a week and form part of the <./>UnderGuide</.>. Or, you could submit your entry to <./>ThePost</.>, h2g2's community newspaper, which always loves new and interesting points of view. Peer Review isn't everything on h2g2, there is so much more, for just about any kind of writing you can imagine. So before you run out in a huff, maybe you could take a look at some other opportunities for your writing to be recognised, or maybe check out the wide h2g2 community, where you can have conversations on just about anything!

I do apologise if it was my initial comments about this entry that put you off. I am sorry to say that, as a teenager with raging hormones, I am set off easily, and I had no wish to offend. Your entry is perfectly valid, you just had the bad luck to stumble upon the wrong forum. I wish you luck with it in the future.

Mmmhmmm.
HisDaddy, you've got a point, you know. I think most people here realize we can't make nearly as many articles as Wikipedia or about.com can. We just can't compete there. So we *try* to focus on quality and originality. Would you find entries on Wikipedia about Teaching a Cat How to Fetch (A625592)? How about a guide to Learning to Walk in Extremely High Heels (A3724977)? Nah.

I think those sorts of entries are what we're all about. Some of the entries here are kind of dull, I'll admit, but I'd venture to say that most of them have some sort of a joke or original concept that you'd be surprised to see in an encyclopedia. And that's good It's something we're doing that very few other people are doing (none that come to mind, but you never know)

As for the Alternative Writing Workshop or AWW (<./>RF5</.&gt I'm sure that we would be happy to host you down there. It's a little quieter than Peer Review, but I like it fine there when I visit. Submitting it to <./>ThePost</.> would work well too, methinks. Both are very fine, respectable places, beloved by their readers.

Hi all

Do we think this one should get moved back to entry? It's certainly not suitable for the EG I'm afraid.

Paully