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

Well, A pair of socks would be the first step. I've got a persisting habit of not wearing shoes and socks, which is fine in the summer but causes a few problems in the winter. (and when I'm walking on broken glass)

*Dance dance dance dance dance*

*tries to move vaguely funkily*

*is listening to Smashing Pumpkins, which he hasn't done much before but has suddenly decided that they're great*

this is the first disco in a tree i have experienced.

*boogies on regardless, throwing purple glitter in the air to catch the fading sunlight*

*hangs a mirrorball from a branch and swings on it*

Dancing in a tree without falling out is difficult, I see why monkeys have the good sense to grow tails now.

*Ahem, cough cough ..." *Lecture coming up...*

Actually monkeys fall out of trees pretty often. But they don't suffer much damage because they are small-bodied and there are usually soft shrubs and leaf litter beneath the trees to fall on. Larger monkeys like baboons stay on the ground or climb no higher than about 20 ft.

I don't know about actual dancing, but they do play around a lot, jumping and swinging and pouncing on each other and so on.

Gibbons are not monkeys, but apes, and they have no tails. They move around by swinging by their arms, or brachiating. The trees in gibbon country are often over 200 feet tall, so even though a gibbon is small it can still suffer some harm during a fall. Gibbons do sometimes miss a branch and fall - in which case they simply relax and study the vegetation as it rushes past them - usually a reachable branch comes by before the ground does, in which case they simply grab it and carry on swinging. Gibbons have been seen to drop more than a hundred feet without any perturbation. But if it should happen to hit the ground, a gibbon will simply let its body go limp and absorb the shock in which case it has a good chance of not even suffering major damage.

Human beings without parachutes or any other means of retarding their downwards speed have fallen out of aircraft at very great altitudes, onto fairly hard ground, and still survived.

*end of lecture*

I heard of a bunch of guys who were driving round some of the more precarious roads in the Welsh mountains, stone drunk - and missed a corner and their car went rolling down the mountain. But because they were drunk it didn't really register with them that they'd crashed, so their bodies were completely limp, and they all survived without a scratch.

One point in favour of drinking and driving, eh?

Except that the drink doesn't make the sober people that the drunks run over and bash into go limp!

There limp when they are dead!

Yeah, but not because of the drink! And if you give them a while they will become quite stiff, in fact.

*brushes away a dusty conversation*

settles into the imaginary tree again. Oh, its good to be back. How are you all? Have you noticed that the tree has come into buds, and that there is some blossom on the wind?

muttering *dead limp drunk people indeed. What sort of a conversation is that to have in a lovely tree like this. *

s the tree.

Yaaaaaay !!!!

the tree is back

Is there any activity more
producive then sitting
around in i-trees ?

Bungee jumping in trees ???

Where is this tree located? All the trees here haven't had a chance to come into bud yet, they're frozen stiff, covered with snow and being blown into bits by a gale force wind. Not exactly the kind of tree I'd want to sit and drink tea in.

This tree is inside the Cafébar, where it is nice and warm and cozy, with a huge window in the roof to let the sun in, and it happens to be a tropical wild fig tree, which is evergreen, doesn't it?

I thought it was an oak, but what do I know about trees ???

*eats a fig*

Perhaps it's had lots of different branches from different species grafted onto it... there was a tree like that near where I grew up. It produced apples and pears and plums, all at once

A perfect tree
with chocolate growing from it?

chocolate cake ???