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

Oh, I really liked this, a very good explaination. I've always been very interested in what you call the warp. I always liked to dive deeper into the settings of stories and think about what actually makes them believable - as you know I mostly read fantasy.

In fact I created my own worlds since I was a child, drew maps and stuff. What I never managed to do is actually writing a story.

I love that Clancy brothers song.

When you work at the mill, weaving at the loom,
You gaze absentminded at the roof,
And half the time the shuttle gets twised in the threads,
Til you can't tell the warp from the woof.

(I guess Oscar Hammerstein had to change "weft" to "woof" to make the line rhyme.)

1824 was about the time one of my ancestors was working on top of his hay wagon, and he fell to his death.

In "Rabbit, run," the warp is the parallel mountain ridges that make it hard sometimes to get from one town to another even if they are close as the (drunken) crow flies. The weft is the crazy, senseless things that Rabbit does. I never found it easy t are about Rabbit, though I was fascinated about the terrain that helped to shape him.

To get back to my ancestors: there are parallel mountain ridges in Vermont, too. One time my mother took me on a genealogy trip to Granville, Vermont. We found the cemetery where our ancestors supposed to be buried, but there was no sign of them. Then we found out that the ancestor was in *West* Granville, which was maybe five miles away, but in the days when he was alive, the short cut through the mountains was snowed in, and you had to go down and around to get from one Granville to the other. That roundabout route took about 40 miles.

That's some detour.

I've heard people say 'woof' for 'weft', so I think it's a legit variant.

So think of the topography of the ridges as the warp, and the silly characters crossing and recrossing them as the weft.