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

FWR:

Now that's a man cave! Two dartboards....and licence plates and....

Lurking in the darkness, the arachnid glimpse of the tractor, alien, insectoid. Not a man cave after all....maybe a man trap? Lovely shot DG, stirs the imagination, thank you.

DG:

The oldest Hoggett kid seems to have taken his Captain America shield with him when he moved out...it's a picturesque barn, no?

Hi, there, my name's Mr. Tread, the world's only talking tractor. On the door of the barn, you can see my huge collection of license plates, which I won in competitions all across.....well, northwestern Pennsylvania. Does the rest of the world matter anyway? I thought not!

The man who thinks he owns me used me in the Spring to plow the fields so he can plant whatever those seeds are that come up as green stalks with silk threads at the top. At least, he *thinks* that's what the seeds do. My secret minions like to mix seeds for other plants in there: poison ivy, dandelions, kudzu, and burs. The poor guy has to hire a lad to go around pulling up the stuff he does't want. I sit in the barn and watch him doing it, and I laugh and laugh!

Do you have to announce beforehand which dartboard you intend to hit with your hatchet?

I like the photo.

That tractor designer must have learnt a little lesson from the Reliant Robin, but only a little lesson. Luckily, the speed remains way below corner-tipping.

It's the new generation of AI tractors that will usher in the Farm Belt Apocalypse (as if climate change weren't enough of a worry by itself).

That tractor is a 1949 Case, and it has won awards. A87917115 NT Hoggett has the trophies to prove it. Cease to make mock of it.

Sorry, Dmitri and Farmer Hoggett. I am poking good-natured fun in a spirit of love, and also because I have been reading Philip K Dick. Do tractors dream of electric sheep?

That one doesn't, though it may dream of real goats, and of the dog that talks to them.

If you're reading PK Dick, you're not alone. I've just finished rereading 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' and am thinking about Wilbur Mercer.

The one about electric sheep is what I am reading now -- I'm spacing it out over time until the libraries reopen and I can get more books.

I'm also reading "The Pathfinder," which is unintentionally funny. You wondered whether anyone read these things for pleasure? This was surely not the pleasure the author originally intended.

Again, I don't know when my supply of books will open up again. Granted, I read a lot of online stuff too, but have paper copies to read gives my eyes some variety and a different physical perspective...

Yeah, I know... I don't like to read paper books anymore, because it's hard to figure out how to keep them the right distance from my eyes. With one focal point and mostly marginal type sizes, it's tricky.

I swear by the Open Library. It's free, and there's lots to read.

Oh, lord, being driven to Fenimore Cooper is dire...

The angle is part of the problem, though it's not a huge problem. The key is varying things. Some online reading, where I'm sitting erect and facing the screen and looking down slightly. Then putting a book on a table and looking down at a steeper angle. Just getting up form one chair and walking to another chair gives me some exercise and a change.

I locked myself into the Cooper project, so no one else can be blamed. The almost introductory passage that you featured in The Post was not very typical of the book as a whole. The book is an adventure story. It doesn't usually bother with very much physical description, but Cooper made an exception in the passage cited. I guess you could fairly say that he wasn't drawing on his greatest strength when he wrote that part, and should have cut it as short as possible. Obviously, it could have stood to lose at two thirds of its length. Dickens or another of his more talented contemporaries might have pulled it off. I don't know. This was the Romantic Age, when women swooned at the drop of a hat, people imagined spirits lurking in dark corners, and a young Queen Victoria was overlaying her sense of sentimentality on her society (maybe some of it leaked across the Atlantic?)