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

Hey Spartus, you haven't, by any chance, taken to writing to Private Eye using the name Richard B. George have you? I reproduce verbatim a letter written by the alleged Richard that was published under the heading: "A pedant writes..."

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Sir,

You have a Pilbrow cartoon on page 15 of Eye 1016 which shows four panic-stricken, carol-singing pengunis aboard a samll and rapidly melting iceberg with one of them reading a newspaper article about global warming. The caption reads "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas".

This is surely misconceived and therefore unfunny.

The intention was presumably to show the ultimate demise of a ploar ice cap due to the greenhouse effect. But penguins live at the South Pole and so their illustrated predicament would be quite unlikely because they would simply swim to the Antarctic land mass.

At the North Pole, however, there is merely frozen sea water and therefore the desired joke can be properly acheived by replacing the penguins with polar bears.

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On reflection, I guess it can't be you - you'd never start a sentence with "But"

I must be slipping. I don't even KNOW what "samll" or "ploar" means.

P.S. I bet it was bubster that wrote it. He's George, you know.

But you never know.

I have no idea what they mean either, I just copied the text directly from the magazine. I thought that you'd be able to tell me...

"...the desired joke can be properly acheived by replacing the penguins with polar bears..."

Boy, you know, I bet if the magazine made a new cartoon that replaced penguins with polar bears and mailed it to Richard B. George, I bet then he'd get the joke and laugh and laugh and laugh. Good thing there are people around that can properly explain the way humo(u)r is supposed to be determined. Otherwise, we'd be laughing at substandard jokes all the time. That would be sad. I think, one day I will hire Richard B. George to be my humo(u)r consultant, 'cause then he could lean over to me and ensure that the jokes I heard were correct in their facts, and therefore my jokes would all be, in his words, "properly acheived" and that way I wouldn't laugh at non-factual jokes.

This silly "no cloning humans" rule should be suspended so everyone has a Richard B. George to act as humo(u)r consultant.

Hmmmmmm.

I, personally, thought the pun possible in that name was rather incrediblly coincidental, so, being paranoid, I'm just going to assume that it WAS you.

That okay?

Yes indeed. I, naturally, knew what you were thinking. I have a friend named Susan who likes to go by the name Anthony if that is of any assistance.

Give 'er a dollar for me, willya?