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

Entry: The expression: "Live fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse" - A988266
Author: Dr Deckchair Funderlik who regularly grunts in the H2G2 post. This week: The History of Clowns - very educational: A977088. Yes - U216365

My first submission for the guide.

I really like this piece. It's well written and funny.

very minor point - you've spelt champagne and anomaly wrong.

Sprout

Here in Southern California, the image of youth and beauty are everything, precisely because of the movie industry where this motto came from.

Many folks pay plastic surgeons good money, in order to leave a quite pretty, young looking corpse.

Nice entry

Another couple of minor points:

In the conclusion you've changed "good looking" to "beautiful"

I've not heard of the expression 'to smoke like a Trooper'. You can swear like a Trooper or smoke like a chimney.

I not sure of the smoking habits of Troopers.

SK

How about 'smoke like a Chimney'?



Or the less well-known expression 'smoke like Number Six watching a Plymouth Argyle game'...

Thanks for your comments. Glad you liked it
I have made the suggested corrections. Though, in defence, I should say that "Champagne" gets me every time, and, well "anomaly" is just asking to be spelled wrong.

As for "Smoke like a trooper" - I take the point. "Smoke like a chimney" doesn't quite seem to fit the Dean image though. Chimneys don't have much going for them. I wanted to get at that thing he did with the cigarette hanging from his mouth, so, I switched to "invented a whole new way of smoking".

Very funny!

I like your use of the phrase "stiff competition"....

Well, now that you've said that, so do I!

I like this a lot!

Hey, I happen to know that Mr Turnupseed was called Donald Turnupseed. This is because there's a song about him - Donald Turnupseed was also immortalised, in his onw small way, on an obscure B-side called 'Turnupseed' by long-lost 1980s alternative band Furniture - most famous for 'Brilliant Mind', which featured in the John Hughes movie 'Some Kind of Wonderful'. You can include that in a footnote, if you like!

(I'm not quite obscure enough to own the single, but it's on Furniture's 'best of' - 'She Gets Out The Scrapbook, which I heartily recommend, and the title is explained in the sleevenotes which is how I know...)

On to technical matters... is there any chance you could change the Subheaders to Headers, and remove the 'centre' tags? Standard practice and all that... and there are also a few typos in the 'Examples' paragraph:
you'll need to go for 'practised' rather than 'practiced', 'glamorous' instead of 'glamarous', and replace 'Porche' with 'Porsche'. An extra 'p' in 'aproximately' in the Alexander the Great paragraph wouldn't go amiss, either.

But as I say, good stuff!

Turnupseed was immoralised in his *own* small way, of course.

I'll get me coat.

Or even immortalised.

I think I prefer "immoralised"

Thanks for taking the trouble to weed out all those errors. If I have any facility with words, the individual letters still seem to elude me.. I will implement the changes shortly.

I would be happy to include the details you present in a footnote and you can go on as co-author if you wish.

I think the real irony is Turnupseed's name. That sedan could have been driven by anyone - Smith, Jones, anyone - but the cosmic lottery chose "Turnupseed".

...just make sure it's some else's!

V. funny. And informative too.

Why, thank you Dr DF - that's very kind!

Yep, this is a great entry. And funny.

I always liked the live fast part of the saying but had great problems with the die young part. Well, if you take a look at my name - Methos - you may have an idea... I would say "Mix living fast and slow well and die old - very old".

Methos

Thanks again for all the feedback

I have implemented the suggested changes and added Number Six's comments in a footnote.

I like the entry, but it ignores the fact that quite a few people _do_ focus on point one, and failing to die (since living fast only increases the chance of dying, it doesn't make it certain) slow down, either by choice when they give up the fast life, or if they keep going, because old druggies just can't move faster than a hunchbacked shuffle.
There are also those who luck out, or can afford repeated rehab, who seem to manage to live fast, and die old. In a way the philosophy can be expanded to: Live fast (because that's more fun) and if your luck runs out and you die young, at least you'll leave a good looking corpse.
Even James Dean didn't actually try for the die young part.

I take your point about motivation, but I am deliberately focusing here on the expression as an expression. That is to say, focusing on the words "Live fast.." etc. as a prescription for life, and in this way leaving irony to take care of the rest.

I think that if I start dealing more seriously with people's motivations for prolonged headonism, that the entry will become unbalanced and the impact watered down.

By focusing on the expression - as an expression, or a coda, or prescription, I can keep the entry tightly focused on just that, and the point comes through more clearly, imho.

However, even within the logic of the expression, I think that there is room for a line or two that deal with the possibility of succeeding at point one - living fast, but failing point two - dying young.

So I will add in some lines to that effect, and see what people think.

How's that?

Added a whole new paragraph.
Happier with it now

Did James Dean make a road safety ad? I never knew that! More details please.

(Even if you don't put it in the entry, I work in road safety and it would be useful to know.)

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