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

My brother Deswald is the heaviest sleeper I've ever met. He once slept through an earthquake which put an inch-wide diagonal crack across the wall of my bedroom, which was next to his. More recently, he slept through the removal of his bedroom floor by builders, who then carried out some heavy-duty demolition work on the kitchen directly below him, whilst playing their radio at a loud volume; he only awoke when the builders were ready to leave, and waved at them blearily through the hole in the floor.

So when he woke up at three o' clock this afternoon, he had no idea that I'd spent all day ringing his number on the phone that's right beside his bed. He switched on his computer and was confronted by a mass of emails from his Internet friends, all asking him if he had been blown up. Bewildered, he wrote back to say that he was a bit bloated, thanks for asking, but it was probably just water retention.

I finally got a call from him at four, after he had got around to reading the news. Oh, the relief! I wanted to go down there and smack his head in, the stupid git.

One of my brothers is a particularly talented sleeper. Eg he has fallen out of a bunk bed and woken everyone else up while remaining obliviously asleep himself. To be fair though, unless your brother was close to a particular explosion, he wouldn't necessarily have noticed anything anyway. Lots of awake people apparently didn't.

Meanwhile, I've just checked and found out that all my near relatives who live in London have reported back to their uber-home as being safe. I don't know about any stragglers or day-trippers yet.

He wouldn't have heard any of the bombs going off, but his telephone was ringing right beside his head. Ah well. He's safe.

Here's hoping the stragglers and day-trippers are all fine too. So far I've only got a friend of a sister of a friend of a friend who was on one of the trains, and she wasn't badly hurt. Some of the TV footage was pretty harrowing, though. Hard not to feel angry about it.

Snailrind, you shall have great pleasure giving that brother of yours a slap next time you see him!

Glad to hear all of yours are okay as well SEF.

I've hadn't seen news all day and just now heard about this. I'm glad your brother's OK.

Thanks, Hellbound.

Deswald's given me permission to cut 'n' paste a little email exchange we had.


DESWALD: Yup. Still not dead.

SNAILRIND: And neither is MrFlay, or so he tells me.

DESWALD: Excellent! Glad to hear it.

I remain somewhat disappointed at the unfortunate statistical tendencies of my friends, who NEVER call me to ask "OMG! Are you still alive? Have you been run over???" which is far far likelier to be the end of me, as I suspect more people are run over each day in London than the terrorists got. Three dozen? That's just a bad traffic accident.

I've googled for "causes of death in London", but unfortunately only ancient manuscripts seem to be online. In 1775, 169 people died from "Mortification". 52 died from "Lunatick" (up from five in 1632). "Teeth" claimed 694 (470 in 1632), "Evil" a mere 11, and as many as 64 people, nearly twice yesterday's toll, died from "fools, etc".

Nobody ever calls to check if I've been had away by fools, teeth or evil

http://www.contemporarypoetry.com/brain/poetry/poems/causes_of_death_in_london_1632.htm

Only one of my friends wrote and said "I'm NOT worried you're dead, because I understand statistics and stuff. Hope the people who don't, aren't the death of you."

Do you think you fit the profile of being done away by those things? NB When comparing numbers you should probably consider percentages of population at the time.

I'm not sure about the teeth one (unless you include shark attacks and infected bites as well as personal tooth infections) but you could probably classify many modern deaths under the other old categories. For example, rather a lot of people are killed by evil - in particular the incarnations known as religion and nationalism or patriotism (including football). Rather a lot could be said to have died from fools too, eg incompetent doctors and drunk drivers (especially if you include themselves as the fool in question and slow mechanisms such as lung cancer from smoking).

Oh and today it turns out that "dying from fools" is back in - EU fools to be precise by their banning of food supplements which people with certain medical conditions require a lot more than do the health nuts the EU claims to be protecting from themselves (rather than apparently protecting the big business interests over the little ones which could easily be the case given the approved versus non-approved list favours artificial ingredients).

http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/pri/en/oj/dat/2002/l_183/l_18320020712en00510057.pdf
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=27322
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-1690686,00.html
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/vitamins2.php

Yeah, I caught that on the news today. Worrying. Do you require a lot of supplements yourself?

Just to clarify: everything in post 8 after the second "DESWALD" was written by Deswald, not by me.

Didn't a lot of people back in '98 die of trouser-related incidents?

I need a few - partly because of my allergies making many normal foodstuffs too dangerous. A close relative has pancreatitis, making all fat-soluble ingredients inaccessible other than via supplements. We won't die immediately but we're going to suffer quite a lot and probably die sooner than otherwise. As far as I'm concerned this is heading for attempted/constructive murder on the part of the EU (I wonder if we could really bring a case against them ...). They are not making things safer at all for those of us who aren't "normal".

Prescriptions?

We have those too.

However, many of the supplements are cheaper bought than on prescription (except for the extreme old-age discount or occasionally bulk-buy pre-payment of prescriptions - though that seldom worked out). I think doctors mostly (when clued up about costs) just tell people where to get them. For the items which won't be available at all on the approved list though, a prescription won't help. It would be like writing a prescription for a new brain or other novel organ transplant - merely having the piece of paper doesn't really help you obtain one on demand.

A prescription would only work for those items which are already sold at high prices by big business pharmacy companies - which is part of what smells about the new regulations. They are deliberately favouring artificial over naturally derived ingredients and excluding some things altogether (perhaps because the big players don't make their own high price versions of those).

"O brave new world, that has such people in it."

I think the idea or excuse at least behind the EU thing on vitamins is to stop 'fools' from overdosing on vitamins because they're too 'foolish' to realise that too much vitamin is just as bad as 'too much' anything else.

I foresee an underground trade in illicit vitamins. People will smuggle 'em in from America and places, and cut them with talcum powder in sleazy back rooms.

"Ya wanna buy some Vitamin D? It's good shit, this; great for the skin. I got some three thou mils, just come in from Cuba, a tenner each, or if you want I'll let you have a bag for eighty. Great, man. See you at the speakeasy."

The EU wording at the moment is about "marketing". If they really mean "selling" then the Channel Islands company reckon they already dodge the regulations by not being in the EU as far as manufacturing and finances go. If they mean "advertising" then they only need to ditch their brochure campaign and switch to being all internet-based to dodge that. Even if the intent was to include preventing postage of these things (which that particular company thought was OK), customs simply don't have the manpower to stop every single personal shipment getting through. Peaceful but determined non-compliance by citizens currently seems to be the way to go.

*Now* you tell me. I just bought a hundredweight of talcum powder.

Had you also already decorated your back room to be sleazy then in anticipation of all that trade?