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

Music smileys

Sports smileys

More food smileys

A smiley that looks like the little green guy on the
cover of the Hitchhiker books

Robot smiley

Rabbit smiley with his ears sticking up

Animated smileys

Raspberry smiley (like the tongueout smiley, but wetter)

Butterfly smiley

Sherlock Holmes smileys (for mystery buffs, like a magnifying
glass, pipe, and hat, which were popularised in the movies,
but which I don't think were used that often, if ever, in the
books, actually)

Weather smileys (sun, clouds, rain, lightning, snow, etc.)

Balloon smileys (How about different colours, or sets of one,
two, three or four balloons?)

Other flower smileys (It's always nice to get flowers!)

Geographical smileys (symbols indicating a place, like waves
on a beach, local trees, country flags, mountains, landmarks
like the Statue of Liberty or the Sydney Opera House, figures
in ethnic costume, etc.; these could be used as signs of
welcome or identity, for example)

Television smiley

Radio tower smiley

Artificial satellite smiley

Natural satellite smiley (moon or big asteroid, for example)

Smiley holding his ears because he's overwhelmed by the
conversation

Smiley holding his ears and shutting his eyes tight (and
perhaps gritting his teeth) because perhaps he's childishly
not listening, or wishes he hadn't got involved

Marijuana leaves smiley (or not....)

Kitchen and table utensils smileys (spoon, fork, spatula, etc.)

A smiley that looks like David Letterman does when he mocks
being (really is?) nervous and grins without smiling, adjusts his
tie, and sometimes makes the noise "eeyeeyEE!" through his
teeth (You can leave out the noise....)

Mouse smiley (animal or plastic computer accessory, or cartoon,
pending success of HHGTTG movie by Disney)

Fly smiley

Flyswatter smiley

Smiley screaming very loud because I have been asking for too
many smileys

And to think I lay awake all night thinking loads of ideas up and what happens - someone else has already posted it all!

I would like to make a serious comment, though. All the smileys, as well as the rest of this site seems to be very white-orientated. All the smileys should be available in brown, and, while not being intentionally racist anywhere (as far as I can detect) there is a tendency on H2G2 to assume that all the readers are white. Does this bother anyone else - white or black? Perhaps it's because I grew up in a white community and am white that I tend to think like this, but there doesn't seem to be room even for black aliens in any of the DNA books. What does he think about this?

I am trying to point out that right down the very bottom, we white people always assume that we are alone, and you get quotes like "Australians are rotten to the aborigines" (paraphrase) which I pointed out at the time was a racist comment in itself, because it assumes that aborigines are something other than Australians. And the sentence should at least read "White Australians are ..."

Am I splitting hairs? Do any coloured people feel discriminated against here, or in the HHGG books? Or rather, just plain ignored? Here I am, doing my best to be fair to everyone, and it's all been done before, or no one else is interested?

It will be a perfect world when things like this no longer need to be said, or, as someone once said (referring to women this time)

We know we will have reached equality when a totally incompetent woman is placed in a position of responsibility.

Actually, the smileys are yellow. But then, if you
take it further and point out that they are cartoons,
the Simpsons are also yellow, and they're apparently
Caucasian characters.

Since they're cartoons, they should be in any colour,
not just the usual skin tones of Earth people. There
is a blue smiley, for when you have the blues, and a
green smiley that's ill, and a multicoloured smiley
that's been pushed around a lot, and a blushing smiley,
and maybe I forgot some others. But maybe the
yellow smileys should come in more than one colour,
too. By the way, does anyone know why smiley faces
are yellow? The icon from the '60's or '70's was yellow,
of course, but why? And why are the Simpsons yellow?
You notice how the non-white characters on that
programme are a yellow-brown? Everybody's some shade
of yellow.

Speaking of cartoons, there's a children's show called
"Doug" in which people have arbitrary skin colours.
Doug appears to be Caucasian, as do most or all of the
characters on the show, but some are purple or blue or
yellow or green or something other than the sort of light
orange ("white") that Doug happens to be.

I remember in first grade thinking that black people had
it better with colouring, because the Crayola 8 crayons
had brown, but you had to be clever or inaccurate to
colour white people. You could leave them uncoloured,
or you could make them orange, like I usually did, or you
could be one of those kids with the bigger pack of crayons,
or you could try colouring really lightly with the orange
crayon.

I wonder if anyone else thought about this in their early
years. I also seem to recall that the crayon used to
colour white people in the bigger boxes of crayons was
called "flesh" (which is discriminatory or disgusting,
depending on how you define the word), but the only
colours they have now are I think "peach" and "apricot".
Except my mother, an elementary schoolteacher, told
me about some "multicultural" crayons they have in
her classroom (how PC can you get?), which is a box
of colours of skintones of different peoples. I don't know
if they named them after the races or nationalities, or if
they just took the most likely colours out of the big box
and packaged them together.

Also, why "white" and "black"? Black people are actually
brown. Some are very dark brown, but really still brown,
not black. I think in Hawaiian, the word "haole" (I think I
spelled it right), referring to whites, actually means "pink".

As for the different skin tones of aliens, if you've ever seen
"Star Trek: Voyager", they have a black Vulcan. And the
Klingons seem to come in more than one race on the
newer "Star Trek" shows. As for DNA not including blacks,
maybe he lives in a mostly white neighbourhood. When
you don't encounter people of different races on a daily basis,
such things probably don't tend to occur to you. What often
bothers me about aliens is not that they are all one skintone,
but that all the people on a planet with presumably a landmass
and population comparable to Earth only seem to have one
culture. Maybe they don't come in colours, but surely they
should come in varieties?

Okay, don't forget we're actually talking about smileys.
Maybe we should have some Klingon or Vogon smileys.
Or something. What do you think?
(There should be a deep-thinking smiley, like the "erm"
smiley, but who isn't quite so confused or embarrassed.
He could be called the "hmm" smiley, as indicated above.)

Some of us in The Church of the True Brownie (http://www.h2g2.com/A193754, for those of you who are interested) would like to see a brownie icon and a milk bottle icon.

Look at all of the sweet stuff we have as smileys and you'll come to realize that we need some milk to wash that down with...

And how about:
a cup of tea
more fruits (especially the lemon) and veggies
a glass of wine
a dunce cap
a book
and, just because I like them, octopi

a bear.

I would have to say that I would agree on the milk smiley. But as for others, I would like to see a mooning smiley (how would that work), and the following:
-kid
-phone
-prude
-not-so-prude
-nymphomaniac

okay, so I seem to be in that mode today.

....Also a proud smiley. He could look comically
full of himself.

Do smileys have gender? Should they? Earlier
we were discussing whether they should have
ethnic skintones, or race. On a girl smiley, do
we add a bow or hair? Should smileys have hair?
And is it sexist to presume that the girl smileys
have long hair, while the boy smileys have short
hair, or that the girl smileys have hair and the boy
smileys don't? Should smileys have moustaches?
(Can girl smileys have moustaches?)

Should smileys have age? Should there be baby
smileys, kid smileys, teenager smileys, middle-
aged smileys, and elderly smileys? And if so,
what should we use to distinguish them? Perhaps
hair colour or style?

The smileys are small; should we add eye colour?
Or hair colour? Could you really tell from such a
small icon?

To change the subject just a bit, does anyone know
of a way that you can pull up the smiley list while
posting to a conversation, in case you can't remember
the name or the look of the smiley so it can be included
in your message? I tried to do this, but I lost the post
I was trying to do; I used the browser to go back to the
message, but the screen was missing. (It went back
to the conversation to which I wanted to answer.)

just open a new window and go to the smiley page. That should do the trick.

You know, I was thinking that subconsciously. I actually
am aware of my subconscious, probably more than other
people, but I guess I was ignoring it.

So we need a "well, duh!" ("obviously!") smiley, and an "I'm
ignoring you/that" smiley.

We also need smileys of timepieces, to suggest the passage
of time. The online-too-long smiley can't be the sole arbiter of
such a thing. Here are some suggestions:

a wind-up watch face

a grandfather clock

an hourglass

a blue police box (the usual camouflage of the Doctor's
time-travelling vehicle on "Doctor Who"), for everyone
who, having apparently been wasting time, wishes they
could go back...

Vehicle and transport smileys:

Volkswagen Beetle

Volkswagen bus, or hippie van, or both

pickup truck

bicycle

tricycle

child's red wagon

motorcycle

motor scooter

the other kind of scooter

skateboard

skates: roller skates, inline skates, ice skates

aeroplane (or do we have one already? I know
there's a rocket....)

hang glider

surfboard

sailboat

motorboat

old-fashioned sailing ship

steamship

horse and buggy

ride-on lawn mower (I've heard stories
of people using these as transportation
rather than just for cutting grass!)

golf cart (often used for non-golf
purposes, like parking lot transport,
travelling across a large estate, or
carrying luggage in an aeroport)

tank

I think the lawn mower and golf cart are cute, in the
way a really cheap, boxy automobile is; there's
something endearing, and yet at the same time
annoying, about all of these.

One smiley that is an absolute essential is the middle-finger smiley. Because sometimes, there just isn't a better way to tell someone how much you appreciate them then to show them that they're number one.

You're number one with me, Colonel.

One with his hands over his eyes. Interpretations are many.

"Please, please, please, make a seahorse Smiley for Seven of Nine's Xmas present. Please, please, please!"

-BTW I have adopted this one-

How about a peace smiley, for those occasions when you've got completely ed up with someone in a forum and then later want to restore diplomatic relations with them? It could be a smiley holding an olive branch, or even a cute little white dove.

I would like a teapot smiley so I could invite everyone over to my space for a cuppa. Maybe some chocolate eclair smilies and devonshire tea (scones & jam with cream) smiley.

Anyway I'm only a new fishy and I havn't mastered the use of smileys yet!

Did I mention a UFO smiley? A flying saucer would
be a good idea. If we already have one (this page
takes a long time to load, so it's easier to just suggest
things on the forum and risk being redundant than to
look them up), then we need another flying saucer
for very high tea.

Please, please, PLEASE! I know it's already been requested, but can we have a biker smilie? Also, I would love a hopeful puppy-type smilie, which would help change the minds of the most cynical person (see, I could have used it twice already!)
Please?

PS. Yes, this person IS schitzophrenic (it's probably spelt wrong. I'm sorry)

I also thought a cup of tea would be a particularly important addition to the smileys.