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

Hi
Fantastic name

Why, thank you. I can't claim authorship for it though - I blagged it from a book called 'Down With Skool' by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle. It's boy's school version of the St. Trinians books, and centres on Nigel Molesworth, aka The Curse of St. Custard's.

FYI, the name comes from bit where Nigel has a super whizzo idea to making canings less painful by stuffing hair down his trousers.....
"Once i try wizard wheeze to put a curl inside trousis then it will break the kane. Tiptoe shuffle shuffle zoom down on fotherington-thomas and shave his curly locks. While he blub I stuff the locks inside my trousis. Go to study. Kane descend whack gosh oo gosh oo gosh and hares fly out like H-bomb xplosion. Kane undamaged so it is not such a wizard wheeze after all but Headmaster gets a piece of his wife's mind (making mess after maids hav been in). So BOYS triumphant agane WIZZ."

Umm, so where do the purple pigs enter the equation? And how do you make that fish symbol?

Ah Britain. We really know how to make sense don't we.

Purple pigs is just the wierdest thing that I could think of at the time.

Is it just me or is H2G2 v e r y s l o w to navigate around?

The fish is made by typing this (without the gaps)


> < >

Dunc !8 ' )

Ah Britain. We really know how to make sense don't we.

Purple pigs is just the wierdest thing that I could think of at the time.

Is it just me or is H2G2 v e r y s l o w to navigate around?

The fish is made by typing this (without the gaps)


> < >

Dunc !8 ' )

I thought so too - they must have a very slow server, or a connection that doesn't have enough bandwidth to deal with the popularity of the site. It takes pages forever to load, and I'm on a cable connection! Maybe this is something that we should bring up with the powers that be.

I don't know about you, but I'm still finding my way around this place, and there's an awful ot of it! Have you tried doing any searches yet? They turn up a whole heap of stuff, and then they link to other pages, and then you have to look at the researcher's pages, and there are more links there...... phew! I just discovered blogs, and I was going to get me one, but it seems like I've already got one right here in the journal

Oh, and thanks for the tip about the fish. As a matter of fact, I discovered how to do it over the weekend on the page about GuideML, which is something I'm going to have to look into more. So where did the name 'Bronze Hedgehog' come from, if you don't mind me asking?

What is blogs?
I'm still fairly new to H2G2 and the internet and I so far have mainly used the forums. I'm still just blown away by the idea of an online community. It breaks down almost every concievable barrier to conversations between people.

The name Bronze Hedgehog comes from a few years ago when we used to play networked games over the school network and were all becoming Card freaks. We all had a nickname to put down on the scoresheet and one bloke started with 'Iron skunk'. Then somebody else had 'Steel Mole', and being a lover of hedgehogs (not literally-ouch) Bronze Hedgehog was the natural progression

Dunc !8 ' )

What is blogs?
I'm still fairly new to H2G2 and the internet and I so far have mainly used the forums. I'm still just blown away by the idea of an online community. It breaks down almost every concievable barrier to conversations between people.

The name Bronze Hedgehog comes from a few years ago when we used to play networked games over the school network and were all becoming Card freaks. We all had a nickname to put down on the scoresheet and one bloke started with 'Iron skunk'. Then somebody else had 'Steel Mole', and being a lover of hedgehogs (not literally-ouch) Bronze Hedgehog was the natural progression

Dunc !8 ' )

sorry, I keep posting messages twice by mistake

Yeah, it's a fine idea. I've only been here for a couple of weeks now, and the community thing is real nice. I started out on the internet a few years ago - I signed up for Yahoo mail at a cybercafe one day, and I've never looked back. Soon after that, I joined a Tom Waits discussion list, and that's pretty much the reason why I'm in Texas now, cos I 'met' my wife on the list and moved out here about a year ago. The discussion list is kind of like the forums, except that when you send a mail to the list, everyone on the list gets it, and after a while you get to 'know' all the people who post regularly. It's a community, just like H2G2, but H2G2 is like a step or two beyond, because we get our own page, we get the forums, we get the Guide entries, and the edited Guide entries.

Blog is short for weblog, and it's a fairly new thing on the net. It's like the journal, like keeping a diary, but this is a diary that can be read by anyone. A good blog has lots of links in it too. My friend Luke has one here http://www.captainfez.com if you want to see what one looks like. You have to click on 'It's here'.

That's a good story about the name. It's weird the way that things happen sometimes, the way that some things stick and others don't. I had a friend at school called Michael, but when we were reading a passage from a play during an English lesson one day, he came in a couple of lines too early, when other character called Penelope should have been speaking, and from then on, that was his nickname.

When you say cards, do you mean like, regular playing cards, or some kind of trading cards?

Jim

We used to play Magic Cards actually, maybe you've heard of them as they're supposed to be quite big over in the U.S. We stopped playing it when the company releasing them started to get greedy by releasing new cards faster than we could play them. The game was just getting too complex.

We played normal cards as well, mainly two games that seem to be played the world over: S**thead (known as 'Eric' in front of the teachers) and slam (spit?), the only simultaneous card Game I have ever seen apart from snap.

I talk too much.

Duncan !8 ' >

Are either of those two the same game we used to play at school called 'Fish', where everyone puts down a card in turn, and it has to be either the same number, or any card of the same suit , and different cards do different things to the game - a 2 means that the next person has to pick up 2 cards unless they have a 2 as well, in which case the player after them has to pick up 4, unless....then 6, then 8, a 3 means they have to pick up 3 or 6 or 9 or 12, a Jack reverses the order of players, a 7 means that the next person misses a turn, an ace allows you to nominate a new suit, etc., and the first person to get rid of all thir cards wins. If you play out of turn or get something wrong you have to pick up a card, and when you only have one card left, you have to say "last card", so that everyone else can plot against you to prevent you getting rid of it and winning the game. I can't remember if you deal out all the cards, or if you each get a set number, but I remember that if there are more than about 6 players, you really need two packs, which can make it interesting once people start laying down lots of 3s