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

The Council was convened yesterday evening, to discuss arrangements for the forthcoming revolution. Unfortunately the debate became somewhat bogged down over the vexed issue of putting bags over the heads of executed prisoners.

Decko considered the provision of a bag to be a compassionate gesture, intended to relieve the distress of the victim by preventing them from watching the generally stressful proceedings.

Ziv thought that the bag was essential for hygiene, since without it blood and cranial tissue would be liberally sprayed over a wide area.

Dave attempted to lighten the mood, pointing out that a sustainable policy of mass-slaying would require the bags to be re-usable. This opinion was not well received, and he was obliged to get the drinks in.

Mickey didn't say much on this occasion, being apparently preoccupied with making a list of suitable candidates for head-bagging.

Before adjourning, the Council engaged in a short debate to establish who would sh*g Sarah Palin. Ziv and Mickey wouldn't, while Decko claims to have done so already. Dave still quite fancies Obama.

The Council was advised, by Denise the Barmaid, that Decko would arrive late. Ziv speculated that a helicopter had whisked him off to advise the World Bank.

Mickey expressed the opinion that everyone employed in financial services should immediately be transferred to ghettos, while those they had wronged consider appropriate further action.

Ziv observed that the last German Chancellor to nationalise the banks had successfully employed this tactic to admonish those with a genetic predisposition to usury, and that Angela Merkel is the Mother of a Bag of Spanners, putting him in mind of a partially-decomposed Les Dawson.

Dave thought that the interest rate cut would help Small and Medium Enterprises, and was obliged to get the drinks in. At this point Decko arrived, and suggested that Dave might like to tell the Council how we came to be dumped by his milkman.

The motion to reinstate the practice of gouging the paintwork of Porsches and BMW convertibles was passed unanimously.

The Council received a report on revolutionary activities among cadres nationwide.

Apparently there isn't a lot, Decko declared. He had attempted to contact a legendary citizen in South London, only to find that he'd copped out and become a dentist.

Ziv was able to reassure the Council that at least the comrade in question had married a nice Jewish girl. In spite of this, Mickey has added him to the Bag List.

Mickey further proposed that as soon as the Council seizes power, steps should be taken to nuke Iceland. Dave considered this opinion a little extreme. Ziv noted the irony of the last remaining capital investment in the world being down to a bunch of capitalist running dogs in the People's Republic of China.

Phred makes a motion that a bag be purchased and exclusively reserved for Henry M. Paulson, Jr., Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

Mr. Paulson had a big hsnd in inventing the toxic sludge now called collateralized debt obligations while he was CEO of Goldman Sachs... Don't even ask about credit default swaps.

Paulson proceeded to make a personal fortune of a billion dollars by selling these securities short. Any moron could see the danger of adjustible rate mortgages four years ago. Not all morons have the opportunities to make a billion on the obvious.

Paulson now serves the US Taxpayers and the rest of the developed and emerging world economies as a fox in the henhouse...

On further reflection, Phred is not sure Paulson deserves the mercy of a bag. Besides...he is bald...

The Council received and reviewed the Bag List, now including the US Treasury Secretary. Every American politician Mickey can name had also been added. These number five, two of whom are already dead.

It was agreed that only named living individuals should be accepted. Hence the "House of Representatives" and "France" have been exonerated, and the Icelandic Prime Minister is all right for the time being since no-one believes that he's called Keir Hardie. It was further agreed that if any Council member other than Dave objected to any bag-listing, then the name would be removed. Ziv rescued Boris Johnson and Decko acquitted Davina McCall.

Fifteen further names were added by unanimous agreement, while Dave was getting the drinks in. The Bag List now stands at 91. This total does not include eleven people who either dumped Mickey or who gave him a hard time at school.

Discussion then passed to the global economic crisis. It was generally felt that recapitalisation of failing banks is not a sufficient measure. The Council favours the further cutting of interest rates, but there was no consensus on the plan to eliminate unemployment using a slave auction on eBay.

Decko advised the Council that the referee's parents were only fleetingly acquainted. He had his doubts, indeed, as to whether they belonged to compatible species, and to which maternal orifice Master Dean had actually emanated from. There are apparently well-authenticated cases of supposedly-human football officials turning out to be pieces of faecal matter.

Mickey considered the day's events to have been quite amusing on the whole, and observed that smart teams make sure that their players get sent off only after they've been substituted. Ziv speculated that the red-carded individual thus alluded to might be the only individual capable of challenging Mickey for the title of Most Despicable Resident of the City.

It was unanimously agreed that Paddy Kenny is a slaphead in more senses than the closeness of his haircut, and that close ups of Chris Morgan shouldn't be allowed before the watershed. Bragging rights were not transferred, on account of the fact that Mickey is not a fit person to deploy them appropriately. Decko observed that United are technically still in the Premiership, adding that Carlos Tevez is even uglier than Morgs, and that you can't polish a Mike Dean.

The Council debated the ephemeral nature of celebrity, and unanimously concluded that Jonathan Woss would soon be on ITV. Though opinion about the sewiousness of the incident varied, it was genewally agweed that it had at the very least involved a little wancour.

Whereupon a loud snigger was heard from the cuboard where the Community Hall cleaning things and the tea urn were presumed to be kept.

The Council considered forthright representations from Dave. Concern was expressed, on account of the fact that he’s never before had a discernable opinion about anything.

Dave demanded that everybody who subscribes to the Daily Mail should be added to the Bag List. This is now official Council policy, since Mickey immediately supported it and Ziv rather pensively abstained. Among the consequences of this radical policy is that Decko is forthwith a pending widower.

Dave’s ire seems to be linked to the Woss-Grant affair. Apparently there were only two complaints before Dacre et al ran the story. The Council suspects a romantic entanglement with the now-unemployed Four Poofs and a Piano. The Council considers it at least plausible that Dave got off with one of them in the distant past, most likely the Piano.

Ziv’s take on the affair is typically abstruse. Apparently Russell Grant is a tortured genius whose mental well-being hangs by a thread, and the BBC is thus in the process of a Gilligan-Kelly reprise which will probably end with members of the cast revolving among the trees.

Decko’s views are unclear, being distraught to the point of incoherence about his impending bereavement.

Mickey thinks that everyone concerned must die, starting with that gross-overpaid long-haired ponce. This is slightly ironic, given that Mickey last paid his licence fee in 1994.

The Council observed that the last posting was definitely old news, reflecting the fact that Dave had forgotten to post it.

This week's news is of course American. Decko noted that the outcome was inevitable, either that or the other guy winning. Ziv thought that the important thing now was to move on quickly, and hoped that half-full bags of pretzels are being strategically placed around the White House.

Denise the Barmaid was impressed that someone had finally asked who these people are. Well, not all that impressed, but she nonetheless offered the following:

Decko is a large gentleman with a disturbingly red face and a permanent air of impending cardiac arrest. He apparently spent several years in the army, but gets aggressive when questioned about it, or indeed about anything else. More recently, he has worked as a doorman at Josie’s, and a string of similar establishments. Their common attribute seems to be that the average age of the clientele is over 60.
Decko lives with his wife, Kath, a nurse who last spoke to him in 1994. They have no kids, possibly for the same reason.
Decko’s political views are unique and very loudly held. He claims to be a Liberal Democrat, though one with unusual right wing tendencies. He favours proportional representation and the forced repatriation of anyone born outside a ten mile radius, or who looks as if they might have been.
Decko is nominally C of E, and a Unitedite.


Ziv is the intellectual of the group, unreasonably good-looking, youthful and Jewish. He graduated in Law somewhere in the USA and deeply resents being here instead. He is the legal representative of several firms in the creative industries quarter, and appears to make his living by suing his employers in rotation for plagiarising each other’s console games. He drives a DB9 and is married to Eleanor. They have twin baby daughters. None of the members of this family has ever been observed to smile.
Ziv counts himself a Conservative, though he rails against what he sees as the populist overtures of the party. He has an explanation, incomprehensibly technical though always convincingly articulated, for everything. Many people find his emotional detachment disturbing. Ziv cannot understand how he can possibly disturb people when he ignores the majority of them so completely.
Ziv is a Liberal by denomination. Though scrupulously fit, he doesn’t like football.


Dave is tall, thin and awkward, and possibly the worst dresser the world has ever seen. He is single and works in the city council’s housing department. He has never so far been able to elaborate on this preliminary description of his vocation, since he is very good at being shouted down, usually to taunts of “Bo-ring!”. Dave might possibly be gay, but is such a spectacular failure in relationships of all kinds that we are unlikely to find out.
Dave declares himself to be a socialist, and would dearly love to be militant, except that he’s too soft. As an alternative to getting angry, he goes into a kind of petrified apoplexy and sweats a lot. His cars are stolen every six weeks or so, shortly after he’s spent all his money getting them through their MOT. Dave is the most even-handed and tolerant member of the group, with the result that he buys most of the drinks.
Dave is an agnostic (not an atheist, since that would be too assertive). He has a degree in something-or-other from a University (not a Poly). He also has a Chesterfield season ticket, the loser.


Mickey is short, furtive and quite obviously a psychopath. He has difficulty keeping jobs, possibly because of an unfortunate habit of threatening his employer. Nothing is known about his early life or education. His car is an abnormally-proportioned Ford Sierra, as though someone who wanted a stretch limo lost their nerve. His partner is called Janine, and she looks like she should still be at school, only Mickey is not the kind of guy you ask about such things.
Mickey is not interested in politics or religion, since their practitioners all seem to be opposed to crime. He talks less and listens more than the others, and possesses an uncanny ability to become invisible when glasses are less than a quarter-full. His clothes are sharp, his jewellery is expensive and his hairstyle changes every week. Where the money for this comes from, you don’t want to know.
Mickey is a Wednesdayite, quite possibly the only allegiance he has to anything.


Denise is a barmaid. She tries hard to be stereotypical, with a permanent white T-shirt hugging a full bosom and blonde hair with the roots grown out. She hails from Barnsley, has the accent to prove it, and hates customers.
This hatred has subtle and diverse forms. For example, she merely loathes Ziv, but actively despises Mickey. Decko she considers to be beneath contempt. She doesn’t appear to believe that Dave exists.
As far as is known, Denise is single and heterosexual. Dave has been known to claim that she is lonely, and has also been known to have been punched in the face shortly afterwards.
Denise has forthright opinions about many things, and can express them in a surprising small number of words, usually hissed. Her politics and religion are inscrutable. So is her age, somewhere between a haggard twenty and a fit thirty-five.

The Council discussed a novel proposition offered by Decko. The Council henceforth supports a modern form of tranportation, whereby juvenile criminals will be shipped to Africa and compelled to work on infrastructure projects for impoverished communities.

Ziv suggests that this should be known as Involuntary Service Overseas.

The Council debated the reported recent dearth of sperm donors.

Mickey observed that the medical authorities had brought this on themselves, and that the rationing of health service resources had reached catastrophic proportions if donors were now indeed required to bring their own magazines.

Ziv felt that magazines were undesirable anyway, on hygiene grounds. Surely videos would be more appropriate for the purpose? A discussion of suitable titles then ensued, and Dave found this so disturbing that he actually volunteered to get the drinks in. Unfortunately he failed to take the opportunity of getting Denise's opinion on this vital matter.

Decko declared that the root cause of the problem was undoubtedly his own less frequent sperm-liberating activity, which must undoubtedly have had an impact of the net fertility of the planet. He apparently exudes a potent cloud wherever he goes, and its extreme pervasiveness probably accounts for millions of unexplained pregnancies a year.

The Council resolved that the word 'fecundity' does not exist. Ziv used it in the course of a disparaging retort to Decko's announcement, but neither Decko nor Mickey believed it to be part of the English language. Ziv then refused to vote, claiming insult through the imprecation that it was probably part of some Palestinian goatherding dialect. Dave also refused to vote: although he might possibly remember hearing it, he was sure everybody was pulling his wire, an unfortunate choice of phrase in the context.

The Council listened with concern to a passionate and indeed slightly hysterical representation from Mickey, claiming among other things that Dave was suspended by the city's social services department in 1994 and has been retained on full pay ever since. This is because the said department are trying to cover up the fact that a high proportion of the population of South Yorkshire incestuously impregnate their own offspring to provide food for the table.

Dave attempted to inform the assembled company that he works in the housing department and has nothing to do with social services, but was drowned out by the sound of a bunch regulars aiming to lynch Mickey. Mickey eluded their clutches, while continuing to describe the scandal, in a series of loud exchanges as he ran round the bar. Just before running out of the door pursued by a mob, Mickey was heard to shout that Jamie Oliver had uncovered baby-farming practices in Rotherham, leading to his murder and replacement by a robot.

Ziv thereupon informed the Council of Mickey's opinion that robots are rife in modern Britain. Apparently that Eoghan Quigg on the X-Factor is also a robot, and everybody who votes for him is having their details captured and being added to a HM Government bag list of who to cull if things really get tough. The real Eoghan Quigg, according to Mickey, was a 19th Century New York rent boy much fancied by Herman Melville, which is why all the characters in Moby Dick are anagrams of his name.

Dave produced his parking permit, claiming it as proof that he was still going to work. He further observed that, if he was a social worker, he was hardly likely to have written to the BBC complaining about Little Dorrit being cancelled.

Decko pronounced him just as mad as Mickey.

The Council inadvertently debated Gaza, after one of the locals poked Ziv in the chest and demanded to know where he stood on the Israeli bombardment. Anyone who actually knows Ziv would realise that the only way to invoke Chosen Race sympathies is to poke him in the chest.

Ziv became even madder after a demonstration the rest of the Council are more pro-Israel than he is. Or, more correctly, Decko is anti-terrorist, in a Daily Mail kind of way. If anyone tells Decko that the other lot are terrorists, that's good enough for him. Mickey just thinks that all-out war somewhere on the planet keeps humanity on its toes. Dave belongs to the impotent despair school. Although he can't do anything personally, he assures everyone that he's very sad about it.

Ziv informed the Council that they're individual intellects are less prominent than their mastubatory tendencies, and declared that he was going into hibernation till 20th January.

The guy with the dodgy accent who drives the Camaro wasn't in today. Possibly just as well, because he might have gone out to discover a full set of flat tyres.

The Council is slightly surprised to announce that it has sent a representative to observe Obama's inauguration.

Contrary to Mickey's assertion, the point is not to make sure that Bush can't refuse to leave. Nor is it to celebrate Africa's finest hour, as Dave would have it. The ruin of Gaza was a final straw for Ziv. He has gone to restore his hope for humanity, and perhaps also his faith.

Which makes it a little unfortunate that Decko told him he'd "obviously had an epiphany".

Dave's complaints about his "cello scrotum" suffered a setback today as members of the House of Lords admitted that the syndrome was something they made up s a joke in 1974.

Since 1974, the syndrome has been incorporated into many mainstream medical journals, although some Doctors have questioned how the cello could actually come into contact with the scrotum and result in a repetitive motion injury like Carpal Tunnel-

The Council invited Dave to make a statement on this important subject. After ten minutes of debate, it was decided that further discussion would be fruitless on account of the sufferer's acute coherence deficit.

Ziv delivered a short speech on the essential dysfunctionality of all middle-aged men, as a result of their inability to choose decisively between hypochondria and the pretence of youthful vigour.

Mickey is for some disconcerting reason preoccupied with the classification of all medical conditions according to whether or not they affect the edibility of the sufferer. With thoroughly distasteful glee, he advised Dave to contract something nastier than cello scrotum, since that particular condition would do nothing to remediate his foodstuff status.

Denise the barmaid then closed the discussion entirely with the announcement that no more beer would be available until lewd remarks about cellos desisted.

Ziv attempted to persuade the Council of the impending obsolescence of literacy. Supposedly civilised societies are apparently prone to over-valuing literacy compared with numeracy. This is claimed to be because many of our supposed betters in positions of high socio-political status are functionally innumerate.

Reading and writing has been a broadly good idea for a couple of thousand years, because of the universal success of a communication mechanism involving one chap making marks on a flat plane and another chap decoding them. Nothing better had been invented in the meantime, but it can now be confidently asserted that global telecommunications and computing power will yield a better system within a decade.

Although reading and writing will probably continue to be taught for a further two or three generations, owing to the essential conservatism of society, it will soon become apparent that teaching children to read actually distracts from there assimilation of the true universal language of civilisation, namely mathematics. Literacy will then become obsolete.

Ziv then obtained the slightly reluctant permission of the Council to write to Mr Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail to inform him that within the lifetime of some of his readers, his august journal would be universally considered to be the vestigial information medium of the world's few remaining primitive societies.

Mickey has classified innumerate people as a further potential dietary supplement. Unlike Ziv, who envisages that the post-literal communication technology will require no medical intervention, Mickey is in favour of microchip implantation into everyone's heads at birth, making it far easier to switch people off when society no longer has a use for them.

The Council noted an unexpected consequence of their assault on literacy. Mickey has written something. His manifesto has not so far been adopted as official Council policy, thoough it has provoked debate.

It is here reproduced in its somewhat hysterical entirety. (NB – Dave insisted on running it through a spellchecker, thereby removing what little charm it originally possessed).

Long live literacy! The answer to society’s problems is to be found in the written word. There are some pretty good clues in Swift and the Bard. Hence the following Modest Mercy Quality Straining Proposal:

Hunting with dogs will be reinstated. The quarry will be banking executives in receipt of a salary in excess of £100,000 per annum.

No more than one banker's carcass may be butchered per family per calendar month. Butchering of bankers who are still alive is not permitted and persistent violations may lead to a fine. Recipes can be downloaded from the DEFRA website. Vegetarians may download QBS (Quorn Banker Substitute) tokens, or may donate personal meat quotas to selected charities in return for bread. Kosher and Halal banker meat will soon be available as a substitute for fresh kill by special arrangement.

Financial services sector employees found at large outside the ghetto must be delivered alive to the civic authorities. Reasonable force may be used in their apprehension. Excessive force will result in loss of meat allocation privileges.

The fat content of banker meat cannot be guaranteed. Bankers should always be consumed as part of a balanced diet. Always wash your hands after contact with raw banker.

In recent times there has has been a dramatic fall in interest of banker products.