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

"Your search did not match any documents" gets 5.

No I didn´t mean the Tinder Box. I meant one that is called something like "The Soldier and the Lighter".

I don't have any useless information to report at this moment.

I hope you will find this bit of information useless

Decidedly so Phreako. I have tried it out on a few friends today and they all agree with me as well. Indeed unlike most of the other posts I do not a see how I can wheedle it into a conversation in any satisfactory way.

I can therefore conclude with confidence that it meets or exceeds all known tests to determine information usefulness.

Please accept my congratulations on contributing something genuinely useless - have a bone on me.

Red Dog

Thank you Red Dog
Your congradulations are accepted

Once again
Today I have no useless information either

Take note! The average-person-swallows-8-spiders-per-year-at-night is indeed complete tosh. It was created as part of a list of stupid 'facts' by an American reporter, as an example of what people are prepared to believe.

Then the spider swallowing information is truly useless because it isn't even true

The facts made up by the reporter truly were stupid because they were not even true

The most useless information is false information
The most stupid facts are false facts.
They are even more stupid when the person telling people the facts knows that they are false and is telling people that they are true and not even just joking around

I hate people who make things up and try to make people believe them.

So that'll be most politicians, the majority of estate agents and a sizable number of second-hand car dealers on your hate list then. Seems reasonable.

Chicago had the first elevated train, skyscraper and atomic reaction. Chicago also has the only river in the world that flows backwards.

The reporter didn't make up the facts to deceive people, she used them to illustrate an account of how credible they are. So everyone reading the article would have known they weren't true.
A problem could arise by someone reading half this thread but not reaching the disclaimer. They would then go and spread the false information. Much more harm and annoyance is done by those who don't realise what they're saying is false or only half-remember a story.

Round goes the gossip.

The word gossip derives from the Middle English word godsib, contracted from God's sibling.

True information, maybe useful to someone, useless to someone else.
False information, maybe useful to someone, damaging to someone else.

Ooh, words!
'Sweetheart' was once 'sweetard' as in dullard. Originally, cherry was a plural- 'cherries' is back-formed from 'cerise', the French term. Likewise 'lazy' was not an adjective, but coined on the same pattern as 'easy' etc.

Today I feel as useless as Cooper-Clarke's sucked and spat out smarty. A dullard even. A consumate dolt.

A spider, with a leg span, too expansive to fit a drinking glass over, without giving the poor creature several permanent limps, has just found it's way to the top of my copy of the Collins Encyclopedia of Music, that rests against my pc. It's watching me as I type this very sentence. Staring at me eye to eye to eye to eye to eye to eye to eye to eye...O inspirational spider!!! A beer glass with a cd rom case flooring will be your crystal chariot, to the outside world, were the stars will light your eyes, like sorcerer's stones.

Spider and I sit watching the sky in a world without sound.

Eno's yunno.

djs

That is so spectralularly verose I am stunntled into connumptions.
Hasterthrong, please bescribe plackloads more so someone can gathdit them into sleevenotes for impeming conceptual album.
(That's hauntingly mad with words and I'm put off-thread by it and want to write my own. Hurry a great deal more so someone can gather and selectively make them into sleevenotes for something no one will ever buy.)
There's a place called Hellions Bumpstead. I live near both Sheepy Magna and Sheepy Parva- no less, not to mention Aston Flamville. There, they should create a new type of pancake.

I find myself stunntled that mere useless words could connumpt anywine as tightly bound as your good self.

Heeheehee!
Tightly bound certainly, but not straight-laced. (That is the origin of the word; as is its oppostite, a 'loose woman'.)

On average, a person produces about half a liter of fart gas per day, distributed over an average of about fourteen daily farts.

The word "fart" comes from the Old English word feortan, presumably of echoic origin, meaning that the word was chosen to sound like the object named.

In the same vein, 'feisty' originally meant 'farting dog'.

There are approximately ten million bricks in the Empire State Building.

The five most stolen items in a drugstore are batteries, cosmetics, film, sunglasses, and, get this, Preparation H. Apparently people are just too embarrassed to purchase the last item. And, just in case you are curious, one of Preparation H's main ingredient is shark liver oil.

In four separate instances between October 1987 and February 1988, small pink frogs rained down from the sky on to various parts of Great Britain. Scientists are still uncertain as to where these frogs originated, although some have traced them back to the Sahara desert.

The phrase "Often a bridesmaid but never a bride" actually comes from an advertisement for Listerine mouthwash. The text was written by Milton Feasley and first appeared in 1925. The advertisement was so successful that it ran for more than ten years.