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

So you're going to go up to everyone in the street and foce them to wear a "need a hug" badge? And you think obeying a t-shirt is excessive behaviour?

This is so weird.

Well, not everyone in Perthshire will be wearing a badge that says "Cuddle me"

Can you get badges saying "Nice friendly girl wanted"?

Nah just all my friends, make it interesting

Can you get badges saying "warning: extreme literalist"? Then, if I meet anyone with a suggestive t-shirt, I'm covered, man.

That's what I call good thinking!

Oh, man ... it's been such a long time since I met a nice girl my age without a boyfriend. I mean, I keep meeting these great girls, pretty and nice and weird and all, and they have boyfriends. The new plan is to meet more nice girls with boyfriends and then wait. You never know. But it's still sad.

I want to go away from my awful job and write scripts ....

Poor Andrew, you should move up North, there are an extreme amount of single people here (I mean up North), I suspect all the people who visit the Swan Princess and the Quayside pub are all single. (See Newcastle for details), and to all the men here

I have breasts and you don't, so there!!!

There's no need to gloat.

Hmm ... may consider that moving north thing.

Waaaaaaay back in the merry 80s, I remember seeing a movie (typical young rebels trying to overcome the upper class snobs who thinks they're better than our heroes. Kind like Revenge of the Geeks.) where they're driving alon on a highway and one of the guys has a T-shirt that says "Wanna trade?" and he shows that to pretty women they pass, and one of the women has a T-shirt that says "Sure!" and they promptly remove their respective T-shirts and swap them, while the cars are still moving along on the freeway. And since it's an 80's flick, the woman didn't have a bra on under the T-shirt, to the delight of the guys in the car (and watching).

I like your idea, Xan. I wonder if it'll work. Probably won't, though. Would it mean that you'd take the hand print T-shirts literally as "Place hands here" invitations?

Ooops.. Sorry, it was Andrew who had the idea about the literal-badges..

Um, yes. Although those handprints are actually way too small for my hands, usually. I was more thinking about the "don't just look, touch" ones, though.

It's quite annoying in a way, since I suspect the girls with handprint t-shirts aren't so much expecting fondling, but it makes me think about it and that hurts my mind. Could I claim sexual harrassment? I doubt it somehow ....

Life is so full of conflicting messages. To be honest I've come to conclude that a lot of women are very messed up about their own bodies and those of other women. Eating disorders, the "does my bum look big" syndrome, the fact that every single woman's magazine has diet suggestions and really skinny models in it and the way women will be gratuitously rude about beautiful women -- especially when they get fat (admittedly this is mostly women who are also journalists) -- all bear my viewpoint out. By contrast, my own physical self-hatred is positively straightforward.

What I don't understand is why in guys magazines the women are normal sized...in womens magazines - which women get all thses silly ideas about their bodies - they're all stick insects...

I mean there's a messaging problem...I mean why tell us we're too fat when stick insects aren't actually what guys want.

(They don't do they?)

*starts having a girly insecurity about the size of her bum*

I certainly don't. Stick thin women always look slightly ill to me...

Fact is you don't want to reach for something and snap do you

I guess not...

Could get very messy!

Very very messy...and not very easy to fix.

Kind of... terminally messy!

(Trouble is, if we say we like other women's bodies you'll think we're )