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

I'm afraid I must concur with Mr. Dreadful. Such an episode never happened.

It was about a self-help group who met in a barn. I'm not sure the creature was an Absorbaloff, but it sort of ate the members of the group one by one and you could see their faces under its skin. It was done in an unusual format, as a video diary of one of the group. He had made friends with the Shirley Henderson character. The Doctor only turned up right at the end of the episode. He "dissolved" the weird creature and the people it had digested got free, except for Shirley Henderson who vanished through a crack in the pavement.


At the end of the video diary, the chappie showed his girlfriend, who was a face in a paving stone.

It wasn't a barn, it was a disused building in an industrial zone.

TC, if you look at the smileys I think you'll find that Messrs. Dreadful and X are being silly. As for the monster's name, it *was* an Absorbaloff. The monster was the winner of a competition on Blue Peter for viewers to create a new monster for Doctor Who. Absorbaloff is the name the kid gave to his creation.

Oh, and the 'chappie' was played by Marc Warren, more famous as Danny Blue in the first four series of Hustle.

I noticed the smileys - a couple of seconds too late. Oh to be able to travel in time....

Mel Brooks hand prints in front of (Grauman's) Chinese Theater in Hollywood have 11 fingers.
http://i.imgur.com/a3thCUz.jpg

http://imgur.com/g3UeNeL.jpg

Not as unusual a trait as one might think, Anne Boleyn was also reputed to have a sixth finger on her right hand, though this is disputed, with as little objective evidence on either side of the debate.

Mel's was prosthetic, however.

Could have fooled me.

It looked very real.

Why not put the finger on his right hand then? Count Rugen's extra finger was on his right hand, wasn't it? If that's the reference then Brooks put it on the wrong hand. Shame on him.

Disclaimer: To my knowledge, Mel Brooks had nothing to do with the making of The Princess Bride.

But shame on him anyway.

It darn well better look realistic or Brooks would never have heard the end of it from all the make up and special FX artists he surely knows.

Curious point.

I just realized that the alarm on my cell phone is the refrain from the hamster song.

There were verses too?

Yep...


"Dee-da-dee da dee da dee-dee,
Dah dee duh dee dee dee doo,
Dadedeepahdadee dee dooh doo,
Dap ah dee deepidee dee dee doo."


Repeat ad nauseum.

Yup, that's it.

Entirely too easy to roll over and go back to sleep again, but it was the most stirring things I could find in the alarm menus.

My father used a rooster's crow alarm to remind him to take his evening pills. It was effective and very annoying.

Thr last time I had a rooster alarm it was a real rooster.

These days, its a flock of morning doves that's been living in my front yard since times immemorial, audible only if one is already awake.

This was much more annoying than an actual rooster. It was like a rooster bred with one of those hamsters, very repetitive. It was really bad when my dad's phone would act up and ignore his finger swipes to shut off the alarm.


(Hooster? Ramster?)

The bird-like and mammal-like evolutionary lines apparently differentiated from an eight-fingered lobe-finned fish before they ever left the sea, five of the fingers, including a thumb, attached through a discrete set of carpels (hands) or tarsals (feet) to the radius and tibia, evolving into the mammal-like hands and feet, while the remaining sets of three toes articulated through a second set of carpels and tarsals to the ulna and fibula evolved into the bird-like hands and feet.

Hard to say what recombining the two lines would produce at this late date in evolutionay time, though I suppose it might be attempted by means of chromosome doubling, retaining the complete sets of chromosomes of both parent organisms, especially problematical since chromosomal gender determination is reversed with avians and mammals, XY for males with mammals, but females with avians, vice versa with XX configurations.