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

Entry: Common Sense - A52770855
Author: dmitrigheorgheni - U1590784

Not much to say about this one, other than that I hope it has enough adjectives in it.

I have never been anyplace really exotic, because when I'm there, it's not exotic - it's got me in it.

To me, a really exotic place would be, say, one of those English villages with the really cool names, like 'Little Knothole' or something like that. I would be really fascinated to read a story about life in Little Knothole - what it's like, how it feels to slip a letter into a pillarbox, instead of a boring old blue mailbox...I wish somebody would write something exotic like that.

But nobody ever does. They always tell about ordinary things like volcanoes.

Blue? Post boxes are yellow

Nah, they're green. Even if they're old and have GR embossed on them, they're still green.

TRiG.

Off to read the entry now.

I'm not sure what I was expecting there, but it wasn't that. It's quietly beautiful, isn't it?

TRiG.

Thank you. What a kind thing to say.

Yes, story. I like the colours, and it's made my toesies warm again.

But the bit about glass "running" is an urban legend. Old glass is merely warped because the techniques for floating it weren't as advanced; very old glass (like you find in medieval churches) is thicker at the bottom because it was made from discs of molten glass spun out like a pizza base, or from blown cylinder shapes cut open and flattened. It looked wavy like that even when it was new.

Thus speaks the archi-. But your character might not know that

No, indeed. Because an historian told me that.

I thought it might not be true, but hey, this is fiction.

And note the title.

It was just a favourite lecture of our Building Materials prof. He repeated the "glass is not liquid" speech about four times per semester, so it's been well drilled into me.

This goes along with the historian's weekly 'people were NOT shorter then' speech.

It made him mad when people said that.

Amazing what spoilsports people are who are guardians of factoids.

Visitors just thought that because the beds were shorter, and the staircases unmanageable.

But I can fix the story with a couple of words - and still follow my theme. Watch...

Oh yes, we get the "people weren't shorter then" speech too, from the Architectural History guy, as pertaining to the height of doorways

And they hadn't invented ergonomics yet.

This is beautiful - I think the best description is painterly.

However, I found the end perplexing . There is nothing in the piece before this point to make us think the house is a time machine or a spaceship, so I take it you are saying something about the man's state of mind rather than an objective fact. Are you saying that he lives so much in his own head that he interprets the earthquake as evidence that the house is a spaceship?

I think he has a rich fantasy life, which is not to say that he's incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality. He merely doesn't bother.

It was raining, so Christopher Robin spent the day indoors, flying to American and back on his bed.

TRiG.

Thank you, TRiG. That was much better explained than I could have put it.

And he can fly the house to other times as well as other places. What a lovely state of mind! I really enjoyed that

There are a couple of things you might want to correct
Para 3 - there's an 'i' missing from 'mixture'
Last para - there's a missing 'l' and an extra 'e' in 'fell'

Also, thought you might like to read this - or at least the conclusion paragraph if you can't be bothered to read the whole thing: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glass/glass.html

Thank you. I'll get the typos out.

And thanks for the link. I love this sentence: 'All such phases or states of matter are idealisations of real material properties.'

That fits right in with what I was trying to say. (And thanks to Mala for starting us on this train of thought.)

It's only a model The whole phases of matter thing.

Any model detailed enough to describe a complex process entirely accurately is too detailed to be any use as a model

I really love the idea of the whole house being a time machine - even if it's only imagined.

Oh, and this must sound silly, but I want a table like that.