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

hi ptp, in my case in 1966 my sister eloped and my mother had her bad heart attack which caused me to be sent home from the army training.

if ide stayed in ive no idea where i would have been i doubt i would have joined h2 and now writing on here to you and others lol jim

Fate moves in mysterious directions, my friend

It was fate that brought me to this small'ish island in the southeastern corner of this arcane and foreign land, where nobody knew me and I knew even fewer (okay, maybe that is not possible, but it certainly felt that way).

After my internship (18 moons) I swore never to set my foot here again, but I've nevertheless lived and worked here again twice since then. 28.5 years all in all. And now I have no desire to leave whatsoever

(Except for holidays whenever I can afford them, of course. I need to see Greece again. And Portugal. And Spain, The Netherlands, Yorkshire - and a lot of other places and not necessarily in that order)

Pierce, are you saying that you eloped with your intended to the small island where you now live? If so, you must have thought the island offered you *something*, if only privacy because so few people knew it existed...

When I found out I needed an internship (18 months on a daily newspaper) there was only one left and that was here - almost at the other end of the country (which wasn't mine to begin with, I was born and grew up in Germany) so it really was foreign to me

It isn't always the places you expected to go that turn out to be the ones you end up appreciating. The town where I spent my career had an image as a tough place to be accepted in from the outside. Once they know you, though, you're one of them and form then on you feel welcomed. I looked back at the town's history and realized why this is so: the town had a much larger land area in the 17th century, but bits and pieces f it kept breaking off to form new towns. They must have felt rejected, so developed this hard protective shell.

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be ”

[Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul]

Exactly. afterall. Everyone has to be somewhere, and here, is always as good as any other place to be, often better os its said. I've been elsewhere before, whilst being here, and although fun at first, its often better to be where one is, rahter than somewhere else,; things tend to get confusing very quickly when the latter is the case, rather than the former.

George Burns used to say, "I'm glad to be here. At my age, I'm glad to be anywhere..."

There have been stories that Fields' grave marker reads "I'd rather be in Philadelphia"

















PS: In reality, the interment marker for Fields' ashes merely bears his stage name and the years of his birth and death

Fields? I can only think of a cricket player and a music hall singer.

W.C. Fields?

Yes, W C Fields. He gave a "temperance lecture" that began with the words "Down with rum." I presume that the rum stayed down.

He was a hard act to follow. I enjoyed him in "My little Chickadee," in which he shared the billing with Mae West and Margaret Hamilton. He was in a *very* strange movie called "Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch" in which he wooed Zasu Pitts.

Zasu Pitts was known as the Queen of the cutting-room floor, as she hammed it up so much that most of her takes had to be deleted.

Fields famously said that he wouldn't drink water because fish made love in it.

Fields famously said a lot of things

Like:

"It was a woman who drove me to drink, and I never had the courtesy to thank her for it"

"Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water"

"The clever eats and breathes down rat holes with baited breath"

He started as a juggler. In later life he juggled the truth in movies like "never Give a Sucker an Even Break."

Leading lady he was most strongly associated with, Mae West.

I'm not sure that's saying much. He played outsiders who got along with hardly anybody. In "It's a Gift," his screen wife was extremely disrespectful toward him.

Will Rogers appeared in at least one of his films as a supporting background extra.

The Ziegfeld Follies for 1916 had both Will Rogers and W C Fields in it; likewise 1924/5.

After 1935, of course, Will Rogers would no longer have been in anything due to his death. Fields died in 1946.