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

Hiya Boys & Cake Girl,

Not sure if you remember, but we were talking briefly about 3 Men in a Boat at the London meetup. I promised to send you a link for the Project Gutenberg, where there are a load of his texts online, including Passing Of The 3rd Floor Back.

http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/cat.cgi is the London mirror site.

Ooh, ooh! They've also got 3 Men on the Bummel! And Malvina of Brittany, excellent stuff!

Err...um.. now that I've littered your page with punctuation I shall go quietly...

H&K
Z

Thanks very much! I did remember - which is a miracle considering the effect beer usually has on my memory. I shall go to investigate immediatly!

No worries Hope you enjoy them as much as I do!

Glad you remembered, I think it was the rain washed it out of my head. It suddenly surfaced again yesterday

H&K
Z

Hi! Just thought that I'd let you both know that I've downloaded all the JKJ books that I can find onto my Palm-Vx.

I've started 3 men in a boat, but I'm gonna have to be careful where I read it... I was sitting in the park about an hour ago reading the chapter about the cheese... and I was laughing so much I had to put it away and come home!

I don't know how I managed to miss this stuff all my life. Do you ever get that feeling that sometime recently you have jumped through to a parallel universe where there's something that everyone else is aware of, and you've never encountered? I swear, everywhere I look now, JKJ keeps popping up.

(It's the chapter summaries that make me laugh most... "The advantages of cheese as a travelling companion"... LOL!)

Yay! A convert!

Excellent!

PalmPilot thingies are so good for reading books on! I know what you mean about 3men, Jim. Sat on training reading the 1st - got some funny looks LOL

H&K
Z

Now this felt weird this morning...

3 men in a boat, he's talking about how old stuff gets regarded as fine art, when in fact it's just the nik-naks of the time.

"Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd?"

Maybe it's just me, but I always get a weird feeling when an old book happens to mention the time in which I'm living. It's as if there's a copy of the author in my head and I'm telling him "look, we're here now, you can see for yourself what it's like".

A bit like when I read _Looking Backward_; it was written in the late 19th century, and involves someone travelling 100 years into the future. This modern guy takes him round the shops, and he buys stuff. The traveller says "I didn't see you hand over any money. How did you pay for it?" The modern guy says "Well, we don't need to use money any more. We use this card; it's called a credit card. The shop can take the money directly from your account."

Now when I first read that, I must admit it freaked me out a lot!

Know what you mean. Only thing I never discovered and has always bugged me is which were the cups with the gold flowers, species unknown, inside. (I'm paraphrasing because I'm too lazy to get up and look for the book.) I always wanted to see one because he was right about the Willow ware and the figurines so I feel like he SHOULD have been right about the cups too.

I've found amazing stuff like that, but only since I started reading 3men. Then I started reading old books and noticing stuff, but that bit about the credit card is way freaky!

I was reading Madame Bovary, and they mentioned sabots, a kind of wooden clog - from which we derive the word 'sabotage' - that was kinda odd.

H&K
Z

That bit about sabots was mentioned in one of the StarTrek films... #6 I think (The Undiscovered Country).

When I've finished 3MIAB, I think I'll move on to MB. I've got a lot of JKJ to catch up on!

I don't think I've watched that film - I tend to watch Voyager mostly; the bald fellah is not nearly so ready to pick up a weapon and kill people as is the woman with the hair!

Madame Bovary was written by some other geeza - um, let me check

*footsteps*

Gustave Flaubert it says.

3 Men on a Bummel is the sequel to 3MIAB - very funny, and with some startlingly prohetic things to say about the Germans!

H&K
Z

ST #6 was a Kirk film; I think it was the last of the 'old' series.

I hadn't realised that 3MOTB was a sequel to 3MIAB; I'll bump it up my to-do list a bit then.

The book I was going to move onto next was Malvina, not MB. I just had a moment's insanity (aka 'brain fart' ).

l8rs, jd

I've just not being paying attention to the ST films then, oops!

I'm reading Malvina on my palm thing - a very interesting read indeed! Have you read any of H. Rider Haggard, She and the sequels? Ripping good reads () also, but please! My kingdom for a paragraph - were paragraphs only invented this century, does anybody know?

H&K
Z

Never read HRH; obviously something else to download onto my very-full Palm!

I know what you mean about the paragraphs. I mean, a space would be nice once in a while, if only to break up the page a bit. And without paragraphs, I find that my eyes lose their place on the page and can't recover very quickly - nothing to guide them back to the right line. It makes for a very irritating read!

I've noticed one big advantage to reading on the Palm. With big books, if you're only 1% of the way through the book, even though you've been reading it for a week, you really feel the thickness of the rest ofthe book ahead of you. But with the Palm, although there is a number telling you how far through you are, it doesn't feel quite as imposing; you always feel like you've made some progress, even if you've only read a page or two. That's how I was able to get through Crime & Punishment on the Palm, after a couple of aborted attempts with paper.

And talking of difficult reads, have you ever read Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_? In many ways an interesting book, but My God! The SPEECHES! John Galt's speech goes from (quickly gets the book out to check) page 927 to 984!

I would not want one of these guys to come to my party!

HRH is one of those who never mastered paragraphs - like you say, very hard to the eyes! The book I'm reading now 1st published 1853 has excellent paragraphs, I don't know why some of these people never bothered.

Crime and Punishment on the Palm? That's quite an achievment, I salute you!

That's one heck of a speech there! defintatly not best man at the wedding very often!

I've just been re-reading bits of TMIAB - sincxe this IS H2G2, I must point out something a bit odd. I know DNA says it's just total co-incidence things like this, but if you go to the scene where they are just packing up and waiting for a cab to take Harris and J. to the train station, check out the address of the house they are leaving from!!

H&K
Z

Bugger, where did I put my copy!!! That's not fair!!!

Here, borrow my copy. ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext95/3boat10.txt

Yeah, very good! Hadn't noticed that.

Mind, all the way through, I kept getting these little flashes of DNA. Some of the humour is very Adams-ish. Bit like reading P.G. Wodehouse (though DNA blatantly acknowledges that as inspiration).

Well, I've got the entire Gutenberg library's stock of JKJ installed on my Palm. Gonna take quite a while to get through, methinks.

(Still can't stop laughing at the chapter summaries... "Advantages of Cheese as a travelling companion" "Disappearance of Harris and a Pie")

LOL!

Hello jim, zed, boy and cakes girl.

I find this on the page of jim.

I have book of Jerome K. Jerome. I have Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. I have a hard book. I have read it however english is hard.

Thank Q!

Hi Q!

So, what did you think of JKJ? Being a recent recruit to the fold, I must say I really enjoyed it. I've read quite a few now, but had to stop when I couldn't face another one! After a break, I'll go back to them again.

Have you tried Three Men in a Boat? You can get it off the net.

Hello!

I read three men in a boat. It is good. I like dog. He is funny!

Thank Q!