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

travelling light.

Rendezvous point 10.30am tomorrow and after that ... a four day blank sheet.

*waves* See you when you get back.

H

*waves back*

I didn't think it would be quite so unsettling not knowing where. Weird but good weird.

Quitter.

Teaser - how long are you going to keep us all suspended?!

Well I'm back. And disorientated, having been misled to believe that this trip involved some N. English or Scottish hill and bog. And tired out. After all, it is past midnight in Venetian time .

Waz, who will catch up when she's got a grip on reality again.

Not too tight a grip, mind.
(Reality chokes easily)

Forever.

Hush Pin! I'm having difficulty getting any grip on reality at all. And there's garage bills to pay.

Forever in suspension?

Waz (disappearing inside a Piazza San Marco snow dome)

Forever and ever.

Nothing is forever. Not even the sun and the stars. Well, stupidity is forever. Ok. At least one thing is forever. Stupidity creates this timeless, dark, self-perpetuating aura that just engulfs things and smothers the joy and light out of the universe.

Sort of like the time Uncle Harvey got bitten by a brown recluse spider on his nether regions whilst using the two-holer out behind his house because he was too cheap to pay a plumber to unstop Aunt Hattie's drains and was waiting for Cousin Floyd to get off work so he could get the job done for free.

Uncle Harvey was a modest man and was loathe to show his boney butt to anyone but Aunt Hattie, who was upset with him over the drain and was secretly delighted that the spider, not realizing it was a poisonous one, bit him. So, she daubed it with iodine, hoping it would sting, and put a Curad on it and told him to stop whining.

Floyd managed to get the plumbing in good working order and everything seemed ok. Except Uncle Harvey kept sitting more and more sideways and then finally stopped sitting altogether. He was running a high fever and Aunt Hattie tried to get him to go see the doctor, but he wouldn't go. If old Doc Gregory had still been alive, he might have agreed, but Dr. Kiefer had taken over...Dr. Carolyn Kiefer...and Uncle Harvey wasn't about to show his butt to her.

He finally did agree to show it to Aunt Hattie again, and then she called in Floyd who told me that he had a hole in his butt the size of a golf ball. Floyd and Aunt Hattie made a bed of sorts for him in the back of the old DeSoto so he could lay on his side and drove him to Poplar Bluff to the clinic where they had a male doctor.

They put him on some kind of anti-venom medication and cut away some more of his butt to get all of the infected tissue out and packed the hole with something sort of turpentiney-smelling. It took him nearly two months to heal up enough so he was comfortable sitting down.

And what was it all about? Stupidity. Pure and simple. Stupidity and greed. He had plenty of money to pay a plumber. So he's spent the rest of his life being called Butthole. Which serves him right as far as I'm concerned.

Waz, don't do it! Don't go inside the Dome with Jodan. I'm not sure I can cope with two friends in Domes.

H

H! What a story, please tell me it's true!

Jodan's in the Dome too?

Waz, hesitating on the edge.

Of course it's not true. A hillbilly wouldn't know a gold ball from an onion.

Jodan lives in Oakwood, which is affectionally nicknamed by Oakwoodianites 'The Dome'. It's rarely called that by outsiders of course, except H

Gold ball

I said golf ball, Domite. Golf ball. And Hillbillies do so play golf. We're not very good at it, though. Especially on the holes where the little flat part with the hole thingie is at the top of a hill.

Waz.....most of it is true. The names were changed to protect the guilty. The actual bite did indeed occur in a two-holer. And it was a brown recluse. And he did wind up with a hole in his butt. But he never owned a DeSoto. I made that part up. He always wanted a DeSoto and so I decided to give him one.

Jodan is just jealous because my family is more colorful than his.

H

I meant Golf ball.

My family has colorful golfing clothes in it's past

Golf clothes, especially old ones, are really stupid looking. Sissy clothes.

Now, Coon huntin' clothes are very masculine.

H

Not colorful though. Just brown and possible a bit of green, unless I'm mistaken.

If not for stupid looking golf clothes, great films like Caddyshack may have never lived up to their full potential!

Oh, look at us We're hijacking a thread... again.

Waz, put you hands in the air and turn around slowly. This is a hijack! Don't make any fast moves and you won't get hurt.

Sorry Waz. I'll go away now. *waves*

H

Bye Jack!