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

A lot of what you say makes sense (to me and somebody else), but I wonder what percentage of the H2G2 readership actually has the Bart font and can see your page in its full, intended glory.

I've actually been making sense? To more than one person?? Oh dear.... I must be slipping. It's generally more my nature to make nonsense than sense. I'll have to be more diligent in my postings, won't I?

Tell me, tell me O mighty Mund, what mysterious entity is the Bart font? And what visions does it allow for that the Bartless masses overlook?

And what exactly is it that leads you to feel I'm a kindred spirit? That I torture pets with my musical *cough* talent? That I'm in search of an octave of rats? That I like to write little stories, when the cosmicpolitans are half full and my mind is half empty?

Do tell.

Sorry to be meaningful, but I am wearing the special silver anorak to try and make up for it. The Bart font is the typeface of the wording in the "H2G2 GOD" box on your page. It's a nice font, but people who don't have it on their systems won't get the same effect (I've just removed it, which meant rolling up those little silver sleeves, and the box looks much more boring). But then it's their fault for not seeking out reprobate fonts.

Kindredness of spirit is usually in the eye of the beholder. I suppose it was the thought of a new trinity - God the Mother, God the Lad and God the Spooky One - that prompted me to write. You could write a new bible. Maybe a nice short one.

As for rats, we have one at home, an elderly lady rat called Janice, the only survivor from the 18 we suddenly had when brother and brother turned out to be brother and sister. So long as you are contemplating reusable rats, you (and they) might feel at home playing dodgy music in the Pit (http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A599600). It's rather lonely in there at the moment.

We also have a rabbit, which seems to wear a wig from another dimension, and earned much love this afternoon when it chewed through the phone cable and cut us off from the internet. And we have a mail address for a recently deceased rabbit.

Will that do?

That will do.

I am a trinity here on h2g2, though not in exactly the way you pictured. And I did start writing the true history of the lad, about a year ago, I guess. I'm waiting for that thread to be reborn so I can continue the tale. *sigh* At the current rate, I guess that'll be somewhere around Christmas. Foolishly, I never saved the stories on my puter, so I have to wait and see what I've already written before I continue. I miss the lad. The Peetie god stories were a lot of fun to concoct.

I'll pop by the Pit tomorrow and see what I can add to the decor. I looked in there yesterday. A lovely place with a lot of potential. And one of h2g2's best kept secrets, too, eh? What exactly did you have in mind when you made it? It's a shame we can't use links like we could before the BBC. I was wanting to create music with other people from here, get each of them to record their track on some song, and mix it all together. That would have been cool, to have a band with members from all over the place make music together without ever meeting each other. I really miss being able to put pics and sound on my page. Maybe it'll happen again, one day.

It's time for me to get my fingers sticky and try something new. 8) I went to a big Oriental market here and picked up all sorts of mysterious foods which I'm not at all sure what to do with. But I'll open a can of longans and see what they're like. I love surprises!

From thirty seconds of research, I deduce that you must be in Thailand (longans are its biggest fruit export, apparently), but I may be wrong. There are lots of recipes for the closely related lychee, but none for longans (and I am not consulting Delia Smith's famous "How to recognise water").

Incidentally, one of the most wonderfully stupid bits of music equipment I've come across recently is on a BBC page (http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/playground/theremin1.shtml). It can make grown men laugh. Or was that laughing men groan?

Thank you for the theramin! I LOVE it! I've wanted one of those for some time, believe it or not. The guy who gave me my accordion showed me a movie he'd made of a band he's friends with, which includes theramin and accordion in their compositions. I wonder if I can find a marimba and dijeridoo (sp?) to download somewhere, too. If so, I can really start making some bizarre cat-terrorizing music. I'm going to have to take a little time on my next day off trying to figure out how to put links on my page, so I can put your theramin there, as well as link to some of the portraits I've made of MoGgie.

The longans were quite tasty, and very similar to lychees, but smaller and tougher in texture. I ate them right out of the can.... didn't seem to do me any bodily harm.... yet.

I'm in Fort Lauderdale, FL. South Florida is a very ethnically diverse area, and the Oriental Market is one of my favorite new discoveries. Not only is everything there outrageously cheap, especially compared to regular chain supermarkets, but there is a huge selection of mysterious foods and other items to be found there. Many of them are not labeled in English, so I buy by looking at the pictures on the label and ask the proprietors what the heck the things are and what to do with them. Fortunately, I have an experimental approach to cooking when I take the time to do it, and if it turns into a disaster (last major catastrophe was the buffalo and tofu gruel I concocted) there are a number of decent restaurants I can walk to.

I'm off to bed now, not in an especially creative mood tonight. This has been quite a day for me, to say the least. Work has taken some really surprising turns over the last 48 hours, and has left me kinda drained. I'll go see if I can contribute anything worthwhile to the Pit tomorrow when I'm back to abbynormal.

Saw traces of you in the Pit and elsewhere - you thought last week was abnormal!

It's too late for music now - if I play the drums, the rest of the family will play my head. To compensate (inadequately), I reach forward to the little pink clanger that someone has thoughtfully left by the PC. When you squeeze it, it whistles you a message. I hope it's not one of these dangerous, turncoat clangers...

Thinks... does she know what a clanger is?

ummmmm.... my omniscience seems to have some black holes, and clangers got sucked into one of them.

Needless to say, the events of the past week have left me in a less-than-playful mood. *sigh* I've been trying to figure out what I think is right, and am only maybe working towards an idea of what I think is best. Somehow, the two seem to be mutually exclusive, and I'm not used to that.

Clangers - the only knitted space creatures (as far as I know), denizens of a tiny world riddled with caves, consumers of soup distributed by a dragon, makers of tinkly music, speakers of swanee-whistle language. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/ilove/tv/clangers/trivia.shtml for a start. Maybe you had to be there and be the right age. How long have you been omnipresent?

Conflict between right and best - I'm with you there. It's what comes from not being absolutely certain about things.

I'll have been exersizing my omnipresence for 39 years in another couple of weeks, and somehow have never run across any sign of clangers before. They're cute lil critters, aren't they? I almost never watch tv, so it's not surprising that I hadn't heard of them. I don't know if they show them over here, and as I don't have cable or satellite I'm unlikely to find out. Actually, I broke the antenna as I was trying to figure out what the heck was going on last Tuesday.

If I find the time, I'll write a 50-word article on why a knitted physiology is the best thing in space since sliced bread. But I can never forget the clangers' plaintive whistles that the soup is too cold, or that one of their number has managed to jump off to an even smaller spheroid that might not be back in similar orbit for several years.

I'm another TV avoider, though I often cling to the radio for news and stimulation while using the internet to seek out data or flood the world with pointless opinion.

If I'm honest, I'll admit to 47 years, many of them part-wasted, but a newish lease of life, so maybe all is not yet lost in space.

Oh yes. One of the guys involved in the Clangers (Peter Firmin) also had a hand in Noggin the Nog (even weirder but ultimately very beautiful). Take a look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/ilove/tv/titles/noggin.shtml and listen to that voice.