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

You can't keep milk, i've tried and tried. I even made it one of those little wheels to spin round and round on and a bed of hay but milk is a crafty thing. One day it turned sour on me. During the night it got it into it's little head to escape. It muscled up to the bars, wrenched them apart with all the strength it could muster and was off, quick as a ferret. The moral? you can't keep milk, it always goes off.

Hello destroyer of ham sandwiches.
Have you ever considered piping milk into bricks and then smashing the bricks to pieces with a hammer?
Ahhh, I thought you mightn't have.
Immanuel Kant once posited that as a solution to the milk problem, you know. It was in one of his lesser works, called:
"Hey, why not just put all this Categorical Imperative stuff to one side for a moment and just chat about milk!"
Aristotle thought that milk could not be kept because its proper station was somewhere else.
Wittgenstein thought that if we only examined the ordinary use of the word "milk" we would realise that it should just go in the fridge and stop moaning on about it."
Ans Sartre thought that the nothingness at the heart of milk meant that it was free, as a nightingale, or the mournful notes from a Parisiene Harpsichord, wafting through the Cafe du St Germain...
If you are going to study Philosophy, you need to know these things. I studied it at Essex Uni, and as you can see, I used my time wisely.

So basically you're saying milk can be kept eh. Ok then what about keeping time. What do you have to say on that matter?

It's funny you should mention that i haven't pumped milk into bricks - i haven't. It's like you know me or something - weird. Have you been looking through my rubbish? Have you ever spied on anyone before? I did once when i was young, me and my friend spied on this neighbour we didn't like, we were very thorough, and very bored i imagine. We spent many a summer evening lurking in bushes and climbing along walls. We put on dark hats and had little notebooks, i probably imagined myself as some sort of Harriet the spy.

Time is a good answer
But not right ...
If we couldn't keep time, then all the musicians would be out of work.
Still, I think you deserve a bag of mufflewhumps and maybe a cherrywhizzle or two. 8)
As for spying, well, I am a spy at the moment. James Pod, 007. On a pirate ship at A579684.
Perhaps this makes up for all the non-spying I have done in RL, or perhaps there is no reason for it and it is simply rather .

How about a present?
If you keep it, then it's not a present (Well, assuming that it's a present for someone else of course...)

Other than that, I'll go with a hug . Now those you really do have to share

How about this for something you can't keep--Off of h2g2!

(OK, so it's not a tangible thing, but isn't it so true?)

Hi Cabby
Well, gee, I'll keep the if you like!
And, on that point, think I'll keep ing aswell..

Amy , Very true, but isn't it great? . One of the best intangible things I've ever had the privilage of not keeping off!

Pod, is the picture of the groundhog a clue to
the riddle? If so, I would guess that the thing
that can't be kept is one's shadow. Every night
the sun goes down, and one's shadow gets lost
in the darkness that surrounds everything.
Sure, the darkness of one's own shadow is still
there, but it can't be distinguished from the
rest of the darkness, in a sense it has ceased
to exist.

Peter Pan found that he had lost his shadow,
and this upset him very much. Wendy kindly
sewed it back on for him. This was a fantasy,
though.

I've thought of something else that can't be kept (though someone may just say it's just another word for --I'll attempt to prove them wrong)--mufflewhumps! Think about it...Before you give one to someone, a mufflewhump is just a cloud of incohoate possibilities (looking something like a dustbunny ), and after it is given, it turns into whatever it is that the recipient most desires, and so is no longer, strictly speaking, a mufflewhump--it's whatever it turned into. So if you try to keep a mufflewhump without giving it away, it never becomes anything...It is only during the act of giving (and perhaps during the transformation) that a mufflewhump is truly a mufflewhump...

Ahh, the uncertain heisenberg principle of the mufflewhump.
I thought that someone would bring that up, sooner or later..
Well, even as a cloud of incohate possibilites a mufflewhump is still a mufflewhump. And before you give it, it is what you want it to be... I think that the answer is that a mufflewhump is an entity of peculiar nature, but you can still keep it...
Sorry..
But please, do have one

Paul !
I do apologise...
I meant to say that shadows are probably one of the few things that you can't actually get rid of...
So shadows, though interesting, are not the answer.
But you are right about the groundhog...
There is definitely a clue there...

*has visions of a mile long list of suggestions about groundhogs..*

Well, with links to the groundhog day film
'The present' could be the answer i spose

oh, but we've covered s before

I don't know what Pod had in mind, but my take on
it is that the present is always, well, present. In
"Alice through the loking-glass," the mantra
was "Jam yesterday, and Jam tomorrow, but never
jam today." Tomorrow never arrives with its jam,
because it turns into today, which is sadly jamless.

yes but the present is always running away into the past threfore by the time you've realised you are in the present it's up and gone and it's all just a distant memory, but i agree really not a very good answer all in all

Good answer 8)

But wrong

Ah well, have a ..

Well, I think my pound is safe ... I might even go and buy some

Is there an actual answer that you had in mind when you requested your Keepership, or has this contest been rigged the whole time? Or are all of us just being really dense, and when/if the answer is finally revealed, the sound of will resound throughout h2g2, startling small animals throughout the land, and causing Amy+'s wolves to howl? (BTW, Pod, she still has one female pup left...I'm sure if you asked, you could have her...)

Looking back through the posts, I reckon this groundhog thing is a red-herring..
I was at Essex Uni too and the closest thing I did to philosophy there was Logic and Scientific Method. (Bear with me, I'm going somewhere with this.. )

Now, part of L+SM was the predicate calculus, which can be used to prove or disprove logical statements through the use of various rules (they called them axioms, to make it sound like they weren't just making them up as they went along)
One of those was RAA (or Reductio Ad Absurdum (note the use of Latin to again make it sound all scientific )). Basically that stated that if from a logical impossibility (Say that A is both true and not true), you can prove anything. Now there it was used to establish that a premise was incorrect and so the opposite of that premise must be true, but we can take it either way.

Now, we have an object, A, which can never be kept, so kept(A) must always be false. We can also say that if someone can keep an object, then that object can be kept, keep(X,Y) => kept(Y).
So now we have B (sorry to call you B here, it seems so informal somehow!) who is keeping A. keep(B,A) which implies kept(A) is true, so, through RAA, we have the choice of either claiming that we're all right or that you've dropped it through a hole in your pocket when you weren't looking...

Alternatively, we could take the Zen approach to this kinda thing and just go for Mu.. and 'unask' the question.

Another thing you can't keep--all that ^ in your head

Its is worth pondering, though Amy

Cabby
Ah, I remember the old "Logic and Scientific Method"... 8)

You know, Cabby, you came that close, I am almost tempted to reveal the answer....

shouldn't discount the 'ol Groundhog so quickly... Notice, for example, how the little feller keeps switching direction... kind of like a RAA thing, doncha think?

Which is worth pondering, Pod? What I said, or what Cabby said? If Cabby, I agree...I was just saying that it's a little slippery...