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

*pauses to throw at Pinniped for not liking The Smiths*

I'm sorry about not liking the Smiths. If I remember right (and it was a very long time ago) it was more that I didn't like the people
who did like the Smiths. I couldn't see why it was cool to be morose. I certainly couldn't see why the cool, morose guys pulled and uncool, irrepressibly cheerful me didn't.
Now that I come to think of it, I guess this is the kind of thing that the Smiths sang about. How deeply ironic. I'll listen next time, honest...
P.

Well, irony's kinda ironic that way, but cheer up everyone, I've just had a look at the FRONT PAGE no less, and the Udderthorpe paper clip doo-dah gets a mention!

Sod the cheap white wine, this calls for !
(careful though, it's just some fairy liquid in a wine glass)

BTW, I found the latest instalment of the end of the pier revue really quite scary.

Hiya Knitbunny

greatly appreciated. Coleridge introduced us to the odd glass of cleaning fluid, so we're all well used to it.
Mr Men next for the Post, maybe? Dunno. I probably won't write much new stuff in the next few days. To be perfectly honest, the Weddell is feeling a bit unloved, what with all this midnight-oil burning...
The latest piece is also coming out disconcertingly straight. Almost an Edited Guide candidate - chilling thought.
EPR4 maybe was a bit scary, but above all it was pretentious, wasn't it? It was intended to be anyway.
The first cut at what turned out to be Udderthorpe was very different, and based on the joke that was later thrown away in EPR4 about the Microsoft paper-clip. Loser in UK makes paper-clips in a garage lock-up, clips are resolutely inert, he stays destitute. Loser in LA does same, only his clips are virtually alive, he gets rich. When I came to try it, the US end was unconvincing, and the Udderthorpe half grew into an industrial archaeology parody and became self-supporting. The remains of the US piece became EPR4, mixed with ideas about Pingu's demise which was originally planned to be at the hands of a Microsoft paper-clip. I don't know where GoldSpeech came from, but he's hard work and some of him seems a bit adolescent with hindsight. I'm not at all sure about the endings of either of the pieces either.
Oh dear, I seem to have turned into a boring writer talking affectedly about his "art". Never mind, all in a muse's day's work, I shouldn't wonder.
Anyway, what's all this Smith's fixation about? Unless your telling porkies, you're not old enough to remember the Smiths...
No, don't be offended. Not until I've had another swig of that washing-up liquid, anyway...
Lion

Okay, okay, when Morrissey made his Top of the Pops debut I was too busy grooving to the hot sounds of my Mister Men LP to pay much attention (Arthur Lowe sings! Well, speaks in time to music, anyway) but is it not more pretentious to champion an era you can't even remember as the height of musical creativity and then go on to claim that all modern bands are rubbish, boring and hopelessly derivative? I think so.

Talking of Mister Men I think your story would go down a storm in the Post. The Udderthorpe one seems to have caught quite a few people's imagination as well.

EPR4 was nicely pretentious but I still can't believe Pingu's gone! I Loved the idea of him as some sort of hard-bitten noir anti-hero.

Goldspeech is hard work? Do you mean writing him or reading him?
Reminds of the story of the girl who is supposed to have been convinced that Bob Dylan sang about how 'The ants are my friend'.

Talking of Bob Dylan, have you seen that new moustache of his? Vincent Price, anyone?

I'm 24 (nearly 25 - eek!) and don't really remember the Smiths either, got to like them later. I remember a whole lot of stuff from that period, but The Smiths never registered. First I remember of Morrissey was that "November Spawned a Monster" song with the fantastically jolly lyric "Ooooooooaaaahhh, twisted child, so ugly, so ugly/Ooooooooaaaaaaaaaahhh twisted child, oh hug me, oh hug me"

Anyone want a cheesy pineapple?

Zagreb

I bumped into the guy who particularly liked the Smiths (back around '85 - prehistoric to youz guys) the other week. He's got fat and he got ditched years ago - hah!
No...this is not revealing me in my best light. Rewind...
As you've probably guessed, I would have to admit that I've got a few more miles on the clock than you lot. Suffice to say that my favourite band remains Led Zeppelin (which Zagreb will presumably find significant).
Hey, Knitbunny, I'm really sorry about killing off Pingu. He can be reconstituted though. He is just a blob of modelling clay after all...isn't he...?
I'd personally like Noggin the Nog to avenge him, but I have a disconcerting feeling that no-one will remember who Noggin is. He used to scare the hell out of me when I was this high. Graculus was weird. Olaf was a sort of Proto-Armitage....
....You've got no idea what I'm talking about, have you? *sobs meaningfully*
Well, long before the Clangers, and even longer before they totally sold out with Ivor the Engine, Postgate and Firmin produced the Epic among Children's TV animated series...
I'll see what Shazz reckons about the Mr Men. Good suggestion.
...Got any more of the Fairy Liquid? Quite habit-forming, that stuff...
Yours ever
Lion

(Note to Ms Eliza Knitlittle : Trouble is brewing. Pinniped was at his Club the other evening - the Antarctaneum - and he took an outrageous bet. He bet Professor Pansy Piggins that she couldn't teach a Textile Designer to be pretentious enough to pass muster in the Upper Echelons of Academe. She's got a month to do it. You know, the precipitation in Iberia manifests itself principally upon the pampas, that sort of thing. Don't, whatever you do, look out for EPR5....)

The problem I have with the Smiths is that having ignored music for most of the 80s, I fell in with a scarily obsessive crowd of fanatics with the net result that I have a respectably encyclopedic knowledge of obscure indie bands 1989-1992. For some reason, however, this did not include the Smiths, and so when I ended up at Uni I found that although I could humm most of the support bands for the support bands tunes (can't everybody?), my knowledge of the Smiths was absolutely zero.

I have never quite forgiven them for this, though I suppose, technically it wasn't their fault.

You'll be pleased to hear, though, Lion, that subsequently I broadened my musical tastes and no longer confuse Led Zeppelin with Def Lepard. Gosh, someone wants to talk to me. I'll just nip out for a few minutes. Won't be long...

*comes back in muttering about students who, not content with getting their pound of flesh off me in lessons, want to. get this, socialise in my off hours. I mean. Really.*

I was tempted to use your paper clip engine doobry in a lesson yesterday, P. In fact the only reason I didn't was shortage of time. I hope you are suitably chuffed about this singular honnour.

Hi Solnushka!

I'm dead chuffed! Feel free as far as I'm concerned (same goes for all the stuff, if any use).
Although I suspect that under a strict interpretation of concentration camp rules it would be the BBC's copyright that's in question.

You should be proud that your students want to socialise with you. I can't think of a single teacher/tutor of my own that I felt like that about. I still very occasionally see some of them in the street, and I still slip, hyperventilating, into the nearest shop doorway. Pathetic, really...
P.

Well, when I mean socialise, I mean heve free English practise...

I forgot about copyright. It's living here that does it. Either there is a special exemption for teachers, or no one in this country gives a toss...

Any of you guys still out there?
(Sorry I've been elsewhere a few days)
...sure is quiet...
P.

I am. Don't know about the rest of them. Cheesy Pineapple?

*cough cough sniff*

Sorry, I've been seriously ill, well, seriously drowning in self pity, anyway.

I think it all started when I added a dash of C-LO to my s.
I guess I should have listened to my physics teacher when he told me oils and detergents don't mix.

ooh, sometimes I crack myself up, I really do.

Hi Zagreb, Knitbunny, and anyone else still around...
The Cheesy Pineapple is very nice, but I'm starting to suspect that it's somehow responsible for the bits of wood that are now stuck deep in my soft palate.
And Knitbunny obviously got poisoned by the C-LO. We seem to have a problem of fundamental dietary incompatibility here.
You could try one of these things :

Can't get the hang of them myself. They don't even balance on the nose-end particularly satisfyingly.
P.

Self pity? Why?

Zagreb (drunk, sorry)

Hi Zagreb
Yeah, I was too...
S'not self pity though. More like an ability to think of anything to say...
P.

the "self-pity, why?" was for Knitbunny but thanks for the reply anyways

I remembered today being on h2g2 whilst drunk last night and was terrified I'd posted something horribly embarassing so I was pleasantly surprised to find an unembarassing message that was properly typed

I try to avoid computers altogether when I'm drunk - last time I didn't I was with my friend David and we spent a whole night trying to upset people in chat rooms. I think I was claiming to be Elvis and telling everyone to 'repent, repent or burn in hell' and then David was hanging aroud the children's chat rooms and asking random under-twelves if they would like to come and see his puppies. We could both barely focus at that point, let alone type, so I think we were failing miserably to wind anyone up. It was funny at the time...

As for the self pity, it was because I was pretty poorly all last week with a bad case of flu. (Or, as my friends and family call it, 'a wee bit of a cold'.) So I was stuck in the halls of residence with a load of people I don't really know, none of them prepared to make me cups of tea all day or even just quietly sit with me and hold my fevered little hand. Basically I HAD to feel sorry for myself, because no one else was going to.

awwwww

I hate being online drunk because of what I might do/say. I once emailed some poor blighter who'd written a game I liked whilst drunk as a skunk. He emailed me back and put most of my "letter" in the reply, replying to the various parts of it. It was embarrassing, to say the least