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

[..and despite many requests, I have finally decided that I must publish my autobiography on the internet..]

What?

What was that?

What?

What happened there?

Whaaaaat?

Huh?

Was that it?

What?

"Julie, this is the best picnic I've ever had."

"Thank you, Dennis."

"A simple meal of ham and potato salad in a cozy boat, with the stars and moon overhead...."

"The simpler pleasures are the best."

"The food is exquisite! It's delicious, delectable, luscious, pleasant-tasting, scrumptious, toothsome, yummy, tasty, ambrosial, appetizing...."

"Stop!" Remember your promise!"

"You mean the one about using no more than ten synonyms?"

"That's the one."

"But the food is so good it deserves twenty or even thirty!"

"Nevertheless...."

"Wait. What was that crunching sound?"

"Oh, my God, Dennis, there's an iceberg straight ahead. I think we've hit it."

"Isn't it lucky that we're in a lifeboat? Lucky as in....."

As I sit at the keyboard I can smell her perfume on the breeze of this warm summers night.

I start to type the next sentence but I hesitate as I am aware that she has just walked up behind me.

I attempt to develop the story but she is running her fingers through my hair as she leans over me to read what I am writing.

Her pert breast is now nudging my right ear as I attempt to continue the story.

My apologies, but I am going to have to get back to this tale later.

You've probably heard of the neverending story. This isn't it. This is the story that, for various reasons, couldn't even get started.

Sylvester Sarspopple was going to write the great American novel, but decided to stay in bed all day. Alas, it was a carnivorous bed. It ate him that afternoon.

A package was supposed to come for Brenda Foof. It would have contained a flying carpet. She could have taken it all over the world, but it got lost in transit.* Too bad.

Ricky Splivins had always wanted a horse of his own. He dreamed of riding it in a championship race. But his family's house wasn't zoned for horses. He had some lovely sea horses in his aquarium, but no one would read a story about that.

Sorry about that. Please select another story in this thread.






*The carpet never turned up. Maximilian Twitt, the official assigned to finding lost parcels, was in one of his delusional periods. He tried to climb a nonexistent mountain and fell to his death. Ironically, he would have found a flying carpet quite useful.

Sarah Lea Puddingmuffin had baked goodies for hundreds of wakes, but
now someone else would have to do it, as Sarah was quite dead. As dead as one could be after getting shot, stabbed, poisoned, strangled, and forced to listen to Haydn symphonies for 40 straight hours.

Sheerluck Hoames, Inspector Clueless of the Surete, and Sergeant Joe
Friedegg all investigated, but failed to find the killer.

It was clearly time for Miss Marbles to step in and bring the murderer to justice. It took her only one hour to do so.

"Cornelius Crustfield, the food critic who resented her for putting acai berries in his scones, poisoned her," she declared to a hall filled with reporters. They shouted questions, but she put up her hand for silence. "Dexter Deadeye, her ex-fiance, shot a fatal bullet through her open window from a hang-glider 500 yards away." Still more questions, which she stopped with a menacing glare.
"I matched the stab wound with a knife from Sarah's own kitchen. The fingerprints on the handle were those of Mary Stewmeat, the assistant who coveted her catering business. There was no strangler, however. The medical examiner erred on that."

"What about being bored to death by endless symphonies?" someone shouted from the audience.

Miss Marbles poked around in her duffle bag and accidentally dropped it. Dozens of Haydn CDs fell out. Blushing, she ran from the room.

The roses outside his window cast shadows as the morning sun slowly crept across his bed. A gentle breeze made the shadows dance. It was then that he heard the voice. It was a gentle voice, and it called him by name. He was startled from his dream. "Who...who are you?" he asked.

"You know who I am, Jeremy" the voice said. "Don't worry, I'm not here to take you away. You still have a little time left."

"How much time?" Jeremy asked with a quavery voice.

"I'd be breaking the rules if I told you," the voice said pleasantly. "I saw the dream you were just having -- the daisy field, your young, smiling mother...."

"You can read my dreams?"

"Yes. I can also see what is *not* in your dreams. You've never once dreamed about the years your mother spent in that nursing home..."

"Those were a nightmare for both of us! I'm grateful I don't dream about them."

"You're afraid of ending in one of those places yourself, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Don't worry. You won't. In any case, I'm here to make a suggestion."

"What is it?"

"Sieze the day. The sun is up. Do something you love with all your heart before it's too late. That karaoke bar down the street? You love those songs! Why not go for it one last time?"

Then the voice was gone. Jeremy made plans for the coming evening. It would be great fun,and he would feel young again as he sang those old songs he loved so much.

~~Getting the Bugs Out of Foreign Policy~~

The President was annoyed. "Why have the Martians expelled our diplomats?" he demanded.

"They feel insulted," the Secretary of State replied. "They watch our TV programs. Recently they saw "War of the Worlds" and hated the way we portrayed them as warlike..."

"You mean they aren't?"

"Mr.President, the Martians are only 6 inches tall," said the Secretary of Defense. "Their biggest tanks are the size of a cat -- not that they ever get used. The six-nation Martian Alliance has not seen a war in 300 years...."

"Can we send them a gift by way of apology?" the President wondered.

After some discussion, the President's advisors decided to send a shipment of Mars candy bars. To show their appreciation for the delicious candy, the Martians sent 10,000 performing cockroaches, which were prized as pets on Mars. The cockroaches charmed everyone in Washington with their singing and dancing. Then they escaped
and began to reproduce at a very rapid rate....

As I was walking through the courtyard of the Urbalopolis Library, I spied my friend Camus Maupassant de Saint-Exupery."

"Dave!" I exclaimed. [I always called him Dave because I didn't speak French.]

Dave was furiously scribbling on a yellow legal pad, but looked up. "Paulh! I'm putting the finishing touches on my new short short story. It's been a month in the making!"

"Great! What's it about?"

"It's a Romance Mystery Western about a hobbit who's a rocket scientist. He falls in love with a Chinese lady who's training to be a matador. They want to get married, but her father, who races dog sleds in the Yukon, needs her to help with the upcoming race....."

"I can see why a story like that would take a month to write."

"Oh, most of it's easy, but I wanted a touch of verismo with the main character."

"The hobbit rocket scientist?"

"Yes. Turns out they're not easy to find....."

Sounds like a call to the Thinker is required

"Create something", he said.

"Hold on a minute" , I responded, "I have just had an excellent meal washed down with rather too much vin blanc."

"The best of all times to create something very special", he replied.

"You are not fooling me", I said, "I have been around far too long to believe that anything I write whilst under the influence of alchohol is of any value whatsoever."

"Under the influence", he said, "you free up your creative senses."

"So why am I talking to myself", I said, with devastating finality.

[I've been talking to myself quite a lot in this thread lately. Lucky for me, I already know how strange the person I'm talking to is. The nice thing about short short stories is that they are a good vehicle for minor wacky ideas, which is the kind that come to me on a daily basis. I know I try to throw too much into my stories. Believe it or not, what you see here is usually a bit shorter than what I originally intended to post. The world is a big place, and if it isn't big enough, there's the rest of the universe. Story ideas are out there. They jump out at you from the covers of the tabloids next to the checkout aisles in your grocery store. You can go for a nice walk in the country and notice some oddity in what the animals or people or insects are doing. Borrowing another author's characters and putting a different spin on them is okay, too. I',m working on an ad campaing for Witch of the West Peanut Butter. If Peter Pan and Popeye can sell products, then why not the Witch of the west?]

"So", said Professor Smink, "just when did you get these severe depressive feelings."

"It hit me suddenly, whilst I was sitting at the keyboard, knocking out yet another less than average five sentence story, and I suddenly realised that I had lived 15 years longer than William Shakespeare."

"Can you imagine how that feels, if he had been given those years instead of me, the world would have even more great poetry instead of the pile of dross that I churn out."

"But you cannot blame yourself, it is not as though you made the choice in this case", said Lauren Bacall, as she gently stroked my fevered brow.

"Dear Lord", I sobbed, "Please don't let me wake before I learn to whistle."

This isn't my work, but I thought it might be appreciated here:

Looking For A Grass Skirt http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz8l7Ho1MLw

"Sorry if this is a little vulgar."

~~The Magic Pudding~~

The facelift, breast enlargements, and fancy hairdos had helped Rose go a long way as the anchor at Channel 66 News, but nothing was half as helpful as the inside info she got from the Magic Pudding. Every morning Rose opened the refrigerator and listened to the Pudding's latest scoop.

This evening she was on Cloud 9, having just won the prestigious "Investigative Reporter of the Year Award." She couldn't wait to give the Pudding her good news! As she got out of her car, she saw her nephew Jimmy's car parked in front of her house. She expected to find him curled up on the couch watching TV, but instead he was sitting at the table with an empty bowl in front of him. The Pudding's bowl!

"Tell me you didn't eat that pudding!" she exclaimed.

"I did, Aunt Rose, and now I feel weird," Jimmy said sadly. I keep getting all these weird ideas about organized crime and missing people."

"Now that you're out of college, maybe you could use a job," Rose said. "My station is hiring. You could put these weird ideas to use as my assistant...."

Here is a five-sentence version of the above story:

The facelift, breast enlargements, and fancy hairdos had helped Rose go a long way as the anchor at Channel 66 News, but nothing was half as helpful as the inside info she got from the Magic Pudding which lived in her refrigerator.

This evening she arrived home with exciting news: thanks to the Pudding, she had just won the prestigious "Investigative Reporter of the Year Award." She dashed through the front door and saw her nephew Jimmy sitting at the table with an empty bowl in front of him -- the Pudding's bowl!

"I ate the pudding that was in the fridge, Aunt Rose, and now I feel weird," Jimmy confessed, "'cause I keep getting all these weird ideas about organized crime and missing people."

"Now that you're out of college, you could come to work at the station and put these weird ideas to use as my assistant," Rose offered.

~~Minimalist dialogue~~

"Come!"

"Now?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Sex."

"Sure!"

Guess I was wrong.

"Guess I was wrong" [Rudest Elf]

Not necessarily. Participation in this thread has fallen off tremendously. I was hoping that someone else would click on the link you gave and offer an opinion, but that didn't happen. In my case, most of the links that people give take so long to load that I don't try to click on them. This is especially true with YouTube. I have dial-up Internet access, which rules out streaming YouTube presentations. After maybe 15 minutes of waiting for the YouTube to fully load, then I can look at whatever someone wanted me to see. In that fifteen minutes I could have odne a lot of other interesting or useful stuff, so I almost never bother.

Computers are many things, but time-saving they are emphatically not.