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

Thank you profusely for the editing help.

Mrs. Noonan also told me that sun, moon, east and west should not be capitalized but I ignored her because she is only an English teacher and not from out of town.

The "Nautical Mules" comment gave me my first laugh out loud of the day. I envisoned 60 or so of them heading for Guam.

I'm trying to learn the rules of this space in a hurry. I've been signed up about 48 hours. I hope it's appropriate for me to send this to your personal space.

Your "Knob Hill" and "life after divorce" postings are hilarious. You appear to have complex and multi-faceted online character(s).

Well, you're doing a stellar job for having been here two days. It took me more than a year to really get involved beyond just chatting to people . No need to hurry, just find your way at a pace that's good for you . And you can post on my space any time you like - that's actually the best way to leave a message for someone specific, leave it on their space. That way they'll be sure to see it and it won't get lost in a conversation that's gone on to other subjects.

I can't take credit for the Divorce piece. It's on my project page for those times when I'm casting about for something to do and don't know where to start - I picked it up from the Flea Market a couple of years ago. I've got so many things going on now I don't know if I'll ever get around to doing anything with it, but I appreciated the humour in it too which is why I picked it up.

The Flea Market is kind of a 'graveyard' of abandoned entries; things that other people have written that would have made good Edited Entries but there wasn't quite enough there to go on, and the original authors have left the site. When I get bored I go through looking for things that interest me that I might be able to finish up. If you'd like to check it out it's at Writing-FleaMarket.

Miloso,

What is the "box quote" that you pointed me toward last week?

You said that the personal account should be set apart in a box quote?

Could you explain or link me to and example?

Sorry, I should have said block quote. It will set the personal account part of your entry apart from the rest in an italicised, indented block. You put the text you want to set apart between and tags, like this:

...your text...

It's also useful for inserting excerpts and quotes in your entries.
You can find out more about it here:
A264520

Looking at your entry (which is looking great, by the way ) to put your personal experience in block quotes, you would want to put the tags around each paragraph.

I think I see. So I would switch to Brunnuel style, find a Blockquote button and then paste the paragraph in between...let me try it and see...Thanks.

It worked!

Looks nice

It will set it off even further, (and is the house style) if you also put the text in italics. Just insert after each and before each .

Brunel makes it a lot easier to use GuideML, but you don't have to switch skins to just put code in. You can just type the code, or copy and paste it from another page. Or you can use the Brunel edit page, because it's easiest.

I know Brunel is the default skin now when new users sign up; just out of curiosity, which skin have you switched to?

I was using Alabaster, but I like the Smiley < and GuideML help with Brunel so I'm switching to that for now.

I'm off to insert s. Thanks

BurmaShave...reminds me of trips from Florida to New York with my parents in a '51 Cadillac. Good one.

Thanks!
I had fun writing it. I missed the last set of signs by nearly a decade, but kept coming across references to Burma-Shave while working on my Route 66 project.

Your entry is looking fab! Surely it'll be headed for the Front Page soon. I saw you're working on a couple of other things, too. Hope to see them soon! I'm glad you're enjoying the site

Miloso,

They just picked my article. It was a lot of fun to write. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Congratulations! It's a great entry.

Any time I can be of help, just ask! I hope you continue to enjoy writing for the Guide

Miloso- Questions about h2g2?

It was really fun and intense writing the first article, and being guided to the proper rules and formats by friendly people. I hope I can do that again ....it was a fun game.

But I do have questions for you since you have been so helpful in explaning rules, guidelines, conventions and so on.

1. I have created several "guide entries" in my h2g2 space which, in retrospect, I would like to delete. It is not possible to delete or remove "guide entries" once they are created, is that correct?

2. In creating "guide entries" it seems that one has to actively check "not for review" to keep work in progress from appearing in peer review. This seems counter-intuitive. Why not require the researcher to check "submit for review" when the article is finished?

I'm not holding you responsible Miloso, I just wanted to ask an experienced researcher if I was understanding these two things correctly. Of course I also understand that the BBC site and MGs were built by the same artisans.

Hi Fred
I've been trying to reply to you for *hours*! Durned server problems! We'll see if it works this time...

I'm glad you're enjoying the process . No matter how 'finished' I think an entry is when I'm done with it, I'm always amazed at how much more there is to do when I put it through review. And it's still exciting to load the front page and see your own stuff right up there first thing!

About Deleting Entries:
Entries *can* be deleted - sort of. Only you can delete entries that you create, and entries that you have deleted can be retrieved only by you. Go to the Edit screen of the entry you want to delete, scroll down and there should be a button to 'Delete this Entry'. Click that and your entry will be removed from the directory. It won't come up in searches, and it won't appear in your 'My Entries' list.

The entry will still exist, but the only way anyone will ever find it is if they type the exact page number in the address bar of their browser, and the page will only say 'This Entry has been deleted by the author.'

You can still access your own deleted entries. Go to the bottom of your 'My Entries' list and click on 'Show more Guide Entries'. You should get a choice of regular entries, edited entries and deleted entries. You can open and edit any of your deleted entries and reinstate them at a later date if you wish.

About Creating Entries:
When you create an entry it is automatically part of the site-wide search function (unless you later delete it), but it doesn't appear in Peer Review straight away. To submit it to a review forum you do have to click 'Submit for Review', and there should be a basic posting form with a selection of Review forums (fora?) to submit to (there's also Writing Workshop, Collaborative Writing Workshop, and Alternative Writing Workshop - you have to actively select Peer Review to send it to Peer Review).

When an entry is created it can be submitted for review by anyone - not just the author. Checking the 'Not For Review' box prevents something from being *able* to be submitted for review. I'll try to explain -

A2660519 is an entry on George Santayana that has not been edited. It hasn't gone through Peer Review, and I haven't checked the 'Not For Review' box in edit - so when you see it there will be a 'Submit for Review' button in the right sidebar. You could submit the entry for review even though you didn't write it (although I would appreciate it if you didn't, since it appeared as part of a larger entry that *has* been edited. It was for the 'We Didn't Start the Fire Project').

A1984403 is an Edited Entry about the Coral Court Motel. Since it has been edited there is a directory listing at the top to show how it is classified in the Edited search directory. You can't submit this for review because it's already been Edited.

A1309088 is the original Coral Court entry. When an entry is picked for editing they make a copy of it, and the copy is the one that will eventually appear on the front page. The original stays in the author's control, but is automatically marked 'Not For Review' by the site editors. The author can make changes to the original, but the changes will not appear in the Edited version.

A595163 is the Central US Researchers Group, a page that cannot become part of the Edited Guide. I maintain the page and can make changes to it, but I've checked the 'Not for Review' box so that no one else can come along and submit it.

Sorry that's so long! I've a sneaking suspicion I've only made things more confusing, but I hope that was at least partially understandable.

Thank you.

I see that I asked a "simple" question that has a very complex answer. Those are always tough to answer in writing to someome who is basically clueless about a topic.

I once worked with a young man who had wrtten his dissertation om Santayana. He drove a yellow MGTD which I sorely coveted.
His name was Dr. Herman Saatkamp. A vert nice person who desrved his Dr. of Philosopy title and did not overtly look down on me as a teacher of accounting.

If you do a search on "Herman" amd "Santayana" Dr. Saatkamp pops up all over the net, so apparently he has mantained his interest over the intervening thirty years. I'll have to drop over to see him and say hello one day and see if he followed my advice and kept the car.

"[The psyche] begins to ask itself what it is living for. The answer is not, as an unspiritual philosophy would have it: In order to live on. The true answer is: In order to understand, in order to see the Ideas."-Soliloquies '22 at 227 (Reversion to Platonism). From Soliloquies in England.

Here is a link to Herman's homepage. It links directly and prominently to his Santayana page.

http://www.iupui.edu/~philosop/hsaatkamp.htm

Here are a few nuggets from Herman's page.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner's, 1905, page 284

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."
Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner's, 1905, page 13

"Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace."
Dialogues in Limbo, Scribner's, 1926, p. 67

"Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer."
Scepticism and Animal Faith, Scribner's, 1923, p. 69

I like the way Santayana thought. Get to work and finish that article soon.

"So I believe, compulsorily and satirically, in the existence of this absurd world; but as to the existence of a better world, or of hidden reason in this one, I am incredulous, or rather, I am critically sceptical; because it is not difficult to see the familiar motives that lead men to invent such myths."

"Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention."

"Love makes us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers."

"Fun is a good thing, but only when it spoils nothing better."

"Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled."

"... in the end every philosopher has to walk alone."

"I am worse than an arm-chair philosopher: I am a poet in slippers."

"Life is a succession of second bests."

"The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums."

"It would be so awkward in heaven, after all one had discovered, to have to put on a perfect innocence."

"I suppose people aren't ashamed of doing or feeling anything, no matter what, if only they can do it together. And sometimes two people are enough."

"If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved."

"A man's hatred of his own condition no more helps to improve it than hatred of other people tends to improve them."

"That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions." "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"... in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected; it is recognised and obeyed."

"It is war that wastes a nation's wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation."

"Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean."

"... when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different."

"Intoxication is a sad business, at least for a philosopher; for you must either drown yourself altogether, or else when sober again you will feel somewhat fooled by yesterday's joys and somewhat lost in to-day's vacancy. "

"What establishes superstitions is haste to understand, rash confidence in the moral intelligibility of things."

"That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject."

"Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes."

"... religion too often debauches the morality it comes to sanction, and impedes the science it ought to fulfil."

"... it is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig. "

"History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten."

"The love of life is not something rational, or founded on experience of life. It is something antecedent and spontaneous."

"I have no axe to grind; only my thoughts to burnish."

"America is all one prairie, swept by a universal tornado. Although it has always thought itself in an eminent sense the land of freedom, even when it was covered with slaves, there is no country in which people live under more overpowering compulsions."

"Wealth is dismal and poverty cruel unless both are festive. There" is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."

"But since, as a matter of fact, birth and death, actually occur, and our brief career is surrounded by vacancy, it is far better to live in the light of the tragic fact, rather than to forget or deny it, and build everything on a fundamental lie. "

"... only the dead have seen the end of war."

"It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy ..."

"Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through a long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness."

"... if you bravely make the best of a crazy world, eternity is full of champions that will defend you."

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past; remembering that once it was all that was humanly possible.

"Poetry is not to be spread on things like butter, but must shine on them like dew."

That page of Dr Saatkamp's would have been useful when I was writing my bit. But for me the entry is finished, it was intended to be a short overview to be included in a larger entry: A2660609. I'm not much of a philosophy student, and most of his greater works would have been lost on me, I'm afraid.

I hope my explanation of how pages are submitted wasn't too confusing!

Is Gunga Din still up for grabs on the "Done To Soon" project?

Kipling (White Man's Burden) is an interesting and inflammatory poet.

Could I try out for the part?

Formerly Fred