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

I'm a Mahler fan. His symphonies are so engrained into my brain that I don't need to listen to them anymore. They're playing continuously.

Wouldn't you just die without Mahler?

Maybe I'll learn to love them one day. I never enjoyed Jazz until I heard John Coltrane. I'm sure many find that discordant.

Not a big Coltrane fan, but I like Dave Brubeck. Also Walt Harper, but that's a Pittsburgh thing.

Mahler? I like 'Nun geniessen wir die himmlischen Freuden', but the non-singing stuff? Nah. I'm like that with Holst. 'The Planets' give me a headache until he comes up with that hymn. Then bliss.

And Paul, your saying 'His lieder is...' made me imagine a hillbilly farmer drawling, 'Yep. Them lieder is sure on the tuneful sahde.'

So... what would you measure using units of Mahler? Time? Compared to the average length of his symphonies? Mood maybe?

Twitchiness....definitely. Such as, 'I'm feeling restless, about 2 mahlers on the Weltschmerz Scale.'

Listen to the beginning notes of this (1:15). Am I the only one who thinks, 'Aha! Now I know where the opening theme of ST:TNG came from'?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQFjDBFXN58

The Sting?

Or do you mean Star Trek the Next Generation?

When I said "his lieder is," I was thinking of the body of work. Maybe it's fortunate that I'm not fluent in German. Otherwise, the stuff about dead babies might color my enjoyment of "Kindertotenlider".

It didn't occur to me to even try to answer the questions once Gnomon had posted. I didn't realise they were guesses on his part, and he even got some wrong.

Wales and Belgium are standards, so I might have put them in somewhere.

In Germany it's Saarland when comparing surface areas - one of the smallest states. The little purple one on the left in this map.

http://www.sehenswertes-deutschland.de/files/deutschland-bundeslaender-350.gif

You didn't realise that I might be wrong, TC? Well now you know.

I think the newspaper's wrong, myself. I'll be sending Gnomon's submissions to their archive.

Yeah, Paul - those songs about the dead children are heartbreaking.

Just thinking, Dmitri. Have any of your Post cartoons featured the punchline "Take me to your lieder?"

Not yet... (Thanks for the idea!)

Well, that joke appears in Tom Lehrer's song about Hubert Humphrey

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUnHZAUR6hE

That was a good one. But I loved the synchronicity: the next song on the list was 'Alma', and about an hour before I heard it, I was just wondering, 'Do we need a Guide Entry on Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel?'

Which is Icy's fault, of course...

Here's a quote about the changing landscape of what one cay say, from Lehrer's 1982 interview with the Washington Post:

"As for language, almost everything goes now. That is not to say that verbal taboos have disappeared, but merely that they have shifted somewhat. In my youth, for example, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can say them, but you can't say 'girl'."

By 1982, everyone who had not crawled out from under a rock should have known better. I gave that lecture to my dad in the 60s, and he never referred to the dignified woman who typed his correspondence as a 'girl' again.

Icy, your joke will make its debut on 17 October...

If the underside of rock is comfortable and had all the necessary amenities, why crawl out from under it? I used to lift up rocks to find salamanders.

Imagine how freaked out if some giant creature lifted the roof of your home off.

Didn't I see this somewhere? Maybe a Far Side comic?

I love doing that with ants' nests. Sometimes you expose the egg chambers, and it's fascinating to see the instinctive way they organise themselves to move the eggs to safety before they do anything else.

Heh... Yeah... You don't have fire ants.