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

The seal is wearing a resentful scowl.
"All right. Who sat on my model?"

The model certainly looks broken, but the ever-cynical Trout recalls that it looked equally broken just after Pinniped claimed to have finished it.

Here's a fact : when someone really annoying is conspicuously anxious to be asked a question, nobody will ever ask it. This lot have been working flat out for days now, not asking the question.

"OK, I'll tell you what kind of model it is. It's a business model".

Complete disinterest is expressed; effortlessly, spontaneously, universally.

But then Trout inadvertently glances at the crumpled contraption, out of the corner of a fishy eye. The seal is onto him like a shot, clutching eagerly at any vestige of attentiveness.

"To go with my business plan. I showed it to the bank".

Trout is now feigning sudden death, but Pinniped is undeterred.

"I think they were impressed. They certainly took notice. After the meeting, they were watching me all the way up the road".

Trout is trying hard, but the blood vessels in dead peoples' temples hardly ever pulse like that.

Pinniped attempts to straighten the structure, head on one side, brows knotted. Although there is no discernible improvement in its pathetic condition, his face suddenly lights up.

"Don't you think it looks like her?"

And now the seal has everyone's total attention, willing or not. There is something horribly irresistible about the mangled workings of his feeble mind. It's the intellectual equivalent of a road accident in the street outside your house.

"No", says Trout, as emphatically as possible. He hasn't the slightest idea who 'she' might be, which seems to validate the retort, more or less.

"They don't all have to be the same person, of course", declares Pinniped, brightly. "I thought I'd do Ben because not many of us have got long enough arms. And don't you think she's more monumental than the rest of us, somehow?"

Aberdeen is full of people and animals determined not to find out what this smelly, blotchy, utterly odious creature is going on about.

"Anyway", continues the seal, with vomit-inducing cheerfulness. " I vote we go and do up a real one. Any volunteers?"

Trout Montague was decidedly wary of the managerial fraternity, and the Hockney-meets-Heath-Robinson model being presented now merely served to compound his reservations. Evolution of the model would inevitably involve interminably long meetings with the irksome quasi-literati that occupied the power-pants and middle-order organagrams of the present. Lunches would be pretentious and expensive. Shirts with sleeves and collars would be worn. Shoes would be black and polished. Blackboards would be white and squeaky. Empty vessels would be making a lot of noise. And a lot of dough. Trout Montague started to hack up a four-letter word, pluralised ... "Cun ..."

"That's enough, Trout", intervened the Lady of Shallot from the confines of her Ali Baba basket, at once both moderating and not wishing to disturb the Pinnipedal diatribe. Selling b.s. was exactly up her alley, or to use Phoci-speke, in her pantheon, and she wanted a piece of the pie.

The Jazzme meanwhile kept his tongue secure. He was a practical man and for once knew where Trout Montague was coming from, even if he wasn't quite at ease with where he seemed to claim to have been. The Hypatia clutched the Jazzme's hand, their fingers intertwined the way only young lovers' do, and squeezed, angst written all over her face. She seen the suits come and go before: they'd taken away shelves of musty old volumes and replaced them with tremulous banks of desk-top computers. It was Big Yellow Taxi all over. The Jazzme spat on a hanky and gently dabbed at the freshly-painted lettering that adorned the Hypatia's visage.

At their feet, Boots ran around in circles. Business models. Woof. He'd been there, done that, peed on it even. Cocking a rear leg, the hound peed on Pinniped's model. For luck maybe.

The others would surely go with the flow.

"Sweet", concurred Waz.

"Totally", said Speckly and the lizard in unison.

"Awesome", agreed Teuchter.

"Baaaah", baa'd Jodan.

"Then the 'ayes' have it", claimed the seal. "We're going to go and do up a real one ..."

Trout Montague rolled his eyes so hard that he almost lost his balance and toppled over. "'We're going to go and do up a real one'? ... With all due respect, Sealboy", he retorted patently implying that no respect at all was due, "... what the Friar Tuck does that mean?"

"Sweet", concurred Waz.

"Totally", said Speckly and the lizard in unison.

"Awesome", agreed Teuchter.

"Baaaah", baa'd Jodan.

The seal grins triumphantly.

"I thought you'd never ask".

He holds up a pair of crumpled photographs.

"Now, put these together...and what have you got?"

http://www.darkhorse.co.uk/images/angel400.jpg
http://www.afm.dtu.dk/wind/turbines/img0008.jpg

Pinniped is in his element, which means that someone is going to punch him shortly.

"I guess everybody can see the Road to Riches stretching out before us now? No? Well, we can't all be entrepreneurial geniuses. Listen up, my faithful employees. We are going into the personalised windfarm business".

"No we aren't", replies Trout, trying to keep it simple and hoping it will just go away.

"Yes we are", answers Pinniped, in steamroller-confident tone. "Can't you see it, all of you? This is an opportunity waiting to be exploited. Who wouldn't want a monument to themselves, dominating the landscape for miles? And look, somebody already tried out the idea, but they couldn't cut the engineering. You know what's wrong with this?" The seal waves his photo of the Angel.

"It's a sculpture and not a windmill?" suggests Waz, as gently as possible.

"Wrong!" snaps Pinniped, with the supreme certainty of the incurably deluded. "Look at it, will you? Its arms are too long! They would have hit the ground when they turned. The poor guy who invented it probably just gave up in despair and left it to rust".

The silence is funereal, except somehow more tragic.

"He didn't have my design acumen", continues the phocoid. "It's not enough to be a great businessman. You have to be technically brilliant too".

This observation does nothing whatsoever for the silence, so Pinniped tries another tack.

"Right. Here's the plan. Orchid, read the plan".

The whale clears her throat nervously. "Team memberth' roleth", she begins.

It's lucky that lashings of spray are barely noticeable against the background level of the Aberdonian climate.

"Orchid readth the plan. Ben potheth..."

Throughout the group, spine-curling embarrassment is giving way to confusion.

"Wath painth while flying, Coleridge holdth paint-can aloft, Boot-th thtandth guard and biteth trethpatherth, Jodan ith lookout - that'th becauthe thyeep are inconthpicuouth on hillthideth..."

Trout's fingers would be in his ears, if he had any of either.

"Hypathia doeth the paperwork, Thpeckly and Teuchter look after thales and invoithe the cuthtomerth and Jathme doeth the thyoplifting".

Orchid pauses and ponders some difficulty with her usual geological slowness. "Hey, don't I get to do anything exthept reading thith?" she complains, as Pinniped deftly snatches back his sheet of paper.

"And don't I get to do anything at all?" demands Trout. For a moment, his self-importance must have wrested itself free from his survival instinct.

"I'm sure you'll think of something to do with yourself", replies Pinniped, with a mixture of sweetness and malice seldom heard outside the beauty contest circuit.

By now, the silence is crawling up the walls and clawing at the window-catches. The hound chase its tail for a while, and collapses in a panting, grinning heap.

"To summarise for the idiots", declares Pinniped masterfully, "we are going to decorate one of those windmills over there to look like Ben. When people see it, they'll all want one. And we'll get rich".

Jazzme has just worked out what the whale actually spat.

"What if I don't want to be a shoplifter?" he demands angrily.

"Thanks for the reminder", rejoins the seal. "You're first up. Task One. Steal the paint".

Everyone is trying desperately to stand behind someone else.

"Well?" snaps Pinniped. "What are we waiting for?"

The sheep groaned a mighty groan (for a sheep) as his role was assigned and tried to stand behind Hypatia while this speech went on. She tried to stand behind him, and this pattern continued as other people joined in and the seal's speech became more distressing.

"This would be a good way to build a railroad" the sheep thought.

But a lookout position isn't so bad, he realized. "I can see a lot of sheep from on top of a hill. Perhaps Fiona will be among them..."

As the speech ended, Pin asked them all "What are we waiting for?"
"Wages and badges." Jodan firmly replied.

The seal elects to ignore this remark. It's coming to something when the sheep get militant.

Wages! Don't suppose it'd do much good throwing him a fish. Although one particular fish comes to mind...

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(Noted, btw : this thread needs a badge!)

The hound read the news in the internet cafe, stubbed his cigarette out in the already overflowing ashtray and walked out into the stinking heat of Mumbai.
Pianted windmills eh?. What to do? On the one hand it was hot here, that was good. Working with the windmills would be cold and who would buy the b****y things anyway? Hardly your average garden gnome.
Might be fun though? No they'd give him a naff job, mixing the paint or watching it dry. Why couldn't they paint them somewhere warm? Now there's an idea. The phocoid obviously hadn't thought that one through. Cheaper wages, no hint of strike action, he turned on his heels and headed back to the cafe...

"No wages?!" The sheep shouted in disgust of the seal.
"No badge too. Plus, my obvious potential as Executive Vice President in Charge of Business Affairs was ignored by the seal..."

The sheep pondered this a while. Perhaps longer than most Executive Vice Presidents in Charge of Business Affairs would take to ponder.

"Aha! I'll go on strike! And better yet, I'll form my own rival Personalized Windmill Company. And it will be Jod-Sheep Industries, and I'll make myself President. And there will be badges. And it will be good."

"And maybe we can see about that Railroad too..."

With that, the sheep stormed off to start recruiting sheep for the hard laboring, paint watching, stone stacking, Executive Vice President in Charge of Business Affairs aspiring, windmill designing jobs he needed.

"You in or out, Jazz?" queried the Hypatia, causing the Trout to explode into a veritable froth of mirth. "If she can't tell by now ..." Secretions from a multitudinous selection of salmonid anatomy started to squirt jerkily and copiously, apparently out of control, perhaps even threatening to compete with the volumes emitted variously by Orchid and the Dog.

Nevertheless, ignoring the abounding puerile fatuity, the Jazzme looked down at his Cornish-pasty shoed feet, and shuffled nervously before chinning up to meet the Hypatia's finest iron librarian stare.

"Oh what the hell. This is only fiction. I'll do it. And hang the consequences." Thus having goosed the Hypatia, the Jazzme skipped away on an errand of paint procurement. And he knew exactly where to find it.

***

The local municipal council depot glistened in the morning sunshine, the bright yellow trucks, proud and childlike with their big black tyres and orange hazard beacons, sporting globs of clear water deposited during overnight precipitation. The Jazzme, as well as a certain penguin character much further north, was pleased that there hadn't been a frost. He was certain that one if not all of the members of the proletariat that operated these vehicles would have left the key in the ignition. It would have been "more than my job's worth" to return them to the custody of the depository after the "down-tools" claxon had sounded. So fleet of foot and uncannily agile, the Jazzme ducked, dived, dodged and weaved in and out of the ranks of vehicles looking for one containing paint.

***

Not long later ...

"And what are they?" queried Pinniped, not without a tad of ire.

The Jazzme looked back whence he'd come, and noticing for the first time a pair of parallel traffic-warden yellow lines disappearing over the horizon. He was certain they hadn't been there before ...

"Well, don't worry," assured the Jazzme, recovering brilliantly and turning back to Pinniped grinning cheesily, "there's plenty more paint in this baby", with which he gave the bowser a reassuring pat, thereby causing the Hypatia's brow to lift, her admiration for the earthy initiative of the man slightly jarred by his show of intimacy with this piece of ugly duckling yellow machinery.

"Oh, and I've got this", continued the Jazzme, hoping to pull the predacious Phocid off his scent with something of a non-sequitur, and simultaneously pulling from his waist coat pocket a tin of yellow Humbrol. "It's for the model."

Jazz was pleased that they had wanted to paint the darned windmills.

The reference to the angel of the north, with it's rusty appearance had reminded him of the reaction of the people of Gateshead who called it 'The rusty man' and got very hot under the collar about how much civic money had been wasted in providing it. Nobody wanted it.

Just as nobody would want their own personalised windmills, particularly yellow ones, but that was the colour available in the Council Depot. Still it was only a tale as he had observed before and it had given him something to do whilst everyone else sat around trying very hard to understand the small print at the bottom of the sales plan and wondered what was in it for them.

Just as long as I don't have to paint the darned things he thought - that's not a job for a design engineer.

Meanwhile, as Pin's crew was dealing with a multitude of problems (it will happen. You just wait...) the sheep began to construct his own windmill - instead of vandalizing another one - with the sort of fine worksmanship that only comes from animals without thumbs.

First step - protest signs to pass out to his sheep workforce - with which to march around and baa irritatingly until the ambitious sheep received wages, titles and badges.

But first, time for lunch.

Trout Montague had recovered from his outburst, and wondered if he should be defecting to the side of mutton; that Jodan was a cutlet above the rest; he'd probably make a mint and chop chop to boot. Perhaps now was the time to leave: the fish had felt the wrath of Pinniped rasp across his scales before, and he'd had trouble holding his own end up.

Which is pretty much what he'd been told to do now, and which wasn't actually all that unpleasant ... yeah Trout Montague wasn't about to follow the sheep like a ... well ... a sheep. He'd stay put and experiment with sloth, and an idle mind being the devil's workshop, dabble with divisiveness. Indeed yes, he could think of money-making ideas all right, number one on the list involving a rufty-tufty Nova Scotian equipped with a blunt object ... as it transpired Trout Montague just couldn't help himself ...

"So now there'll be two Big Bens then?" chimed the salmonid, knowing he'd get told off, if not his neck wrung. "'Cept this one's going to look like a gigantic yellow shallot? With sails. Yeah. I can just see this coming off ...

'Can we got to see Big Ben Mummy?'
'You mean the clock tower at the Houses of Parliament?'
'No I mean the Brobdingnagian yellow vegetable windmill in Aber-f*****g-deen ...'

... and yes I do know it's the bell."

Eyeball to eyeball, Trout Montague was perhaps the only one who couldn't be intimidated by Pinniped's fish-breath alone. But the phocid had other tricks up his figurative sleeve.

"Just zip it, fish boy", commanded the seal, whiskers bristling, Trout Montague now precariously poised, metastable and circus-fashion, looking downwards from the end of the seal's snout. And not wanting to be seal-food, Trout Montague zipped it.

In the corner the Ali Baba basket is shaking. If anyone stopped going around in circles for a moment to check out why the basket was shaking, they would hear the sound of barely suppressed giggles.

Then there is no sound, just a faint aroma of Africa, and the sense that there is no-one in the Ali Baba basket after all.

Hypatia not only resented being relegated to clerk status but was distressed that her first assignment was to cook the books. She dutifully fabricated a receipt for the purloined paint then made several copies on her hastily acquired all-in-one digital fax/copier/wireless telephone with dual paper ports and built in speakers. She placed one copy in a folder marked 'aquisitions - paint - oil-based - yellow', then cross filed the others and placed the lot into the putty-colored file cabinet that Jazzme had located at a government surplus warehouse on the outskirts of Aberdeen.

Then she repeated the process, creating receipts for the file cabinet and the all-in-one fax/copier/wireless telephone with dual paper ports and built in speakers.

Buck's defection had made her nervous. Not that she blamed him. She was still worried about Fiona and suspected that his windmill construction company was a ruse to allow him ingress into the local sheep population in his search for information.

She was also a little distressed at the imminent falling out between the salivating salmonidae and the phoenetic phocoid. At least she had Jazzme to fall back on in a crisis. And she suspected that his years of dealing with governmental regulations were going to come in handy if Pinniped persisted in this exercise in free market economics.

We're already in the red here and so far everything has been stolen!

Waz was still engrossed by the photograph of the Angel. She looked up eventually and frowned at the seal.

"There's nothing wrong with the length of its arms. They just forgot to put a pivot in its feet."

'For goodness sake get a grip!' The hound knew his return was more than timely. They were all over the place.
A business plan? conjoured by creativity? Not a hope. Ben falling about in a straw basket. Hypatia furious that her non reality was mirroring her reality, Waz having problems with size and scale, Jazme losing the plot and entering a time warp and the trout and the seal locked head to head over an issue that bordered on the ridiculous.
'We are talking garden gnomes on a Speilberg budget guys. Who on God's earth will buy the b****rs? In yellow? Have none of you heard that next springs fashion colour is orange for gods sake? OK Hypatia,I know pink would have been so much better but the magazines are dicating orange...ghastly but true.'

'thould I thee if I can find a flimthy little number in the paletht thummer tangerine? I thould look rather thplenid in thummer tangerine.'

The seal and the trout groaned climactically. The bastard dog was intent on ruining a carefuly engineered leap into an area of mutual master understanding... who invited the bitch on the journey anyway?

'Think we need some pink guys, Jaipur is the pink city you know? Stop moaning Pin and get your frigging camera out.

'Trout, you can be in charge of the watching paint dry detail and don't get too bladdered you might havet o go go to Jodpur

Everyone was most taken aback by the uncharacteristically forthright bent of the hound's outburst. Pinniped for one wasn't accustomed to having his leadership questioned let alone usurped utterly. And besides, he didn't have a camera, at least not in the sense of a lightproof box with an aperture. The Hypatia meanwhile, whilst shocked at hearing the hound so assertive, was somewhat relieved that her clerking days might yet be over. And Waz, who'd oh-so-quietly baulked at having to work with Coleridge, and indeed vice versa, the both being solitary drifters, was pleased to be able to revert to less gregarious commitments, and to redesign of the basal pivot. Only the Jazzme appeared peeved. He'd quite taken to a life of larceny and was proud of his paint, buttercup thought it may have been. In the short time since returning with the municipal bowser, he'd managed to purloin further a Battenburg and a case of Laphraoig. Trout Montague was, as is already well-documented, easy. Indeed, if it didn't leave so much ambiguity lingering in the air, he'd have said that he could swing either way. But as it was the lead in his pencil had remained firmly plumb. Until, that is, Boots had mentioned Jodhpur. To Trout Montague, the merest conjectural whiff of a pair of clingy gusset-crotched riding-leggings always evoked notions of frolicking right lustily in a hay-loft with a slice or two of posh. To calm himself, Trout Montague helped himself to a healthy slug of the Jazzme's contraband. And in the consequent peaty haze, he couldn't help but notice how tightly the marzipan clung to the pastel pink and yellow sponge hind-quarters ...

"Aha! Dissent in the ranks. It will be all the more easy to crush them," The Executive President for Business Affairs said.

Everything in his plan was going nicely. His employees were nicely oblivious to their small wages and few benefits (then again, you don't exactly need a plan to make sheep stupid) and his competition was breaking down.

Soon he would have a complete monopoly on personalized windmills in Aberdeen! And next? The world!

But he had counted without Jazzme, engineer from Tyneside where they build the ships and are experts at forming trade unions.

Already he was oranising the workforce and had promoted Hypatia from clerk to chief delegate and general manager of the new onion (onion? union ? they're both a bit smelly but needs must... can't have bully boy employers running all over evryone can you?)

And what about the shareholders ? Who were the shareholders? Did they believe in Fairtrade? What if they moved the whole caboodle to the Phillipines where wages were peanuts?

And who was going to design the swivel base - a weakness at the very point where stresses were maximum. Better to swivel at the top, just under the sails. You need a design engineer in charge of this project and it just so happens......

And what's wrong with yellow? Do I have to go and pinch a bowser full of red paint now? Red lead paint to combat the extreme weather conditions of these Northern climes - it's snowing already in Aberdeen.

'What are you doing boot'th?'

The dog was hiding behind a half built windmill painting with the yellow paint. The sign read 'This way to the Phillipines.'

Why thould we go to the Phillipinth boot'th?'

'They have lots of red paint there.'

'Are you thore?'

'No but at least it's hot.'