I was inspired to post the following quote, one of my favorite, from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (mm) by a coworker’s IM tagline, “The answer is 42″:
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly ninety million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn’t the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
One Response
March 1st, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Hans,
You are only the second person I’ve met who has actually read this book. I like the interesting perspective on our silly lives.
~Ruth
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