On-line Opinion Magazine featuring annoyed rumblings from the leading edge of the Baby Boom firmly tied to a reality-based world.
Established: 21 November 2004
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18 comments
If you want to survive out here, you’ve got to know where your towel is.
Mine is right here. Folded neatly. I always know where my towel is! 😆
Some of my fave lines from the great HHGTTG! 😉
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people angry and has widely been considered as a bad move.
If there’s anything around here more important than my ego, I want it caught and shot now!
One for the ladies:
The Point of View gun conveniently does precisely what its name suggests. That is if you point it at someone and pull the trigger, they instantly see things from your point of view. It was designed by Deep Thought, but commissioned by a consortium of intergalactic angry housewives, who after countless arguments with their husbands were sick to the teeth of ending those arguments with the phrase “You just don’t get it, do you?”
And, last one… HHGTTG must have been the book Preznut Bushmoron had read to him before stealing the election in 2k. Sadly, he thought it was the Presidential instruction manual!
Trillian: You idiot! You signed the order to destroy Earth!
Zaphod: I did?
Arthur: He did?
Trillian: Love and kisses Zaphod? You didn’t even read it, did you?
Zaphod: Well, I’m president, I don’t have a lot of time for reading.
Trillian: My whole planet destroyed because you thought someone wanted your autograph!
Says it all really. It’s depressing. Now I have a headache.
Happy towel day!! 😀
Ohh! DRat! I just remembered another for Bushmoron. 😉
Here I was thinking I was the only one who considered your boyfriend a narcissistic moron, when apparently the whole galaxy does.
OK… I’m done now. For now. 😉
The good ones are always relevant. The snark of Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, and Benjamin Disraeli are constantly being supplied with new targets in every generation.
The big problem with evolution is that it is so slow.
no panic here
i loved hitchiker’s guide, but i was really looking forward to more dirk gently.
hipparchia´s last blog post..[for reference]
Yes, there were more books that were lost to us, alas.
We must remember and appreciate what we have.
Hipparchia: Yeah, I enjoyed Dirk Gently! A lot of people, even the HHGTTG lovers didn’t really get it. Oh well… 🙂
We always want more from the great authors and feel a bit cheated when they pass away. I remember in an interview many years ago, Isaac Asimov was asked the question “If you knew you only had six months to live, what would you do?”
Asimov replied “Type faster!” 😆 (Now he was an amazing and incredibly prolific author on a broad range of topics.)
Of course, HHGTTG is responsible for the 42 in my nic. 😉
Here… I found another. 😉 From The Book:
Presidents don’t have power, their purpose is to draw attention away from it.
Bushmoron certainly proves that, though he did slip his leash a bit towards the end. 😉
Isaac Asimov was asked the question “If you knew you only had six months to live, what would you do?”
Asimov replied “Type faster!”
i’d forgotten that. thanks. if only all my favorite authors would type faster… i loved asimov up through about high school or college, but drifted away at some point, though i went back and re-read the foundation trilogy some years later.
hipparchia´s last blog post..[for reference]
The problem with people not getting Dirk is that they liked the characters more than the author, i.e. they identify with the protagonist and miss the point of view.
I read a new book by a new author quickly, and if I liked it, I re-read it slowly to find out what I missed, because there’s always something. In the case of Douglas Adams it is the absurd thing that we call life, and he needs to be read slowly so you don’t miss things.
Isaac was too earnest in his writing. He was on the verge of breaking out in a couple of places, but reined in himself and went back to serious things at the core of his book. He actually was occasionally whimsical in person, but it never entered into his writing.
I sort of met him at a couple of events, in the sense that we were in the same room and I talked to him along with a dozen other people, but the topic wasn’t him or his books. Maybe he saved his lighter side for the oddity of organizations and their rule making processes.
i cannot read douglas adams slowly. i can, however, re-read him endlessly.
yeah, i think asimov’s earnestness might have been what got to me. i’m a fan of absurdity, preferably with only passing amounts of reality thrown in.
hipparchia´s last blog post..[for reference]
When he engaged in the serious business of writing, he was serious about it. I did write about very serious subjects and he had the science CV to make many of his points, but he would have reached a wider audience if he could occasionally crack a smile.
I’ve been in serious situations, and all of them included humor as a release for the tension, even from people who are definitely not ready for a life as a stand-up comic in normal times. It’s human.
Azimov wrote to make a point, to inform more than entertain.
Asimov once said he wrote in the hopes of making people ask questions. 🙂 He said he didn’t have a lot of answers, but had a lot of questions. 🙂
I think he believed taht if enough people ask a question, maybe they will find an answer… and just maybe, maybe… it might even be a right answer! LOL
Well, we’ve just finished 8 years of people who had answers to questions no one was asking, and they couldn’t actually understand.
Karl Rove and Dick “Dick” Cheney think that Rush Limbaugh is the answer, but they don’t seem to understand that the question was “How does the Republican Party become even more irrelevant?”
All too true Bryan! 🙂
BTW, Asimov did publish two (or at least two, I think he also did a joke book for kid’s) hardcover books of jokes and limericks. He was famous in some circles for his limericks. I have a copy of the two volumes I know of. “Asimov Laughs Again: More Than 700 Favorite Jokes, Limericks, and Anecdotes” (pub: 1965)
He was a funny guy. 😉
I really enjoyed and learned from his non-fiction works. I think The first I read were “The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science”, a 2-vol set, a long time ago. 🙂
Sad to think he died 17 years ago! So many good authors are gone.
One of my favorite quotes of Asimov:
“I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don’t have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.”
One you could relate too Bryan:
“Night was a wonderful time in Brooklyn in the 1930s. Air conditioning was unknown except in movie houses, and so was television. There was nothing to keep one in the house. Furthermore, few people owned automobiles, so there was nothing to carry one away. That left the streets and the stoops. The very fullness served as an inhibition to crime.”
And this is so relevant, and prophetically true (I don’t know when he said it, but considering he died in ’92, it was long before anyone knew what is here now, though some suspected it might happen):
“No one can possibly have lived through the Great Depression without being scarred by it. No amount of experience since the depression can convince someone who has lived through it that the world is safe economically.”
And one more:
“When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.”
Some saw this all coming, sadly, few listened or understood.
Oh, if you want a sampling of Asimov jokes, here’s some from the Asimov Vault:
A sampling of Asimov’s favorite jokes
He definitely has a sense of humor in person, but I’ve never encountered the joke books you mentioned. They certainly were in the base libraries I haunted when I was going up, just his science fiction works.
If I get the time, I will have to hunt them down.
Well, he penned over 600 books! :O I think he had something to say about everything. 🙂
Tha link just above has a categorical listing of his published works. Seems he has over a half a dozen books on humor to his credit. 🙂
I found the two I had in a second-hand book store quite cheaply some years ago when I was into finding rare tomes and manuscripts (Amazing what you can find in second-hand bookstores that they don’t even know they have!)
I had for some years an official copy (Only 100 were created just after WW2, and many have been lost or destroyed,) of the original handwritten manuscript for the Rev. C. Dodgson’s (Lewis Carroll) tale of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ he wrote to entertain Alice Liddell. It was much better than the published, printed book. The original was about 100 pages handwritten and full of images (he was also quite good at drawing). It was greatly expanded during publishing as it would have been a very small book otherwise. 😉
He did have a lot of diverse interests.
Yes, a story written to entertain a child would be shorter and contain illustrations, like the Beatrix Potter books, but the publishers were obviously more interested in something for parents at bedtime.
Any number of books started as extended short stories with more written to fill in the spaces.
The problem with collecting valuable books is that you have to be so careful when reading them. You can’t just put them down anywhere, and you certainly can’t eat while reading them for fear of staining them.
I would love to have all of books in electronic form, and a printer capable of running off a paperback when I felt like reading one.