posted
Since it just came out in a movie that, all in all, I found a reasonably good representation of the book and *very* well acted, I thought I would post a few lines of the original text.
quote: 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 roughtly ninety-eight 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 rather 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 that small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said even the trees had been a bad move, and no one should ever have left the oceans.
posted
Ah, yes, Douglas Adams! I really enjoyed this book and second. I was mildly amused by the third and wasted my time on the fourth and didn't bother with the fifth.
posted
That advice about the towel is actually a crock, you know. The most basic problem with it is that 90% of sentients in the galaxy don't know what a "towel" is in our context. If they see you wandering around with an absorbant cloth, they'll assume a lot of different things, but that you can't possibly be a simple vagrent won't be one of them.
It's actually much better to have nothing except the clothes on your back. And if at least one or two items of your apparel are cotton, you have an expedient towel should the need arise.
That's part of what makes the books so funny. Adam's is being intentionally ridiculous about almost everything, including the movement of small green pieces of money, which he fervently believed were the key to making people happier and better. The fact that I disagree with him completely doesn't make that line any less amusing, either.
posted
Um, I don't think Adams really did believe that the movements of the little green pieces of paper were the key to making everyone happy - or at least, I certainly didn't get that impression from his work. I thought the point was about humanity's capacity for self-delusion - most people (in "Western" culture) do seem to think that money's what's important, but a lot of people who work very hard to become rich don't actually get any happier. Sadly, rather than learn from this, they tend to assume that they just don't have enough of the green bits of paper yet, and maybe if they try even harder and acquire even more...
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