yellow sun

special from our friend in space-ular techtronics justice monix moniker honking field hockey beer jester and disco technician, solid, who artagulated the juxtopositioning of sad satellites for the cheery cherry gardens of sky networks and blue lights nodder fondler of switches and dials, in case you missed it, here he is again:  love you douglas, from aqua q.

"

 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-two 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 the small

green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the 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 suggested that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no

one should ever have left the oceans.

Then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man

had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be

nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a

small cafe in Rickmansworth England suddenly realized what it was that

had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the

world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was

right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to

anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a telephone to tell anyone

about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea

was lost forever.

This is not her story.

But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some

of its consequences.

It is also the story of a book. A book called The Hitch Hiker's

Guide to the Galaxy - not an Earth book, never published on

Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or even

heard of by any Earthman.

Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.

It is, perhaps, the most remarkable book ever to come out

of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor - of which no

Earthman had ever heard either.

Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly

successful one - more popular than the Celestial Home Care

Omnibus, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Zero

Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of

philosophical blockbusters: Where God Went Wrong, Some More of

God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

And in many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Easterni

Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's Guide has already supplanted

the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of

all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and

contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate,

it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important

respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words

Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its

extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these

consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable

book begins very simply.

It begins with a house"