WHOP!

it is a known fact that careless talks cost lives, but the full scale of the problem is never greatly appreciated.

for an instance, when walking back from eating a late dinner consisting of eight wontons in a noodle soup, i glanced around at the quiet atmosphere around me, then up at the clear night sky, then at an empty bus passing by, and finally said to myself: "i think i'm quite content with my life right now," three thousand four hundred and twenty five butterflies in china died, fell to the ground, and got washed away by the blowing wind. then somewhere in the south pole, all the ice melted, creating a huge wave that dragged thousands of helpless sleeping penguins all the way to the coastline of brazil, where they eventually died not because of the stroking heat, but because they did not have money to buy brazilian icecream.

this is somewhat similar, although clearly not as massive, to the fates of the vl'hurgs and g'gugvuntt after discovering that the source of misunderstanding that led to the most devastating war between the two races was a human being named arthur dent, whose careless talk "i seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style," got carried away by a freak wormhole into the galaxy where these two races lived, and decided that they would launch a joint attack on our galaxy, which was positively identified to be the source of the conflict. a terrible miscalculation of scale, however, caused the mighty ships that had traveled thousands of years through the vast, empty space to end up being swallowed by a small dog, obliterating the entire battlefleet.

i went and bought life, the universe, and everything at the bookstore today. no, not literally. it's the third of douglas adams book, and the one that cracked me up the most of the first three that i've read. it was so bizarrely amusing that i decided not to go back to the lab after lunch and treat myself to an early friday by spending the rest of the day reading the book. bistromathics is beautiful, and i definitely need to get the ultra-complete maximegalon dictionary of every language ever because i really want to know what flolloped, flurred, glurried, gupped, willomied, and floopy mean.

trying to learn how to fly isn't hard. i mean, arthur managed to do it. the only trick, or knack to this is learning how to throw yourself to the ground and miss. the former is easy, but the latter is rather hard. once you are able to do this, though, keep in mind:

do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful. they are most likely to say something along the lines of "GOOD GOD, YOU CAN'T POSSIBLY BE FLYING!"

it is vitally important to not believe them or they will suddenly be right.

also, if you are particularly amused with the whale scene from the first book, you will find out why the bowl of petunia said "oh no, not again," as it popped into existence and fell down from the sky. who would have thought that the bowl of petunia could hold a grudge against arthur dent? here's a spoiler on what the petunia claimed to have experienced at that moment:

i got yanked involuntarily back into the physical world, as a bunch of petunias. in, i might add, a bowl. this particular happy little life started off with me, in my bowl, unsupported, three-hundred miles above the surface of a particularly grim planet. not a naturally tenable position for a bowl of petunias, you might think. and you'd be right. that life ended a very short while later, three-hundred miles lower. in, i might again add, the fresh wreckage of a whale.

a bunch of awesomely bizzarely nonsensically hilarious lines from this third book, which has now become a personal favorite:

~~ none of these facts, however strange or inexplicable, is as strange or inexplicable as the rules of the game of brockian ultra cricket, as played in the higher dimensions. a full set of rules is so massively complicated that the only time they were all bound together in a single volume they underwent gravitational collapse and became a black hole.

~~ wherever he touched himself, he encountered a pain. after a short while he worked out that this was because it was his hand that was hurting

~~ the unsteadiness of building's flight made him feel sick with fear, and after a short time, he took the towel out of his bag, and did something with it which once again justified its supreme position in the list of useful things to take with you when you hitchhiker round the galaxy-he put it over his head so he wouldn't have to see what he was doing.

~~ the party and the krikkit warship looked, in their writhings a little like two ducks, one of which is trying to make a third duck inside the second duck, while the second duck is trying very hard to explain that it doesn't feel ready for a third duck right now, is uncertain that it would want any putative third duck to be made by this particular first duck anyway, and ceertainly not while it, the second duck, was busy flying. (this one managed to keep me laughing like a madman for a good ten minutes or less)

~~ zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, decided just as discretion was the better part of valor, so was cowardice the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a closet.

~~ he hoped an prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. then he realized that there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.

oh, the salmon of doubt is tomorrow.

happy birthday to columbine, if she happens to be reading this.