almost time now....

How to Leave the Planet

1. Phone NASA. Their phone number is (713) 483-3111. Explain that it’s
very important that you get away as soon as possible.
2. If they do not
cooperate, phone any friend you may have in the White House- (202) 456-1414- to
have a word on your behalf with the guys at NASA.
3. If you don’t have any
friends in the White House, phone the Kremlin (ask the overseas operator for
0107-095-295-9051). They don’t have any friends there either (at least, none to
speak of), but they do seem to have a little influence, so you may as well try.
4. If that fails, phone the Pope for guidance. His telephone number is
011-396-6982, and I gather his switchboard is infallible.
5. If all thee
attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and explain that it’s vitally
important you get away before your phone bill arrives.

Douglas Adams

Los Angeles 1983 and London 1985/1986

~An Introduction for those of you who've never read the wonderfully inaccuratly named Hitchhiker's trilogy.~

“...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-eight million miles is an
utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms
are so amazingly primitive that they 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 movement 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 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 that even the trees had been a bad move and that no one should have ever left the oceans.
And then, on 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 small café in Rickmansworth 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 the phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever
This is not her story.
But it is a story of that terrible, stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.
It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitchhiker’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…”