Life, the Universe and Everything. Yes, the third book from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy of five. It’s still great, though not as good as the previous two. But it’s still funny, it’s still weird, full of random moments popping out of nowhere and, bear with me, this is the most important thing of all, it’s still incredibly silly.

Alright, now that the book review is out of the way, let’s talk about the big elephant in the room. Yes, you know what I’m talking about. Even though I’m also quite certain that you haven’t read much (or anything) or heard much (or anything) about it until this moment. I even doubt that you’ve ever watched it before. It turned out to be the highlight of the book. And it’s somehow related to some kind of ashes. I know, it doesn’t really make any sense. Maybe you don’t really care for it. But it’s about to fill a major empty spot in your life. Of course, I’m talking about the greatest sport there is, ever was or ever will be. Not, it’s not football (or soccer, for you Americans). It’s also not basketball. American football? No one cares about that outside the US.

Yes, you got it right. It’s cricket.

If you’ve never heard of cricket, then google it. If you’ve never watched cricket, then go watch it on YouTube. I’m even half shocked, half surprised that the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything isn’t cricket. Or that the question isn’t about cricket. Well, to be honest, I’ve never played it or watched even five minutes of it. But it’s good. Or so they say. I don’t know. I hear it’s as boring as watching a fly flying around. I don’t really care for it. Or do I?

All I know is that it seems to be everywhere ever since I read this book.

As a continuation of Douglas Adams' famous The Hitchiker's Guide Series this was, as indicated by the foreword, one of the most plotted in the series. But as also indicated by the foreword, you don't read The Hitchiker's Guide Series for the plots. So, you ask me, what do you read it for? You read it for the sense of wonder about the crazy place the universe is. You read it for the comedy of Douglas Adams, for his creative and zany use of made up people, places, words...for his use of language. He is a wizard, transforming words into wit to power a laugh within the inner sanctum of your mind as a reader. When you think you've got him figured out, that's when you realise that actually you haven't.

I read elsewhere when attempting to discover what I could about the literary idea of 'deus-ex-machina' that while it is generally frowned upon as poor storytelling that Adams was able to use it brilliantly for humour. Reading this third instalment of his series I saw again that yes, he was able to do exactly that! And at the same time his use of deus-ex-machina also contributes ultimately to the plot (which we as readers of Adams do not care for). In many ways, perhaps unintentionally, Adams therefore shows that he can also use the literary device of 'Chekhov's gun'. Characters and plot ideas introduced earlier in the piece never really go away. Some may be simple ideas thrown in their for an occasional laugh, but if you see Adams mention a fact or a character specifically, especially in a way that's out of the story's usual context then that character or fact will appear later. Such as the idea in this story of flying (and the re-incarnated character - which I thought was brilliant!).

I won't bother with a plot summary. I doubt anyone can sum up the plot in any way that makes much sense. I will say that if you've read the previous books and enjoyed them then this is a similar continuation. If you haven't read any of the previous books don't jump in now. I recommend going back to where there's Vogon poetry and the destruction of the world with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

How can you go wrong with the zany mind of author Douglas Adams? Arthur, living alone on prehistoric Earth, decides happily to himself that he will go mad and announces it to the empty world. Ford, who unexpectedly reappears after being gone for four years, tells Arthur that he went mad for a while and it did him a lot of good. I loved Ford’s description of his bout of self-imposed madness: n  “And then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks. I kept myself amused all that time jumping in and out of a gin and tonic.”n and n  “I found a small lake that thought it was a gin and tonic and jumped in and out of that. At least, I think it thought it was a gin and tonic.” n Then, Arthur and Ford proceed to chase an irrational sofa through time and a cricket match. Weird enough for you yet? That’s only the first few pages of the book…

Maybe it’s the Mathematician in me, but how can you not love the theory of the non-absolute number for the given time of arrival: n  “A number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive.”n?

In chapter 7, a mattress called Zem and Marvin, the depressed robot, have a conversation. I doubt there are any other books out there that feature conversations between mattresses and robots. It does seem like something that I would dream about at night, though… In chapter 17, we learn about the editor that has been out-to-lunch for the last century and about apologizing in sports to your opponent via megaphone. It’s all so very random.

I wish I could share with you the entry on how to fly inside the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but I really don’t want to spoil it for you in case you read the book yourself. I’ve already shared too much as is. Really, you must read this book. I implore you to read it. The madness must be shared! *happy sigh* I adore the lunacy of Douglas Adams ;)

نسبت به دو جلد قبلی یکم ترسناک تر بود ولی بازم دوست داشتنی:)
طنز آدامز یکم منو یاد طنز کالوینو می‌ندازه‌. گرچه مدرن تره.

به به. آقای آدامز و سرکوهی چه کرده‌اند.
هر جلد بهتر از دیگری و هر جلد بهترین. توصیف بهتری ندارم. در عین طنز و ابزورد بودن کلی مفاهیم جالب و قابل‌تامل داره که بسیار خوندن این مجموعه رو لذت‌بخش می‌کنه. کاش تموم نشه.

«سکندری خورد و رفت که بخوره زمین اما چون تو این لحظه ذهنش به هزار چیز دیگه مشغول بود، کاملا فراموش کرد که بخوره زمین و به همین دلیل به زمین نخورد.»
این کتاب جلد سوم کتاب راهنمای کهکشان برای اتواستاپ زن هاست. هر جلدی که میگذره کتاب قشنگ تر ، پرکشش تر و ناب تر میشه .
ترجمه‌ی آرش سرکوهی رو با زبان اصلی مقایسه کردم. واقعا آرش سرکوهی جوری گل کاشته که اصلا پشیمون نیستم که کتاب رو ترجمه خوندم.‌
سه جلد اول رو پشت سرهم خوندم و برای شروع کردن جلد چهارم و پنجم بشدت ذهنم خسته ست و نیاز به یک استراحت دو هفتگی برای ادامه دادن دارم .

I really and truly enjoy the craziness of these books!
Douglas Adams turns the most mundane things into an extraordinary adventure with laughs all the way through.

In a lot of ways, this book is a lot better than Restaurant at the End of the Universe simply because it has a lot more regular plot action and better-defined enemies despite all the Timey-Wimey stuff that comes necessarily with being a hitchhiker.

Things I've learned:

Arthur Dent is a mass murderer. Or a slightly scattered universal-sequential murderer. Or maybe he's just tactless.

Cricket, or rather, the planet Krikkit is full of a bunch of a-holes.

And I've also learned that I REALLY, REALLY don't want to know the truth.


Which is, when you think about it, completely absurd since I'm going to keep reading the series, and it is filled with NOTHING BUT THE UNVARNISHED TRUTH.


On a side note, I do want to mention that I teared up a little bit when I learned how to fly. Again. And I mean not the teary-eyed kind that comes from cooking some onions with olive oil, but tears of sheer amazement that I've always been flying wrong.

And to think that walking was just a bastard version of the same thing: put one foot forward, fall, and fail to hit the ground. Huh. Amazing.

The only thing I didn't like about this book was it's lack of Zaphod Beeblebrox.

People may have noticed that I've recently become very interested in theories of physics which involve multiple universes. I've spent a fair amount of time over the last few weeks reading about them and discussing the ideas.

Since it's buried in one of my other reviews, let me present my conclusions explicitly. To my surprise, I discover that there is a great deal of evidence to support the claim that we are only one of many universes, and, moreover, that we know what these other universes are. The theory isn't particularly flaky or speculative. Or, to be more exact, there is an abundance of flaky and speculative theories, but there is also one which is rooted in mainstream science and already comes close to explaining Life, the Universe and Everything. The idea is simple. There is a way of looking at quantum mechanics - the so-called Many Worlds Interpretation - which, roughly, means that everything which might have happened actually did happen in some alternate universe. These alternate universes are as just real as ours.

Now, one's first reaction to this ought to be that it's nonsense, or at best no more than playing with words. It's easy to say that what might have been is real, but does that actually mean anything? Well, it turns out there is a strong argument which supports the claim that many universes exist. When you look at the different physical constants - things like the strength of gravity, the strength of the electromagnetic force, the relative masses of the proton and the electron, and so on - a weird pattern emerges. There is no known reason why any of these constants should have the values they possess. They appear to be arbitrary numbers. But, if these numbers were even slightly different, life would be completely impossible. The most straightforward way to explain this fact is to suppose that there are many universes, with many different settings for the constants; we happen to live in one of the very few universes where the numbers came out right for life to happen. This argument is presented in detail in Martin Rees's n  Before the Beginningn.

Next, let's look at the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics (MWI). Everyone who reads SF novels has heard of this, but I had always dismissed it as a fringe theory with little credibility. I was surprised to learn from Brian Greene's n  The Hidden Realityn that the MWI has steadily been gaining ground over the last 30 years, and is now considered completely respectable. As Greene explains, everyone agrees on the mathematical theory behind quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation. People know how to do the calculations, and these calculations work spectacularly well. The disagreement is about what the equations actually mean. Greene, and other people you can easily find on the Web, say that the MWI is in fact the simplest and most natural way to give intuitive significance to the mathematics of quantum physics; the traditional "Copenhagen interpretation" due to Niels Bohr and his colleagues is close to mysticism when you try to pin it down, since it makes the human observer an integral part of physics. Quantum physicists are sufficiently uneasy about the choices that the most popular approach is not to ascribe any meaning to the mathematics, but just perform the calculations without asking what they refer to. This is evidently an unusual way to do science.

To summarize, the most natural way to interpret our mainstream scientific theory is to say that there are many alternate universes. The physical evidence also suggests that there are many alternate universes. If the notion weren't so startling, one would just conclude that, since theory and experiment coincide, there must be many alternate universes.

There are plenty of loose ends to tie up, and you can question the logic in several places. (Robert has done a good job of presenting the case for the defense in the comment thread to my Greene review). I still can't quite bring myself to believe it emotionally, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. The other explanations are even more far-fetched; as Sherlock Holmes says, once you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true. Check it out for yourself and see if you agree.
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Looking around for material on the Many Worlds Interpretation, I found a paper by Max Tegmark where the following interesting passage appears:

Is there ... any experiment that could distinguish between ... the MWI and the Copenhagen interpretation using currently available technology? The author can only think of one: a form of quantum suicide in a spirit similar to so-called quantum roulette. It requires quite a dedicated experimentalist, since it is amounts to an iterated and faster version of Schrödinger's cat experiment with you as the cat.

The apparatus is a "quantum gun" which each time its trigger is pulled measures the z-spin of a particle. It is connected to a machine gun that fires a single bullet if the result is "down" and merely makes an audible click if the result is "up". The details of the trigger mechanism are irrelevant (an experiment with photons and a half-silvered mirror would probably be cheaper to implement) as long as the timescale between the quantum bit generation and the actual firing is much shorter than that characteristic of human perception, say 0.01 seconds. The experimenter first places a sand bag in front of the gun and tells her assistant to pull the trigger ten times. [Everyone] agrees that the "shut-up-and-calculate" prescription applies here, and predict that she will hear a seemingly random sequence of shots and duds such as "bang-click-bang-bang-bang-click-clickbang-click-click." She now instructs her assistant to pull the trigger ten more times and places her head in front of the gun barrel. This time the shut-up-and-calculate recipe is inapplicable, since probabilities have no meaning for an observer in the dead state, and the contenders will differ in their predictions. In interpretations where there is an explicit non-unitary collapse, she will be either dead or alive after the first trigger event, so she should expect to perceive perhaps a click or two (if she is moderately lucky), then "game over", nothing at all.

In the MWI, on the other hand, the state after the first trigger event is [...] Since there is exactly one observer having perceptions both before and after the trigger event, and since it occurred too fast to notice, the MWI prediction is that [the experimenter] will hear "click" with 100% certainty. When her assistant has completed his unenviable assignment, she will have heard ten clicks, and concluded that collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics are ruled out at a confidence level of 99.9%. If she wants to rule them out at "ten sigma", she need merely increase n by continuing the experiment a while longer. Occasionally, to verify that the apparatus is working, she can move her head away from the gun and suddenly hear it going off intermittently.

Note, however, that almost all terms in the final superposition will have her assistant perceiving that he has killed his boss. Many physicists would undoubtedly rejoice if an omniscient genie appeared at their death bed, and as a reward for life-long curiosity granted them the answer to a physics question of their choice. But would they be as happy if the genie forbade them from telling anybody else? Perhaps the greatest irony of quantum mechanics is that if the MWI is correct, then the situation is quite analogous if, once you feel ready to die, you repeatedly attempt quantum suicide: you will experimentally convince yourself that the MWI is correct, but you can never convince anyone else!

But is Tegmark really correct in saying that the experimenter would not convince anyone else of the correctness of the MWI? Imagine that you are the assistant in the universe where the experimenter succeeds in cheating death 100 times in a row, after having explained what she is about to do. I, at least, would find this convincing. I wouldn't be able to repeat the experiment (only the person risking their life can do that), but it would still seem way too strange to ascribe to pure chance.

It seems to me that the argument about lucky settings in the physical constants making life possible is related to Tegmark's thought experiment with the quantum gun. We have all been the beneficiaries of, in effect, a long string of clicks, as opposed to bullets. The question is whether this is good evidence of the existence of other quantum worlds. I can see that opinions are divided!
___________________________________

So I was chatting with a CERN physicist today (imagine other people peacefully knitting in the background), and I took the opportunity to ask him why the picture I describe above isn't the standard one.

"Well, it is more or less the standard one!" he said. "At least among cosmologists."

"In that case..." I began, but he cut me short.

"However, it's not the standard picture among theoretical particle physicists," he continued. "And for experimental particle physicists, it's a yet another picture."

"But... if they all know they have different pictures of what's happening, why don't they discuss it until they've agreed which is right?" I asked helplessly.

That CERN shrug again. It's starting to look familiar.

Life, the Universe and Everything (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #3), Douglas Adams
After being stranded on pre-historic Earth after the events in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Arthur Dent is met by his old friend Ford Prefect, who drags him into a space-time eddy, represented by an anachronistic sofa. The two end up at Lord's Cricket Ground two days before the Earth's destruction by the Vogons. Shortly after they arrive, a squad of robots land in a spaceship in the middle of the field and attack the assembled crowd, stealing The Ashes before departing. Another spaceship arrives, the Starship Bistromath, helmed by Slartibartfast (a character in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), who discovers he is too late and requests Arthur and Ford's help. ...

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز هشتم ماه مارس سال 2019 میلادی
عنوان: زندگی، جهان و همه‌چیز؛ نویسنده: داگلاس آدامز؛ مترجم: آرش سرکوهی؛ تهران: نشر چشمه‏‫، 1397؛ در 222 ص؛ شابک: 9786002297556؛

کتاب «زندگی، جهان و همه چیز» جلد سوم رمان دنباله‌ دار «راهنمای کهکشان برای اتواستاپ‌زن‌ها» است. رمان «راهنمای کهکشان برای اتواستاپ‌زن‌ها» مشهورترین اثر نویسندهٔ معروف انگلیسی، داگلاس آدامز و از پُرخوانشگرترین، مطرحترین و موفقترین رمان‌های طنزآمیز و پست‌ مدرنیستی ادبیات معاصر جهان است که با استقبال گستردهٔ خوانشگران و اقبال منتقدان ادبی روبرو بوده است. داگلاس آدامز این رمان را سال 1978 میلادی، در قالب فصل‌های به‌ نسبت مستقل اما پیوسته، به عنوان داستان‌های دنباله‌ دار کوتاه برای رادیو بی‌.بی‌.سی. نوشت و سال 1979 میلادی در قالب رمان منتشر کرد. داستان «راهنمای کهکشان برای اتواستاپ‌زن‌ها» درباره سفر کهکشانی پُرماجرای مردی میان‌مایه از طبقهٔ متوسط انگلیس به نام «آرتور دنت» و نقش ناخواستهٔ او را در یافتن معنای زندگی است «آدامز» در این اثر با نقل داستانی ماجراهایی که در فضای بین‌ کهکشانی و سیاره‌ هایی دور از کرهٔ زمین رخ می‌دهند، زمین، زمان، قدرت، مراجع و اتوریته‌ های جهان معاصر، آدم‌ها و مفاهیم، افکار و کردار انسان‌ها را با زبانی کنایی و طنزی متعالی به نقد می‌کشد. راهنمای کهکشان برای اتواستاپ‌ زن‌ها پس از انتشار با استقبالی کم‌ سابقه روبرو شد و آدامز چهار جلد دیگر این رمان را با عنوان‌های: «رستوران آخر دنیا»، «زندگی، دنیا و همه‌چیز»، «خداحافظ و ممنون از اون‌همه ماهی» و «بیشترش چیز خاصی نیست» در سال‌های 1979 میلادی تا 1992 میلادی خلق و منتشر کرد. «راهنمای کهکشان برای اتواستاپ‌زن‌ها» هم عنوان جلد نخست و هم نام مجموعهٔ پنج‌ جلدی این رمان است. داگلاس آدامز سال 2001 میلادی درگذشت و پس از مرگ او ایون کالفر، نویسندهٔ ایرلندی با بهره‌ گیری از آرشیو، یادداشت‌ها و نوشته‌ های چاپ‌ نشدهٔ داگلاس، جلد ششم و آخرین جلد این رمان را هم با نام «راستی تا یادم نرفته»، در سال 2009 میلادی منتشر کرد. آدامز در رمان راهنمای کهکشان برای اتواستاپ‌زن‌ها، ژانر علمی ـ تخیلی را در ساختاری مستحکم و پیرنگی پُرکشش و جذاب، با طنزی عمیق، چندپهلو، پُرمعنا و هنرمندانه و زبانی روان تلفیق و اثری بدیع و بی‌همتا خلق کرده است. ا. شربیانی

Another world, another day, another dawn.
The early morning’s thinnest sliver of light appeared silently. Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.
There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.

... and then a voice from above utters the words:

“You’re a jerk, Dent!”

Arthur Dent has every reason to be both puzzled and angry at the blue skinned alien called Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged who came over the aeons only to insult him. In the previous two volume the hitchhiking Earthman served as a sort of lightning rod, attracting all sort of (explosive) troubles on his head.

He was stranded on prehistoric earth as the result of a complex sequence of events that had involved his being alternately blown up and insulted in more bizarre regions of the Galaxy than he had ever dreamed existed, and though life has now turned very, very, very quiet, he was still feeling jumpy.
He hadn’t been blown up now for five years.

Arthur Dent should actually rejoice at the respite he gets and at being back on his previously annihilated planet, but prehistoric times had very little to offer in the entertaining department. His melancholic mood is lyrically captured by an author who is more famous for his comedy chops:

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know you’ve taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.   the passage is referring to the troubles with immortality that Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged is experiencing, but for me it has an universal resonance with regard to my own empty and dark weekends with nothing to do

Escape comes in the unusual form of a galloping Chesterfield sofa, but readers familiar with the style of Douglas Adams already know to be prepared for the unexpected and to always have a towel handy before they embark on a new adventure. Arthur Dent and his companion in exile Ford Perfect should also be more careful what they wish for, because times are about to get interesting and the boredom of prehistoric times will be sorely missed : an old friend, a planet designer specialising in shaping fjords, has need of their assistance for nothing less than the saving of the Universe.

“Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and Universe,” said Slartibartfast, “there is a reason.”
Ford glanced sharply around. He clearly thought this was taking an optimistic view of things. [...] “Where are we going?”
“We are going to confront an ancient nightmare of the Universe.”
“And where are you going to drop us off?”
“I will need your help.[...] A curse has arisen from the mists of time. A curse which will engulf the Galaxy in fire and destruction, and possibly bring the Universe to a premature doom. I mean it,” he added.
“Sounds like a bad time,” said Ford; “with luck I’ll be drunk enough not to notice. [...] My doctor says that I have a malformed public duty gland and a natural defficiency in moral fiber, and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes.”

Move over, Mr. Flash Gordon! Arthur Dent is taking over the role of saviour of the Universe and the quest starts right here on Earth (after alittle time travel on the Bistromathic spaceship) when alien war robots from the planet Krikkit are stealing a piece of junk from the middle of a sports field. For many readers, a piece of burned wood from Melbourne, Australia in the year 1882 would mean nothing, to others it is a holy relic of national pride. For Slartibartfast and his unwilling heroes, it is an artefact of ancient power and evil.

The game you know as cricket is just one of those curious freaks of racial memory that can keep images alive in the mind aeons after their true significance has been lost in the mists of time. Of all the races of the Galaxy, only the English could possibly revive the memory of the most horrific wars ever to sunder the Universe and transform it into what I am afraid is generally regarded as an incomprehensibly dull and pointless game.

... and so the journey into danger and adventure begins anew, with only a towel and a small tourist guide in my pockets, ready to witness the neverending wonders of the Universe.
Wheeee!!! Sign me in for the trip, Mr. Adams! Each episode is better than the previous one for me, and I am in awe at the inventivity of the setting, the satirical sharpness of the sketches, the all embracing and gentle acceptance of our human condition in a cold and hostile Universe. So fasten your seatbelts folks, relax and have an enormously long lunch break!  Lunch breaks are apparently the secret of succes in business that all the big megacorporations are keeping mum about. Hurling Frootmig, it is said, founded the Guide, established its fundamental principles of honesty and idealism and went bust. Hurling only recovered when a friendly tip revealed to him the power of the mighty Lunch Break

Riding in a ship powered by advanced mathematics theories ( The Bistromathic Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances without all that dangerous mucking about with Improbability Factors. [...] The most extraordinary thing about it was that it looked only partly like a spaceship with guidance fins, rocket engines and escape hatches and so on, and a great deal like a small, upended Italian bistro. ), a ship made invisible by a force field called “Somebody Else’s Problem” , Arthur and his friends will guide my eyes towards the absurdity of war, making fun I suspect of some of my favorite epic fantasies series in the vein of J R R Tolkien:

The Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax were engaged in one of their regular wars with the Strenuous Garfighters of Stug, and were not enjoying it as much as usual because it involved and awful lot of trekking through the Radiation Swamps of Cwulzenda and across the Fire Mountains of Frazfraga, neither of which terrains they felt at home in.
So when the Strangulous Stillettans of Jajazikstak joined in the fray and forced them to fight another front in the Gamma Caves of Carfrax and the Ice storms on Varlengooten, they decided that enough was enough, and they ordered Hactar to design for them an Ultimate Weapon.
“What do you mean,” asked Hactar, “by Ultimate?”
To which the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax said, “Read a bloody dictionary,” and plunged back into the fray.

Later on I get a chance to take part in the Ultimate Party to end all parties, a millenia long bash on a floating hotel that attracts the Galactic jet-set while making the host planet a wasteland through unbridled consumption and pollution. Sounds familiar? The Romans are reputed to say “Aftee us, the Flood!” and thinks apparently are unchanged in the future. Pro-Tip if you happen to get an invite: don’t use the word Belgium :

“Belgium,” exclaimed Arthur.
A drunken seven-toed sloth staggered past, gawked at the word and threw itself backward at a blurry-eyed pterodactyl, roaring with displeasure.

In between saving the Universe from its latest Ultimate Weapon of Total Annihilation, we might spent a moment on the issue of truth, as in shutting down the voices of reason and moderation:

When it became clear what was happening, and as it became clear that Prak could not be stopped, that here was truth in its absolute and final form, the court was cleared.
Not only cleared, it was sealed up, with Prak still in it. Steel walls were erected around it, and, just to be on the safe side, barbed wire, electric fences, crocodile swamps and three major armies were installed, so that no one would ever have to hear Prak speak.

What exactly did this man Prak know that was so dangerous to the establishement? Was he another Snowden shouting to the world that the emperor has no clothes on? We might never know more than the fact that it has something to do with frogs, because when Prak lays eyes on Arthur Dent mayhem issues:

He howled and screamed with laughter. He fell over backward onto the bench. He hollered and yelled in hysterics. He cried with laughter, kicked his legs in the air, he beat his chest. Gradually he subsided, panting. He looked at them. He looked at Arthur. He fell back again howling with laughter. Eventually he fell asleep.

In the end, laughter may be the best weapon we have at our disposal against the tyranny of people and the tyranny of time. Without a sense of humour life, the universe and everything are pointless and utterly depressing. The final scene is for me essential and relevant, but I think I’d better put it in a spoiler bracket:

Arthur Dent learns how to fly in this episode, he soars high above the petty worries of ordinary existence, and with the help of the Babel Fish he can even learn the language of birds. Are they the ultimate poets of flight or what?
Unfortunately, he discovered, once you have learned birdspeak you quickly come to realise that the air is full of it the whole time, just inane bird chatter. There is no getting away from it.
For that reason Arthur eventually gave up the sport and learned to live on the ground and love it, despite the inane chatter he heard down there as well.
Thank you again, Mr. Douglas, for the wisdom to accept the world as it is and for urging me to laugh on my way to the gallows to the tune of the Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”

An earlier passage is even more evocative for me of the unexpected depths of feeling underlining the hilarity and the sillyness of the expedition:

It seemed to him that the atoms of his brain and the atoms of the cosmos were streaming through each other. It seemed to him that he was blown on the wind of the Universe, and that the wind was him. It seemed to him that he was one of the thoughts of the Universe and that the Universe was a thought of his.

I hope I will find time for the next episode of the Hitchhker’s Guide soon. In the meantime I will let Marvin The Paranoid Android serenade you to sleep:

Now the world has gone to bed,
Darkness won’t engulf my head,
I can see in infrared,
How I hate the night.

Now I lay me down to sleep,
Try to count electric sheep.
Sweet dreams wishes you can keep,
How I hate the night.