If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of the David Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the upper of the first two David Bowies and wrapped the whole business up in a dirty beach robe you would then have something which didn't exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would find hauntingly familiar.
-Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
What to Do If You Find Yourself in the Digestive Tract of an Arcturian Megawhale
Summary: Arthur and Ford have found themselves in a rather dangerous and untenable situation. Unfortunately for them, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy now requires its readers to view an unskippable thirty-second ad before accessing its valuable and potentially life-saving content.
Rating: G
Wordcount: 2,753
Excerpt:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a wholly remarkable book. Not only was it a wholly remarkable book, it was also a highly successful one— more popular than One Hundred and One Surprisingly Unique Ways to Fold a Lemon-Soaked Paper Napkin, better selling than The Beginner's Guide to Advanced Temporal Anomaly Etiquette, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's needlessly exhaustive six-volume theological polemic Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes, Who Is This God Person Anyway?, Well That About Wraps It Up For God, God: The Unabridged Biography of A Being Who Doesn't Even Exist, and Why Should We Even Care About God At This Point? It even once contained the only commercially published article concerning a small blue-green planet in the unfashionable backwaters of the western spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, which is hardly consequential now that it's been destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass, which has, incidentally, never been built and never will have been built, due to a freakish space-time anomaly— the kind of colossal cockup that only occurs at the tail end of obscenely long chains of bureaucratic nonsense.
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide had once supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it had many omissions and contained much that was apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scored over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. Firstly, it was slightly cheaper; and secondly it had the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large, friendly letters on its cover.
"Don't get it twisted!," some will cry, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is still a wholly remarkable book. It is still more popular than A Short History of Getting Lost, better selling than One Hundred and One Places to Avoid Before You Die, and heaps more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's agonizingly comprehensive, spectacularly over-researched, and aggressively annotated A Brief Rebuttal of Everyone. It is still slightly cheaper than the Encyclopedia Galactica, and it still has the words DON'T PANIC written in large, friendly letters on its cover. It's still the best way to learn how to see the entire galaxy for less than thirty Altairian dollars a day, adjusting for inflation, so what is all this nonsense using the past tense, anyway?
Those people are, in some respects, wholly correct. So what, you may ask, is the issue?
As it happens, certain decisions made by certain marketing departments on certain planets where a certain office building can be found have rendered The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy very difficult, or at least woefully inefficient to use. This, other less outspoken individuals would argue, nullifies any previous usefulness it may have had.
It can still tell you where to find the only decent cup of tea within forty-seven parsecs of Altair Beta, and why the owner of the establishment refuses to serve anyone named Keith; how to survive a weekend in the Swulling Marshes of Squornshellous Zeta without accidentally getting elected mayor; where to purchase a replacement Babel Fish after yours swims away with someone else's ear; how to identify counterfeit Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters before they identify you; and how to legally change your name if it just so happens to be Keith.
The problem is that you now have to watch an unskippable thirty-second ad first— a length of time which, when faced with certain death in the maw of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, matters quite a lot, incidentally. And since this wholly remarkable book is published in the form of a micro-sub-meson electronic component, this new, updated version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was entirely unavoidable. Galactic transients everywhere woke up one day to find their copies inexplicably hobbled by a veritable tsunami of intrusive, extremely loud, and annoying advertisements for things they didn't want, couldn't afford, or did consider buying, before the aforementioned advertisements made them so annoyed they didn't want them anymore.
Я доозвучил второй эпизод радиосериала по Путеводителю, но переслушивая понял, что начало, записанное два месяца назад никуда не годится
Будем перезаписывать
