Hi there,
No fiction book has brought me more joy, satisfaction, and imagination than The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy hexology by Douglas Adams.
Here we go!! with excerpts:
“ #1
Zaphod Beeblebrox entered the foyer. He strode up to the insect receptionist.
“OK,” he said, “Where’s Zarniwoop? Get me Zarniwoop.”
“Excuse me, sir?” said the insect icily. It did not care to be addressed in this manner.
“Zarniwoop. Get him, right? Get him now.”
“Well, sir,” snapped the fragile little creature, “if you could be a little cool about it …”
“Look,” said Zaphod, “I’m up to here with cool, OK? I’m so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat inside me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis. Now, will you move before you blow it?”
“Well, if you’d let me explain, sir,” said the insect tapping the most petulant of all the tentacles at its disposal, “I’m afraid that isn’t possible right now as Mr Zarniwoop is on an intergalactic cruise.”
Hell, thought Zaphod.
“When he’s going to be back?” he said.
“Back sir? He’s in his office.”
Zaphod paused while he tried to sort this particular thought out in his mind. He didn’t succeed.
“This cat’s on an intergalactic cruise … in his office?” He leaned forward and gripped the tapping tentacle.
“Listen, three eyes,” he said, “don’t you try to outweird me. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.”
— The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
“ #2
“Hello,” said the elevator sweetly, “I am to be your elevator for this trip to the floor of your choice…”
“Yeah,” said Zaphod, stepping into it, “what else do you do besides talk?”
“I go up,” said the elevator, “or down.”
“Good,” said Zaphod, “We’re going up.”
“Or down,” the elevator reminded him.
“Yeah, OK, up please.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Down’s very nice,” suggested the elevator hopefully.
“Oh yeah?”
“Super.”
“Good,” said Zaphod, “Now will you take us up?”
“May I ask you,” inquired the elevator in its sweetest, most reasonable voice, “if you’ve considered all the possibilities that down might offer you?”
Zaphod knocked one of his heads against the inside wall. He didn’t need this, he thought to himself, this of all things he had no need of.
Modern elevators are strange and complex entities.
This is because they operate on the curios principle of “defocused temporal perception”. In other words, they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing, and making friends that people were previously forced to do whilst waiting for elevators.
Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking.
An impoverished hitch-hiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators.
— The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980).
“ #3
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation, he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while, he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn’t know about.
— The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (1979).
“ #4
One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn’t be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so—but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous. This above all appeared to Trillian to be genuinely stupid, but she could no longer be bothered to argue about it.
— The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (1979).
“ #5
Last night I was worrying about this again. About the fact that part of my mind just didn’t seem to work properly. Then it occurred to me that the way it seemed was that someone else was using my mind to have good ideas with, without telling me about it. I put the two ideas together and decided that maybe that somebody had locked off part of my mind for that purpose, which was why I couldn’t use it. I wondered if there was a way I could check.
I went to the ship’s medical bay and plugged myself into the encephalographic screen. I went through every major screening test on both my heads—all the tests I had to go through under Government medical officers before my nomination for presidency could be properly ratified. They showed up nothing. Nothing unexpected at least. They showed that I was clever, imaginative, irresponsible, untrustworthy, extrovert, nothing you couldn’t have guessed. And no other anomalies. So I started inventing further tests, completely at random.
Nothing. Then I tried superimposing the results from one head on top of the results from the other head. Still nothing. Finally I got silly, because I’d given it all up as nothing more than an attack of paranoia. Last thing I did before I packed it in was take the superimposed picture and look at it through a green filter. You remember I was always superstitious about the color green when I was a kid? I always wanted to be a pilot on one of the trading scouts?
Ford nodded.
“And there it was,” said Zaphod, “clear as day. A whole section in the middle of both brains that related only to each other and not to anything else around them. Some bastard had cauterized all the synapses and electronically traumatized those two lumps of cerebellum.”
Ford stared at him, aghast. Trillian had turned white.
“Somebody did that to you?” whispered Ford.
“Yeah.”
“But have you any idea who? Or why?”
“Why? I can only guess. But I do know who the bastard was.”
“You know? How do you know?”
“Because they left their initials burned into the cauterized synapses. They left them there for me to see.”
Ford stared at him in horror and felt his skin begin to crawl.
“Initials? Burned into your brain?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what were they, for God’s sake?”
Zaphod looked at him in silence again for a moment. Then he looked away.
“Z.B.,” he said quietly.
— The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (1979).
//
If you enjoy satirical science-fiction, I highly recommend reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy hexology in this order:
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy → The Restaurant at the End of the Universe → Life, the Universe and Everything → So Long, and Thanks for All The Fish → Mostly Harmless→ And Another Thing.If you prefer a podcast format, here is the original series of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy radio show originally aired on BBC Radio 4 in 1978.
What are your favourite paragraphs in your current reads? Let me know, by replying to this email.
Best Stuff I Read
1. Jose Mourinho
There is a difference between success and a successful career.
Success can be related to your talent but can be just the fact you are in a certain place in the right moment, at the right time.
Another thing is a successful career, which is based on year after year after year, I always wanted that kind of career. It’s part of my DNA.
2. An Interview with Sriram Krishnan
What a lot of people think of as raw IQ from CEOs is actually
a) access to information from smart people
b) the compounding effects of (a).
When you’re the founder/CEO of an iconic company, you can tap into the knowledge/expertise/raw intellect of the top percentile in any field of your choosing. The compounding effect of that is remarkable because you can sit at the intersection of many domains and see patterns very few can.”.
→ Full Post.
3. A Mathematical Model of Perfectionism
Perfectionism makes sense. After all, who wouldn’t want to deliver polished finished goods? But like an undefined relationship, it’s actually quite complicated — “a complex interplay between effort, time, motivation, and expectations.” If you’re having trouble “letting go,” these cheeky mathematical models will offer concrete first steps to finding what’s “good enough.”
What I’m Watching
A physician who can talk to animals embarks on an adventure to find a legendary island with a young apprentice and a crew of strange pets.
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Until next Saturday, have a happy weekend.
Solomon Muigai.