“Whatever you want it to be?” Kind of ruins the flow, doesn’t it?
Ultimate Answer:
42
Ultimate Question:
What is the product of six and nine?
God’s final message to their creation:
WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE
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Not to be confused with the final question, “can entropy be reversed?”
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I’ve long been amused at the ASCII connection with 42. I discovered the Guide way back in the mid-80s, when ASCII was all there was (no Unicode or other fancy stuff yet). I’d assumed Adams chose it on purpose, as the asterisk is the symbol for multiplication (“growth”) or a wildcard (“anything”).
I like thinking there’s some connection there, but I also like the notion that he just threw a dart at a map to pick it. Very fitting in its own way.
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Adams was a better man than I am… I would have totally gone along with the “secret explanation” that made me look like a genius.
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Hmmm…I just assumed Adams was 42 when he wrote the teleplay/novel/radioplay/whatever was the first iteration.
Fascinating, Captains!
OK, well, I guess I can factoid the younglings that ASCII is a seven-bit code, with one bit as padding.
I’m pretty sure that’s still true. Therefore random fact.
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Adams was a wee lad of 25 when he first started working on HHGG. And a sprightly young man of 49 when he died.
Now I am sad.
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How much more could he have given us? If someone kept locking him in hotel rooms to finish them, anyway.
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U.S. toilet paper patent from 1891, proving, despite what my wife thinks, that YOU PUT IT SO THE PAPER IS IN THE FRICKIN FRONT!
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Unless you have cats.
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Keep them out of the bathroom. Only monsters put the paper in the back.
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Nah keeping cats out of anywhere is too much work. I’m with @Raymond here, there are two ways to hang the paper: the right way and the cat way.
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After 20-something years and multiple cats, never once have I encountered issues with them pulling out the paper.
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Then you should hang it overhand. It’s not all cats, but some will unspool a whole roll in two minutes just to see the look on your face.
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This is a long video, so I don’t expect anyone to watch it, but I just found out that there is strong genetic evidence, I would go as far as saying proof, that Polynesians and native South Americans had pre-Columbian contact, which is just so cool.
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A supporting actor in this last season of HBO’s TV show Barry is named Fred Melamed.
He is not, in fact, Stephen Tobolowsky with a few more years and a little extra padding on him.
That is true. But you’d be forgiven for making that mistake.
Fred is also not related to either Malamud, father and son conquerers of literary fiction. Just wanted to make that very clear! Also, it appears Bernard Malamud may not have had a son who was also a writer…but he could have!
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It wasn’t until 1930 that splinter free toilet paper was invented.
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Ralph Mooney, legendary pedal steel guitar player (and co-writer of the much-covered hit tune “Crazy Arms”), was ousted from Merle Haggard’s group “The Strangers” after stealing the band’s tour bus in the middle of the night and attempting to drive it home, from the middle of nowhere in particular.
Alcohol may have been a factor.
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I call this a fact: one should probably not take OTC so-called “water pills” (diuretics, of which I favor Diurex Max) without ready access to some appropriate “facilities” or a decent-sized receptacle of some kind.
For they are effective!
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…right, that was essentially a B-movie at the time.
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