What’s in a name?The name of the site comes from first episode of the late, great Douglas Adams’ radio series, book and TV series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s also the name of the fifth book in the “increasingly inaccurately named” Hitchhikers’ Trilogy.In this episode, the Earth has just been destroyed to make way for an interstellar bypass. Arthur Dent, almost the last human alive, is “a bit upset” about this, and is desperate to find out what the Guide has to say about Earth, hoping it will disprove the catastrophe.He’s shocked to find that the entry reads simply “Harmless”.His friend Ford Prefect (an alien from a planet somewhere in the vicinity of Beetlejuice), who had been masquerading as a human on earth for fifteen years, explains that his purpose during this time was to revise the entry on Earth. After some editorial trimming, he explains that his new entry will read “Mostly Harmless”.Here, look: I can prove it:
©2003 BBC Worldwide Ltd. – please don’t sue me!I would say that this is an existentialist comment on the utter meaninglessness of life and man’s inhumanity to man, except that it’s not. I just needed a title for my weblog and I think it’s a really clever piece of humour.
Photo info
The photo in the header bar of this blog was taken from the Kingston Bridge in Glasgow in July 2003. Quite a bit about the river-side skyline has changed since then but I haven’t had a chance (and a sunny day) to take another one.
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