Complete and Entirely Without Any Bridge

I’ve been in a time-warp lately. Mentally, I’m stuck some place around those amoebic years I refer to as “College.” I’m a little fuzzy on how I got to this point, but I think it goes something like this: I was attempting to recommend a book to someone. I remember the book as having quirky humor, most of which resonated in the form of obscure catch-phrases and abstract ideas not unlike the works of Monty Python but without the wide and deserving fan base.

So I started re-reading that book that I first read in college. All this time, I have been wondering, “Why?” My roommate back then recommended it for me. He thought I would enjoy it. In retrospect, that may have been a subtle insult. I tried to explain it to a co-worker.

“That looks like a big, old, book.”
“Not really. It’s several books in a leather-bound compellation of…um...4 or 5 books. It’s ironically referred to as a trilogy.”
“Is that why it says, ‘Complete and Unabridged’?”
“Uh… sure!”
“It looks funny. Is it funny?”
“It is if you don’t mind over-thinking things.”
“Oh. Nevermind.”

And that’s when I remembered why I was recommended to read it (which is really what happened.) I tend to over-think things. Some might say it’s my defining characteristic. It is also why I ended up with a minor in Philosophy. I’m still trying to work-out how to make that into anything other than a complete waste of money. The best I’ve got: “I bundled it.”

The author (Douglas Adams) describes the “book” (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) as “science-fiction humor.” That sounds more like a genre than a description, but it is technically correct. What is entirely correct is that his “humor” borrows from multiple branches on intellect, including, but not limited to, theoretical physics, actual physics, philosophy, mathematics, cosmology, and generally a bunch of stuff I really have no accurate labels for including those I just listed. But all that is just to lend plausibility to the plot—which is about some stuff that happens to some characters and how they react to that stuff. For real fun, he sprinkles in chunks of flare, like… cocktails… and grammar. Maybe I should give an example:

The Infinite Improbability Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances in a mere nothingth of a second, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace… The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking logic circuits to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Browian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood—and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess’s undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy. Many respectable physicists said that they weren’t going to stand for this, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn’t get invited to those sorts of parties…

The whole book doesn’t read like that, just interjectory explanation-stuff. But wait, there’s more! Like dialogue! And poetry! And drinking games! And poetry about drinking games!

Two contestants would sit either side of a table, with a glass in front of each of them. Between them would be placed a bottle of Janx Spirit (as immortalized in that ancient Orion mining song: “Oh, don’t give me no more of that Old Janx Spirit/No, don’t give me no more of that Old Janx Spirit/For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and I may die/Won’t you pour me one more of that Old Janx Spirit.”)

And, so, a bit on grammar is perfectly logical.

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioneer’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from the time in the further future, or a time in the further past. Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact, in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.

But, my favorite at the moment is this one:

The Bistromathic Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances without all that dangerous mucking about with Improbability Factors. Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer’s movement in space, and that time was not an absolute but depended on the observer’s movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants. The first non-absolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or to the number of people who subsequently join them after the show/game/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has turned up. The second non-absolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of those most bizarre of mathematical concepts: a recipriversexcluson—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. The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the check, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are prepared to pay for. (The number of people who have actually brought money is only a subphenomemon in this field.) Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of the restaurant do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. On a waiter’s check pad, reality and unreality collide on such a fundamental level that each becomes the other and anything is possible, within certain parameters. Which parameters is, of course, impossible to say.

And over the course of it all, the reader discovers alternate explanations for the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. The answer is 42. In learning that, you are also given an explanation of why the earth was created in the first place. All of which is not to undervalue the subtle mis-interpretation people chronically express about our true relationship with dolphins and mice.

I’m still arguing with myself whether I should even finish it. I probably will. For some reason, I need the distraction. Don’t ask me why. It will only confuse you.