I apologize in advance for the filler post, but rereading this series was one of my Things and it’s moving right along. Thus, I’m posting about it.

My reread of the Hitchhiker’s series is now 40% done. (Actually closer to 50% because I’m already halfway through book three.) I finished reading book two, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe last week. I didn’t like it as much as I remembered, although it’s still hilarious.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Life is wasted on the living.

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’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 a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?

I’m just about done with Life, the Universe, and Everything. I’d forgotten all about Bistromath. Douglas Adams is just so clever. I’ve really got to get a move on with the reading though. According to my math for the Read or Rid Thing, I need to be finishing a book every eight days for the next six and a half years to complete that one.