Don't Panic!

It turns out that I am not the only Douglas Adams geek in my office. Yesterday I got into a conversation with several of my colleagues about the impending release of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. It turns out that they, too, were great fans of the books. And I was pleased to find that none of them was very optimistic about the film, not because I want the film to be bad, but because this demonstrated that I was not alone in my pessimism.

Anyhoo, one of my mates actually outnerded me by emailing me .pdf files of all five books in the trilogy plus Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. So I have been happily scanning about for favorite quotes. Here's one:

After a fairly shaky start to the day, Arthur's mind was beginning to reassemble itself from the shellshocked fragments the previous day had left him with. He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The Nutri-Matic was designed and manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation whose complaints department now covers all the major land masses of the first three planets in the Sirius Tau Star system.

More quotes as the mood takes me.