How About A Cup Of The Answer To Everything?

Reiner Schulz writes "Douglas Adams admittedly was a big fan of Earl Grey tea. Here's his enlightening entry in H2G2 on the subject (pretty much straight out of The Salmon of Doubt). And those familiar w/ the Hitchhiker's Guide will remember the drink dispenser from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe which, trying to figure out how to brew the perfect cuppa, grabs all available computing resources on board a certain starship. What a coincidence then that one of the finest blends of Earl Grey on the planet in general and in the UK in particular is Harrods' Earl Grey, Blend No. ... 42 . It's a plausible theory as to the origin of the answer to everything, isn't it? Earl Grey addicts like myself will certainly agree (even though Douglas liked his w/ milk; I prefer lemon). So, what would be the question? Perhaps, how about a nice cup of tea?"

Comments

he went far too soon

[havaloc]

The early loss of Douglas Adams is really a loss to the whole world. He really brought something special, and the world is a darker place without him. Read his books if you haven't, they are great.

Re:42 == Divinely chosen number?

[squiggleslash]

This would of course require that Adams was purchasing Harrod's Earl Grey at the time, which is highly unlikely. Adams was a struggling author at the time of HG2TG, and BBC Radio was not exactly the way to make a fortune.

The idea, therefore, that he was regularly shopping at Harrods, a purveyor of exceedingly expensive goods, to get tea, strikes me as totally absurd. It's not as if you can't/couldn't get Earl Grey at the local Sainsbury (even back then in the late seventies, my dad drank it.)

This is an utterly bizarre theory. I don't believe it for a second.

Re:42 == Randomly chosen number

[Jeremi]

Douglas Adams also wrote the following. He was describing Dirk Gently at the time, but the quotation below shows that Adams was well aware of the technique...

People gravitated around [Dirk], drawn in by the stories he denied about himself, but what the source of these stories might be, if not his own denials, was never entirely clear.

The tales had to do with the psychic powers that he'd supposedly inherited from his mothe'rs side of the family who he claimed, had lived at the smarter end of Transylvania. That is to say, he didn't make any such claim at all, and said it was the most absurd nonsense. He strenuously denied that there were bats of any kind at all in his family and threatened to sue anybody who put about such malicious fabrications, but he affected nevertheless to wear a large and flappy leather coat, and had one of those machines in his room which are supposed to help cure bad backs if you hang upside down from them. He would allow people to discover him hanging from this machine at all kinds of odd hours of the day, and more particularly of the night, expressly so that he could vigorously deny that it had any significance whatsoever.

By means of an ingenious series of strategically deployed denials of the most exciting and exotic things, he was able to create the myth that he was a psychic, mystic, telepathic, fey, clairvoyant, psychosassic vampire bat.

What did "psychosassic" mean?

It was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meant anything at all.

I still reckon that 42 is...

[Ambush]

Having recently become a father (again) I still go by my pet theory that 42 could be the number of days between the birth of the child and when the doc gives the all clear for hanky-panky again. ;-)

Anyone who is a parent knows that the first thing you do when your baby is born is to book the grandparents (as baby-sitters) six weeks in advance (42 days/nights) so you can have the house to yourselves.

heh. Works for me.