DON'T PANIC

About this Guide

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times over many years and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers.

It is, however, only marginally less remarkable than the fact that, despite its enormous popularity, you are reading it on what appears to be a perfectly ordinary web browser. Don't worry about it. Most things on the network are perfectly ordinary until they aren't.

On Towels

A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value: you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has a towel, they will automatically assume that he is also in possession of toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, and so on.

On the Babel Fish

The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and excreting a telepathic matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain.

The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

On the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster

The best drink in existence. The effect of drinking one is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. Recipes vary across the galaxy but none should be attempted by amateurs.

On Vogon Poetry

Vogon poetry is, of course, the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent, four audience members died of internal haemorrhaging. The very worst poetry perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, in the destruction of the planet Earth.

"Oh freddled gruntbuggly, thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee..."

Editorial Note

This Guide is provided "as is" with no warranty as to its accuracy. In fact, in many places it is wildly inaccurate. But where it is inaccurate it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it's always reality that's got it wrong.

Submissions, complaints, and entries should be directed to the Sub-Etha mail address below. We regret that we cannot reply to every correspondent personally, on account of most of them being in different time zones, several of them being in different centuries, and one of them being a cup of tea.