S.P.A.C.E....

Enclosed herewith for your Delectation and Appreciation is a lithograph "a friend" recently procured for me at a certain bawdyhouse where it languished barely noticed on the dingy wall of some squalid upstairs accomodation. Legend has it that this fell through some kind of "time warp" (?) from the distant past ... or was it the distant future? O well, "my friend" informs me that they tell many Tall Tales at that House of disputable repute.

Please present said enclosed Work of Art, with my compliments and Best Wishes, to dearest Mr. Kite, and do convey my "regrets" for not doing so personally.

Very truly yours, your obt. svt.
J-daddy O'douga

Time Traveling

One of the major problems encountered with time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother.

There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broadminded and well adjusted family can't cope with. There is also no problem about 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.
---Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Penultimate Questions

What was Jackie Robinson's Baseball Jersey number?

The cover of the original UK paperback edition of the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyIn The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (published in 1979), the characters visit the legendary planet Magrathea, home to the now-collapsed planet-building industry, and meet Slartibartfast, a planetary coastline designer who was responsible for the fjords of Norway.


Through archival recordings, he relates the story of a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who built a computer named Deep Thought to calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

When the answer was revealed to be 42, Deep Thought had predicted that another computer, more powerful than itself would be made and designed by it to calculate the question for the answer. (Later on, referencing this, Adams would create the 42 Puzzle, a puzzle which could be approached in multiple ways, all yielding the answer 42.)

Here is the answer. What are the 42 questions?

2 Hints:
a) "How many questions are there in the 42 Puzzle?"
b) See blog entry title




FACTOIDS:

-- There are 42 eggs in 3 1/2 dozen of Eggs.

-- The President of the United States, between "the bushes" was #42.

-- People born in 1942, were 42 in 1984, leading some to speculate a time-space relationship between Douglas Adams and George Orwell.

-- There are no Wikipedia entries for the date April 2, 1942 (4/2/42)

Duck?

"Even the sceptical mind must be prepared to accept the unacceptable when there is no alternative. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands." -- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency