The Vogons are beside the point. they are simply slug-brained bureaucrats. Ultimately, they were merely pawns, manipulated by a shadowy cabal of psychiatrists, who wanted the Earth eliminated in all possible parallel dimensions because they wanted all possible Questions to the answer of Life the Universe, and Everything completely eliminated forever. (since they'd subsequently be out of a job -- it's a concern as old as Deep Thought itself)

The following paragraph is offered for the confused (who may rest assured that it is unlikely to alter said state).

It is of course well known that the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is "42". Unfortunately, Arthur Dent's brainwave patterns are the closest the Universe ever gets to figuring out what the Question actually is. He was present on the Earth (which was, in fact, a computer built for the specific purpose of sussing out the Question, running a multi-million year program so complex that lifeforms living upon it formed part of its operational matrix), moments before its program was about to reach completion and spit out the Ultimate Question (and indeed moments before it was blown to smithereens by the Vogons ostensibly to make way for a Hyperspace Bypass). As a result, imprinted upon Arthur's subconscious is the final result of the Earth's program: "what do you get if you multiply six by nine?" This is no doubt some kind of perversion of the real Question, due to the fact that a few million years prior, the pre-human natives of Earth were wiped out by the useless castoffs of another civilization, which had cruelly shipped off all their moronic middle-men, telephone cleaners, and advertising agents to exile on Earth. Arthur Dent and every other human on Earth ended up descended from these idiots instead of the Neanderthals that had evolved on Earth as part of its program, and as a result its program had become corrupt.

Even in its corrupted form, Arthur's answer hints that the true Question may indeed be just as inane as the Answer. At the risk of editorializing, this supposition seems in no way inconsistent with my personal experiences within the Universe in question.

old man yells at solid state pinball machine . jpg

the producer here decided to show us this guy's mug for 90% of the run time. i am struggling to understand, though, why it was interrupted with occasional 3-second snippets of PINBALL MACHINES, though.

well, technically, wouldn't the convicted murder BECOME an astronaut by definition the moment we shot him into space?

slashdot is really provoking the deep questions today.

i agree the reversed lower playfield can be a bit disorienting at first, but let's not get melodramatic -- since there are no outlanes in the gravity well, a quick SDTM drain is really the only way to die down there, and completing either bank of drop targets opens the re-entry gate anyway.

swarms of robots.

:|

yeah ... i liked the casting in theory but then not so much in practice. i know what you mean.

i think my absolute favorite part is the destruction scene: the brutal, stomping musical queues as the camera zooms out from the rubble of arthur's home to outer space, giving a true sense of the mind-breaking scale of the vogon fleet, before it simply ploops the earth into oblivion.

Although uneven, the movie was not bad, with a few brilliant parts. it's not like it's "blasphemous" -- Adams himself wildly changed the story every time it switched mediums. It's got most of the best bits from the book, plus a new ending that does more than just stop (as the book does), and as a bonus it does a great job of capturing Adams' absolute love and fascination with life itself.

not saying it's great beginning to end, but acting like it's any more uneven than a lot of his books is silly.

"both sides are equally bad/dishonest/wrong" is the biggest political cop-out ever. it's sad that such pat vaguaries aren't instantly embarassing to the faces they so often fly out of.

you're citing one of the biggest duds of the year as proof the system works? good luck winning people over with that argument.

that would be a neat trick, considering .... anything.

ah yes and if we don't heed the lessons of hollywood blockbusters we are doomed to uh ...

more like 2000ms latency in practice.

to shoot down drones.

it's true that over the last 30 years, the prominence of dogfights in modern warfare declined for a variety of reasons (think of the kind of wars we were engaged in) but if there were a good reason to have them (say, manned aircraft were awesome at shooting down dimwitted, agile-but-slow-to-respond drones) then the practice would rise again.