“His voice was a low soft purr, like the low soft purr made by the opening of an ICBM silo.”
Douglas Adams ruled. Mike Portnoy got me turned on to this author in hysterical geology class back in 1890.
I used this one in a seminar paper:
Now it is such a bizarrely improbably coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful [the Babel fish] could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (book one of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series), p. 50
Importantly, I learned that there is no place in academia for colorful writing.
Check the blogrolls for some cool DA sites.
We named our daughter, Zaphod, after a character in a D.A. novel – also have some signed (by the actual author) copies of is books on our bookshelf.
BTW, I didn’t think Geology was funny in the 1890’s
You are right of course, fun with rocks was not invented until the 1980s. (See # vi.)
How is old Zaphod doing? (“If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now”) I assume she still doesn’t have the 2 heads and 3 arms of the original.