"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", in a moment of
reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among its current
tally of five million, nine hundred and seventy-three
thousand, five hundred and nine pages, says of the Sirius
Cybernetics Corporation products that "it is very easy to
be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the
sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at
all."
"In other words - and this is the rock-solid principle
on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success
is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely
hidden by their superficial design flaws."
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
The beach was a beach we shall not name, because his private house
was there but it was a small sandy stretch somewhere along the hundreds
of miles of coastline that runs west from Los Angeles, which is
described in the new edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
in one entry as "junky, wunky, lunky, stunky, and what's that other
word, and all kinds of bad stuff, woo," and in another, written only
hours later as "being like several thousand square miles of American
Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth....