"Vogon Constructor Fleets. Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from
a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy--
not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They
wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous
Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent
back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and
finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.
The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his
throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
On no account allow a Vogon to read poetry at you."
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
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 the Poet Master
Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found
in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of his audience died of internal
hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council
survived by gnawing one of his own legs off....
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....
