When I was [in Canada] I found their jokes like their roads -- not very
long and not very good, leading to a little tin point of a spire which
has been remorselessly obvious for miles without seeming to get any
nearer.
-- Samuel Butler
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....
Life, you know, is rather like opening a tin of sardines. We are all of us
looking for the key. And I wonder, how many of you here tonight have wasted
years of your lives looking behind the kitchen dressers of this life for
that key?...