Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly
big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the
drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
-- 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....
