Put away your worries, the world is a good and perfect place. It is in
fact very easy.
-- Fenchurch in "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish" by Douglas Adams
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....
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what
they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed
that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so
much -- the wheel, New York wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins
had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time....
The startling truth finally became apparent, and it was thi Numbers
written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow
the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in
any other parts of the Universe....