Beware of the Leopard: the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy podcast

Join Mark and the Jons as they traverse the V section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with a quick final stop-off at U.

Uncertain Areas

“Wild horses thundered through the sky taking fresh supplies of reinforced railings to the Uncertain Areas”. That’s a line from the popular book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to teh Galaxy, and it describes a thing that happens aboard the starship Heart of Gold, when Ford andn Arthur are brought on-board.

Ursa Minor

Ursa Minor Beta is, some say, one of the most appalling places in the known Universe. Although it is excruciatingly rich, horrifyingly sunny and more full of won derfully exciting people than a pomegranate is of pips, it can hardly be insignificant that when a recent edition of Playbeing magazine headlined an article with the words “When you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta you are tired of life”, the suicide rate quadrupled overnight.

The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word ‘Fuck’ in a Serious Screenplay is an award you can win at the Ursa Minor Alpha Recreational Illusions Institute Awards. The trophy is the silver bail from the Wikkit Key.

Vann Harl

Vann Harl is the Guide editor that took over from Stagyar-zil-Doggo, and a canonical nightmare. In the Quintessential Phase of the radio series, Vann Harl and Zarniwhoop – who we’ll cover later – are the same person, but to my recollection that was not the case in Quintessential Phase, the book the series was based on.

Veet Voojagig

Veet Voojagig was a quiet young student at the University of Maximegalon, who pursued a brilliant academic career studying ancient philology, transformational ethics and the wave harmonic theory of historical perception, and then, after a night of drinking Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters with Zaphod Beeblebrox, became increasingly obsessed with the problem of what had happened to all the biros he’d bought over the past few years.

Vegan Rhino

Cutlets of vegan rhino meat are served by the mice to the humans, on Magrathea.

Viltvodle VI

The Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. In the film, we meet Humma Kavula, who appoints himself a priest of the Jatravartid religion.

Viv

Viv is a planet with vicious sea creatures. It appears in Mostly Harmless and that’s all we have to go on.

Vl’hurgs

The Vl’hurgs are mortal enemies of the G’Gugvuntts.

Vod

Vod is presumably the planet where Judiciary Pag is from. It has three suns, and I say “presumaby” because we see him relax in his chambers on Vod, but don’t actually know if that’s his home planet.

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Join Mark, Jon and Danny as they clear the T section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Tri-D

Tri-D is Adams’ allusion to some sort of 3D TV, and is distinct from Five-D, the sub-etha, the Sense-o-Tape, the Hall of Informational Illusions and whatever other technology he created to show things to characters.

Triganic Pu

The Triganic Pu is a form of galactic currency. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles across each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.

Trillian

Trillian is a beautiful astrophysicist, with the real name Tricia McMillan. She’s played by Susan Sheridan in the radio series, and by Zooey Deschanel in the film. She manages to convince the masters of Krikkit not to destroy the universe, and she learned how to maneuver around Hyde Park Corner on a moped.

On an Earth that was never destroyed by the Vogons, Tricia McMillan attempts to get a job with the NBS network in New York, as an anchor on the US/AM breakfast show. She regrets going back for her bag when first meeting Zaphod at that famous party in Islington. She failed the screen test for the network because she decided not to go back for her bag, thus not bringing her contact lenses which she needed to read the script and autocue. When taken to the planet Rupert by the Grebulons, she films the encounter and figures she must have faked it as part of an elabourate nervous breakdown or halicination.

Trin Tragula

“Have some sense of proportion” Trin Tragula’s wife would often say, so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her. And in one end he plugged the whole of reality, as extrapolated from a fairy cake, and in the other end he plugged his wife, where the shock annihilated her brain.

Turlingdrome

Turlingdrome. It’s a swear word. We don’t have a definition but it appears to be a derogatory term for a person, possibly a stupid person.

There’s a creative design firm in Cincinnati who’ve chosen Turlingdrome as their name, which sounds like it might be a bit like calling your company Shithead.

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Join Mark, Jon and Danny as they traverse the T section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Tea and Douglas

What JB said about kettles isn’t entirely inaccurate, according to an American friend of Mark’s, who also has a lovely story to tell about Douglas Adams.

Thor

Thor is a thunder god. Arthur picks a fight with him over Trillian at an airborne party.

Time Traveller’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother, but is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveller’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations.

Total Perspective Vortex

When you are put into the Total Perspective Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says “You are here.”

The man who invented it did so basically in order to annoy his wife who used to complain about him not having enough perspective.

Towels

You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal; you can wave it in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course you can dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

Towel day events

If you’re in the Cambridge on the 25th May, you can

• go on a Douglas Adams walk
• hear a talk by the two remaining members of Adams’ sketh cgroup
• See some Towel Day standup

Find more info at towelday.org.

Transtellar Cruise Lines

Transtellar Cruise Lines ran a liner that kept a ship in stasis for 900 years while awaiting a compliment of lemon-soaked paper napkins. Fact-fans – or pedants, as they’re more commonly known – wil know that an alternative version of the company name is Trans-Stellar Space Lines.

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Join Mark and the Jons as they traverse the [letter] section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Sun dive

Hotblack Deseato’s band has a completely black stunt ship that dives into the sun on Kakrafoon, as part of the climax of a gig.

Susan Sheridan

Susan Sheridan played Trillian in the radio series. She died in 2015, but had a good career as a voice actor with credits including Budgie the Little Helecopter and Jimbo(a personal favourite). We’re going to talk about Trillian in a few weeks, but for now, consider our caps doffed.

Swut

Swut is a swear word.

Tea

Tea is a substance that can be used to power a Finite Imrobability Generator, or for confusing a machine into giving you a substance that’s almost – but not quite – indistinguishable from it. It is now available in most megamarkets, in easy-to-swallow capsules.

Teasers

A teaser is usually a rich kid with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets which haven’t made interstellar contact yet and “buzz” them, which involves strutting back and forth with silly antenni on their heads and making “beep beep” noises.

Tempophone

The Tempophone is – presumably – a telephone that can make calls across various times.

Ford advises Arthur never to call himself up from the future.

Terry Jones

Terry Jones played a parrot in the Starship Titanic video game, and wrote a book called Starship Titanic, based on a video game, but apparently in a different universe from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Seems like something we should address, really.

Anyhow, he plays a parrot because Adams had discussed with Jones that most of the characters he played in Monty Python sketches and films sounded like parrots.

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• An essay about a liquid almost, but not quite, entirely like the best cup of tea ever, by Jon Bounds
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Join Mark, Jon and Danny as they traverse the S section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Strag

A strag is a non-hitchhiker. Given that we’ve discussed the idea of the hitchhiker as a class of person,

Strangulous Stilettans of Jajazikstak

The Strangulous Stilettans of Jajazikstak are mortal enemies of the Silastic Armourfiends of Striterax.

Strateej-o-Mat

The Strateej-o-Mat is a strategy aparatus on the Grebulon ship, that will only follow the commnads of the Chief Strategic Officer.

Strenuous Garfighters of Stug

The Strenuous Garfighters of Stug are mortal enemies of the Silastic Armourfiends of Striterax.

Sub-Cyclic Normality Assert-i-Tron

A Sub-Cyclic Normality Assert-i-Tron is a marvellous device for counteracting the effects of the Infinite Improbability Drive.

Sub-Etha Net

The Sub-Etha Net is basically the galactic Internet. Given that the sub-eta radio band existed first, I think this is a pretty good name, considering ethernet is already a thing.

Sub-Etha News-Matics

The Sub-Etha News-Matic is a kind of space Twitter.

Sub-Etha Sens-o-Matic

The Sub-Etha Sens-o-Matic is a device that scans for signals from spacecraft. On prehistoric Earth, Ford detects eddies in the spacetime continuum and with Arthur, catches a lift through time on a Chesterfield sofa.

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Join Mark, Jon and Danny as they traverse the S section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We dedicate this episode to Jeremy Hardy, who died last week.

The Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots of SrDt 3454

These riots led to three important events, which we’ll go through in turn, but it’s basically all the fault of a ventilation system called the Breathe-o-Smart, which was absolutely guaranteed to never, ever, ever, go wrong; so much so that the company demanded all customers seal shut all the windows in buildings that used it. So, on that note…

Every piece of technology of whatever stripe is required, on SrDt 3454, to carry the following legend, embossed somewhere on its surface, regardless of its size:

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong, is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

The actual riots were caused by three things:

• a press release from the manufacturers of the Breathe-o-Smart ventilation system suggesting that best results are achieved in temperate climates
• a particularly hot day on SrDt, and
• the employees of a telephone company taking to the streets in a demonstration against their corporate overlords (which we’ll come to in a bit)

Any employee of the aforesaid telephone company, called BS&S, is permitted to say, once an hour, “Use BS&S and die”, after dealing with so many idiotic customers over the phone drove them mad. This was a direct result of the protest they had, which clashed with the office workers using the faulty Breathe-o-Smart.

Stagyar-zil-Doggo

Stagyar-zil-Doggo is an editor of the Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Starship Titanic

Many speak of the legendary and gigantic Starship Titanic, a majestic and luxurious cruise-liner launched from the great shipbuilding asteroid complexes of Artifactovol some hundreds of years ago now, and with good reason.

Very much in keeping with today’s episode, this spaceship was built in such a way to ensure that it would be infinitely improbable that anything would go wrong, so unsurprisingly when it attempted its first pre-launch radio transmission, it suffered a spontaneous total existence failure.

Terry Jones, as we’ve discussed before, wrote the Starship Titanic book and played a parrot in the video game by the same name, produced by Adams’ Digital Village.

Stavro Meuller - Beta

Stavro Meuller is a Greek serial entrepreneur with a German father and two clubs – that we know about – to his mixed-heritage name. Both clubs share his name, but it’s only the second one – Stavro Meuller: Beta, or Stavromula Beta – that really matters for our purposes.

It’s where Arthur was supposed to be assasinated, and where he, Ford, Random, Trillian and Tricia meet towards the end of Mostly Harmless, just before the Earth is finally destroyed again. The building number is 42.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry narrated the first audiobook, played the book in the film and cameoed as a journalist in the radio series. He was a friend of Adams and wrote about him in his second memoir.

Stephen Moore

Played

• Marvin
• the sperm whale
• the man in the shack
• Gag Halfrunt
• a vogon guard

in the radio series, and Marvin and the whale in the TV series

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Join Mark, Jon and Danny as they continue with the S section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Slim’s Throat Emporium

Slim’s Throat Emporium is a bar Ford and Hotblack Desiato used to crash, pretending to be health inspectors.

Slo-Time

The planet of Krikkit was to be enclosed for perpetuity in an envelope of Slo-Time, inside which life would continue almost infinitely slowly. All light would be deflected round the envelope so that it would remain invisible and impenetrable. Escape from the envelope would be utterly impossible unless it were locked from the outside.

When the rest of the Universe came to its final end and life and matter ceased to exist, then the planet of Krikkit and its sun would emerge from the envelope and continue a solitary existence, such as it craved, in the twilight of the Universal void.

Somebody Else’s Problem field

The Somebody Else’s Problem field is simple and effective, and can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural disposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain. If Effrafax the magician had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple SEP field on it instead of trying to make it disappear, then people would have walked past it, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.

Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes

Oolon Colluphid’s book Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes is the second in his trilogy of heretical works.

Southend

“When I was young I used to have this nightmare about dying”, says Arthur aboard the starship Heart of Gold. “I used to lie awake at night screaming. All my friends went to either Heaven or Hell and I was sent to Southend!”

Sqornshellous

Sqornshellous Beta is where cushions come from.

Sqornshellous Zeta where matresses cine from. Marvin ends up stranded here after the Disaster Area stunt ship our heroes hijacked smashes into the heart of a sun.

There are other planets in the Sqornshellous, but they aren’t cannon.

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Mark and the Jons are back off their Christmas break and ready to continue through the S section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax

The best way to pick a fight with a Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax was just to be born. They didn’t like it, they got resentful. And when an Armorfiend got resentful, someone got hurt.

They were the first race who ever managed to shock a computer. The computer in question was Hactar, and they commissioned him to build an ultimate weapon, which almost led to the destruction of the galaxy, again.

Simon Brett

Simon Brett produced the pilot of the radio show, and has produced episodes of other radio classics like I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and Just a Minute. He now writes detective fiction and had a book made into a film starring Michael Caine.

Simon Jones

Simon Jones played Arthur in the radio and TV series, and the Magrathean security hologram in the film. He’s appeared in lots of little bits of telly over the years, and was a dear friend of Douglas.

Sirius B

Max Quordlepleen welcomes a group of young conservatives from Sirius B, to Milliways on the night our heroes turn up.

Sirius Cybernetics Corporation

The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation were bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.

Slartibartfast

Slartibartfast is a planetary architect, who won an award for his wrk on Norway. Played by Richard Vernon in the first two radio series and the TV series, and by Richard Griffiths in the third radio series.

On Earth, Ford and Arthur find his signature on a glacier. He picks Ford and Arthur up in his Somebody Else’s Problem shielded ship so they can join his mission with the Campaign for Real Time, and he has a name that sounds a bit like a swearword.

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Join Mark, Danny and the Jons as they ring in 2019 with a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy pub quiz, in which every single round – every single one – is completely and 100% to do with the Douglas Adams sci-fi universe.

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Join Mark, Jon and Danny as they continue traversing the S section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Sens-o-Tape

Sens-o-Tape is another piece of VR equipment. In the first book, Arthur gets strapped into a machine that shows him how the Magratheans discovered the Ultimate Answer.

Sesefras Magna

Sesefras Magna is a planet around which Ford is orbiting when he hooks up a ship to the Speaking Clock on Earth, and where Xaxisians dock their battle fleet. Its sun is Zondostina, known to Sesefrasians as Pleiades Zeta. Orbiting the planet are Epum, its small and blue moon, and the space port, Port Sesefron, from which Zaphod once bought a pair of spray-on pants.

Share and Enjoy

“Share and Enjoy” is the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division, which now covers the major land masses of three medium sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to have shown a consistent profit in recent years.

Shoe Event Horizon

Many years ago Brontitall – or Frogstar World B, delete as appropriate – was a thriving, happy planet. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly the numbers of these shops increased, until it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops, resulting collapse, ruin and famine.

Shorbut Sweet

Shorbut Sweet – AKA Succ-U-Bus – is a robot that dispenses post on the Starship Titanic, played by Douglas Adams, who basically just had to cough into a microphone.

Siderial Daily Mentioner

Arthur and his friends pick up a journalist from the Siderial Daily Mentioner, who was “half-mad” after witnessing Prak do his “whole truth” bit. One of the Trillians also worked for the Mentioner.

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