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

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

Paul McCartney

In Life, the Universe and Everything, we’re treated to Adams’ thoughts on Paul McCartney. One of his little one-liners, in reference to a tune being sung on Krikkit is “Arthur could almost imagine Paul McCartney sitting with his feet up by the fire one evening, humming it to Linda and wondering what to buy with the proceeds”.

Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings

Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings is from Essex, and is the worst poet in the universe. She is not to be confused with Paul Neil Milne Johnstone who died in 2004 but hailed from the same county and was an actual poet of some success. He was referred to by his real name in the radio series but all subsequent versions used a different one.

Peanuts

Peanuts are very good for replacing salts and proteins lost from travel via matter transference.

Perfectly Normal Beasts

No one knew where the Perfectly Normal Beasts came from, or where they go. They were so important to the lives of the Lamuellans, it was almost as if nobody liked to ask. Arthur and Ford destract one with a pikka bird presented by Old Thrashbarg, and ride it to the Domain of the King.

Persephone

Persephone is a new planet discovered beyond the orbit of Pluto, which was nicknamed Rupert, after the parrot belongong to one of the astronomers that discovered it. It has a dark and sombre landscape, a terrain so desperately far removed from the heat and light of its parent sun that it seemed like a map of the psychological scars on the mind of an abandoned child.

Peter Jones

Peter Jones is the voice of the Guide in the first two radio series, and the TV series. He purportedly had trouble saying the word “encyclopaedia” (as I think we’ve discussed before), so they ended up splicing two different recordings of the word together. Keen listeners to this podcast and the original series might notice that I tend to slip into Jones’ pattern of speech when I’m reading Adams’ words, and that’s mainly because I’ve heard them so many times that his delivery is almost baked into my brain. And for that, he deserves our love and respect.

Phargilor Kangaroo Relocation Drive

The Phargilor Kangaroo Relocation Drive is a means of travel by which a ship may be ejected suddenly through the fabric of the spacetime continuum and come to rest far from its starting point. This is however an emergency device and there is rarely time to plot where the ship will land.

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Join Mark and the Jons as they traverse the P section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and take a sneaky pitstop at O.

Oolon Colluphid

Oolon Colluphid is the author of heretical works of non-fiction. We’ve covered many of his books already, but titles include Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

Orion Beta

Orion Beta is noted for its madronite mining belts, where Ford learned to play a drinking game involving telekenesis and obsene forfeits.

Pangalactic garbleblaster

The Pangalactic Garbleblaster is the best drink in existence, according to the Guide.

Parallel Universes

Now, the Guide has had a great deal to say on the subject of parallel universes. Very little of this is, however, at all comprehensible to anyone below the level of Advanced God.

The first thing to realise about parallel universes, the Guide says, is that they are not parallel, because being parallel doesn’t mean anything. It’s all part of the Whole Sort of General Mishmash, but I thought it worth bringing up since it’s sort of noteable by its absencen.

Paralys-o-Matic

The Paralyse-o-Matic is a bomb of some sort. Zaphod throws one into the crowd that comes to watch the uneiling of the Heart of Gold.

Parties

In the third book, Arthur gets hit in the small of the back by a party that’s into its fourth generation, and has taken to conducting raiding parties of nearby planets, depleating them of stocks of cheesey snacks and booze.

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Join Mark, Danny and Jon Bounds as they play through as much of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game as they could. Spoiler: it's not much.

This was recorded live on Friday 25th May 2018, for Towel DAy.

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Join Mark, Jon and Danny as they traverse the M section of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Towel Day is coming!

Join us on Friday 25th June for a special live event! Follow @btlpodcast for details.

New York

In So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, Ford Prefect has a dream in which he meets a creature formed out of the pollutants of New York's East River.

“I instinctively feel”, says the creature, “that I need to be beautiful. Am I?”

NowWhat

The planet of NowWhat was named after the opening words of the first settlers to arrive there after struggling across light years of space to reach the furthest unexplored outreaches of the Galaxy. The main town was called OhWell. There weren’t any other towns to speak of. Settlement on NowWhat had not been a success and the sort of people who actually wanted to live on NowWhat were not the sort of people you would want to spend time with.

Arthut finds NowWhat after a year traveling to the spacial coordinates of the Earth, but ends up here, which is another planet along the probability axis.

NutriMatic Drinks Dispenser

The NutriMatic Drinks Dispenser is Sirius Cybernetics' machine that delivers a cup of liquid that is almost, but not entirely unlike tea. It does this by analysing the user's brain to see what they might find neutritional and enjoyable, but no-one knows why, because it invariably spits out the same liquid.

Octraventral heebiephone

The octraventral heebiephone is a musical instrument that needs more than one mouth to play.

Oglaroon

In one corner of the eastern galactic arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire “intelligent” population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars, and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches.

Old Thrashbarg

Old Thrashbarg is an enthusiastic storyteller. A bullshit artist from Lamuella, who Arthur learns to tolerate with a degree of detatched irony.

Join Mark, Jon and Jon as they traverse the M section of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Mice

Trillian - remember her? - kept some pet mice, who turned out to be the most intelligent beings on earth. We still don't know what species they are when they're not projecting themselves as little furry cratures with a cheese fixation.

Milliard Gargantubrain

The Milliard Gargantubrain is a super-computer from Maximegalon which can count all the atoms in a star in a millisecond.

Milliways

Milliways is the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. It was either built on the remains of Magrathea, or Frogstar World B, whichever you prefer.

A Bastablonian ad agency came up with the tagline "If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways".

Mind zoo

Marvin was once the star exhibit of a mind zoo. He had to sit on a box and tell his story whilst people told him to cheer up and think positive.

Missing matter of the universe

For a long period of time there was much speculation and controversy about where the so-called “missing matter” of the Universe had got to. All over the Galaxy the science departments of all the major universities were acquiring more and more elaborate equipment to probe and search the hearts of distant galaxies, and then the very centre and the very edges of the whole Universe, but when eventually it was tracked down it turned out in fact to be all the stuff which the equipment had been packed in.

Multicorticoid Perspicutron Titan Muller

The Multi-corticoid Perspi-cutron Titan Muller is a super-computer of unspecified parameters and focus. Deep Thought calls it a cybernetic simpleton in comparison to itself.

Murray Bost Henson

Murray Bost Henson is a journalist Arthur knows, with odd turns of phrase like “Arthur, my old soup spoon, my old silver turreen”.

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Join Mark, Jon and Danny as they traverse the M section of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Matter transference beams

Ford and Arthur are teleported from the smouldering remains of the Earth to the Vogon ship, via a matter transference beam. A song that regularly used to be chanted by huge crowds outside the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Teleport Systems factory on Happi-Werld III goes "If you have to take me apart to get me there, then I don't want to go".

Max Quordlepleen

Max Quordlepleen is the MC at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. He's an absolute pro, who divides his time between this upscale restaurant and the Big Bang Burgar Chef.

Megabrantis

The Megabrantis cluster is the political hub of the galaxy. The Vogons migrated away from their homeworld to setup shop here. Brantisvogan is a planet within the cluster, and you can go back to episode 8 to hear all about that.

Megadodo Publications

Megadodo Publications was once the home of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and one of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor. I think we can assume that Playbeing is another Megadodo rag, so presumably the company was doing fairly well.

Mella

Mella is a Golgafrincham woman Arthur meets (along with Agda) on the prehistoric Earth.

She had recently escaped a lifetime of staring every morning at a hundred nearly identical photographs of moodily lit tubes of toothpaste in the art department of a Golgafrinchan ad agency.

We never got to find out what happened between Mella and Arthur, because the book ended.

Memory dump module

A memory dump module is a small unit that Ford uses to copy data from his Guide (after wiping off the bits of fluff and biscuit crumbs). Adams clearly understood not only the need for data portability, but that people would be pretty careless with these devices. Nowadays we call them USB sticks or something similar.

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Join Danny, Jon and Mark as they barrel through the M section of the Guide.

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Danny joins Mark and Jon Bounds to discuss crisps, Sundays and Zeno’s paradox. It’s all in the L section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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• Zoo (2007 film) - Wikipedia

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Mark and Jon Hickman are joined by Jon Bounds to work through some more of the L section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Lazlar Lyricon

Lazlar Lyricon is a customiser of space craft to the staggeringly wealthy. He customised the Disaster Area’s limo, and is said, by Ford Prefect, to have “no shame”.

Lazlar Lyricon also leant its name to a convention of Hitchhiker’s fans. The first was in our home city of Birmingham, and there’s a link in the show notes to an episode of Saturday Review, which scratches the surface of Adams’ move into the world of interactive fiction.

Leda and the Octopus

Leda and the Octopus is something of which a statue was made. It used to sit in the office of the Guide’s editor in chief, but now doesn’t. Of course, we all know that this is a play on the artworks based on the Greek myth of Leda, who comes across Zeus disguised as a swan.

Leovinus

Leovinus is the designer of the Starship Titanic, who fell in love with the computer inside. In the game, you have to assemble all the various parts of the ship that were scattered around it, and build a giant metal woman, at which point you’re given a video message from Leovinus, as played by Douglas Adams, in which he gifts you the ship.

Life Begins at Five Hundred and Fifty

Life Begins at 550 is a book, less popular than the Guide.

LifeSupport-o-System

The LifeSupport-o-System. It supports life on the Grebulon ship, and it’s perhaps the laziest name anyone has ever come up with for a piece of sci-fi.

Lintilla

Lintilla is an archaeologist with millions of clones. She, and all her clones, were played by Rula Lenska, who later went on to voice the Guide in its bird form. She has millions of clones because of a malfunction which meant the cloning machine got halfway through making one clone before starting the next, so it was impossible to stop it without committing murder. Eventually, the manufacturers concocted a plan to marry all the clones off to some hastily-made male clones, adding a line to the contract that meant they were aggreeing to “cease to be”.

Links

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Mark and Danny Smith are joined by Jon Hickman to finish up the K section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and tackle a couple of important Ls.

Krikkit

Of all the races on the Galaxy, only the English could possibly revive the memory of the most horrific wars ever to sunder the Universe and transform it into what is generally regarded as an incomprehensibly dull and pointless game.

L Prosser

Mr L Prosser is 40, fat and shabby. He works for the local council, and is distantly related to Genghis Khan.

Lady Cynthia Fitzmelton

Lady Cynthia Fitzmelton is the woman who christens the new Cottington Bypass by breaking a bottle of “very splendid and worthwhile” champagne over the “noble prow” of a “very splendid and worthwhile yellow bulldozer”. She was played by the comedic actor Jo Kendal, and was completely annoying.

Lallafa

Lallafa wrote what are widely regarded throughout the Galaxy as being the finest poems in existence, the Songs of the Long Land.

Long after his death his poems were found and wondered over, and shortly after the invention of time travel, some major correcting fluid manufacturers wondered whether his poems might have been better still if he had had access to some high-quality correcting fluid, and whether he might be persuaded to say a few words on that effect. He never got around to writing the poems, so the correcting fluid people got him to copy them out of a book they’d taken from the version of the past where he did write the poems.

Lamuella

Lamuella is a planet, not unlike Earth, but where the days are 25 hours long, which plays havoc with a mechanical watch. According to Old Thrashbarg, the planet had been found fully-formed in the navel of a giant earwig at 4:30 one Vroonday afternoon.

In Mostly Harmless, Arthur becomes the Sandwich Maker and makes Lamuella his home, and sandwiches (that sentence makes sense… read that back and you’ll get it).

Links

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