You must be referring to that proposed form of humor where posters would talk about things they didn’t like indirectly, as if they were pretending it never happened. I’m glad everybody decided not to post like that, because I bet it would get old.
The cavemen are Arthur’s ancestors because the caveman pulls the answer “42” from the bag of Scrabble tiles, thus prompting Arthur to pull tiles to see if he subconsciously knows the question. Its interesting to note that when Arthur pulls the tiles to form the question he uses every last tile in the bag. Perhaps the question is longer, but he simply ran out of tiles.
I’m curious to see if the movie, which opens April 29, can come anywhere close to being as funny as the books.
That is so condescending.
I’d just like to point out that BrotherCadfael’s post is the 42nd reply to this thread.
First of all, they’re not cavemen. They don’t live in caves. Second, the natives (okay, we’ll call them cavemen) are dying off, out of apparent lethargy after the Golgafrincham ‘B’ Ark crashes on Earth. The Golgafrinchams (who are surprisingly skeletally and developmentally similar to the cavemen…probably nothing to worry about, just another effect of the Inifinite Improbility Drive, rippling backward and outward through the spacetime wash and causing all sorts of strange effects) end up replacing the hominids in the life matrix of Earth, resulting in a distortion in the program which results in a wrong answer, e.g. “What do you get when you multiply six by nine”.
This results in a whole chain of events culimating in a guild of philosophers, psychiatrists, and other professional thinkers contracting with the Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz to have the Vogon Construtor Fleet demolish the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass that’ll probably never be built anyway. Also, it causes, through a convoluted tangle of events, a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias to come into existence twenty miles above the surface of a planet, shortly to be extinguished by the hard reality of Newtonian physics. Oh no, not again.
Arthur’s ancestors (and yours, and mine) are the hairdressers, advertising account executives, hairdressers, and telephone sanitizers, along with a load of other bloody useless looneys who crashed with the ‘B’ Ark. The remaining Golgafrichams were, as everybody familiar with galactic history is aware, wiped out by a particularly virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.
Wow…previewing the post I realize that I really need to get a new obsession, preferably one involving something that might actually make me attractive to the opposite sex. Jazz, film noir, Irish whisky, and Douglas Adams novels just don’t seem to be doing it for me. :dubious:
Stranger
I forgot who said it, but someone usmmarized Adams’ philosophy in the Hitchhikers’ books as follows:
“The rest of the universe is just like our world, only moreso.” 
Wouldn’t it work just as well something like this?
We know that the version of Earth upon which the Golgafrinchans crashed was subsequently populated by their descendants, who displaced the original population.
This Earth might have been the same as the one that produced Arthur, the protagonist.
If so, our Arthur would have been a descendant of the Golgafrinchan crew, and not part of the Earth’s natural fauna.
But since the Earth exists on an infinite number of potential timelines, each with a slightly different history, Arthur’s birth planet could have been a different earth from the Golgafrinchans’ adopted home.
So, he might or might not have been an intrinsic part of the final configuration constructing the Question, and might or might not have unconscious access to the nearly-completed result.
So, clearly … wait, that doesn’t clear up anything.
Nevermind!
Ain’t I a stinker?
That’s a good username. I find it nicely inconspicuous.
Just wait until he starts playing drinking games with you. I hear he plays to lose.
Stranger