censorship

[Timenn]

Someone who is just talking. And talking, and talkin, and then... where was he talking about? :)

[DjCiD]

this is an excert from Douglas Adams - Hitchhicker Guide to the Galaxy

"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"

"You ask a glass of water."

Arthur thought about this.

"Ford," he said.

"Yeah?"

"What's this fish doing in my ear?"

"It's translating for you. It's a Babel fish. Look it up in the

book if you like."

He tossed over The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and then

curled himself up into a foetal ball to prepare himself for the

jump.

At that moment the bottom fell out of Arthur's mind.

His eyes turned inside out. His feet began to leak out of the top

of his head.

The room folded flat about him, spun around, shifted out of

existence and left him sliding into his own navel.

They were passing through hyperspace.

"The Babel fish," said The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the

oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not

from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all

unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to

nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its

carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious

thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech

centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical

upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear

you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of

language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the

brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel

fish.

"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything

so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that

some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching

proof of the non-existence of God.

"The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I

exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am

nothing.'

"`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it?

It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so

therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'

"`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly

vanished in a puff of logic.

"`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to

prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next

zebra crossing.

"Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of

dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a

small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-

selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all

barriers to communication between different races and cultures,

has caused more and bloddier wars than anything else in the

history of creation."

thats where i first heard the term babel fish, since then i have found translation websites on the net under the same name Babelfish

[Frodo]

yes altavista's is babel fish i believe. Nice excerpt djcid!

[DjCiD]

I live by the guide ;D

Now i wouldnt ming=d seeing a new Hitchikers Guide movie ;D

sad thing to lose Adams, was it last year or the year 2000?