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

Mark and Danny Smith are joined by Jon Hickman to continue pawing through the H section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Imperial Galaxy

In the last moments of his dying coma, the hereditary Emperor of the Galaxy was locked in a statis field which kept him in a state of perpetual unchangingness. All his heirs are now long dead, and this has meant that without any drastic political upheaval, power simply and effectively moved a rung or two down the ladder, and is now seen to be vested in a body which used to act simply as advisers to the Emperor – an elected Governmental assembly headed by a President elected by that assembly. In fact it vests in no such place.

InfiniDim Enterprises

InfiniDim Enterprises bought the Guide frmo Megadodo Publications. We learn about them in the last of Adams’ Hitchhiker’s books, and I was always taken by the name.

Infinite Improbability Drive

The Infinite Improbability Drive is wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances in a mere nothingth of a second, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace.

Inifity

Infinity is defined by the Guide as “bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, “wow, that’s big”, time. Infinity is just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we’re trying to get across here.”

Islington

The London borough of Islington is where Arthur went to a party and met Trillian, in a flat whose phone number mapped to the probability of his and Ford’s rescue. It’s also the location of the cave Arthur inhabited on prehistoric earth, which then turned out to be where Fenchurch lived.

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Mark and Jon Bounds are joined by Danny Smith to continue pawing through the H section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Human beings

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the obvious, as in “It’s a nice day”, or “You’re very tall”, or “Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright?”

Hunt the Wocket

A game played on one of the worlds the Guide settles on, in Mostly Harmless. h2g2.com actually has a ruleset for a game devised by a Canadian teenager in the year 2000.

The players are divided into red and green teams. Each team takes twenty wickets of the same colour as their team and pounds them into the field more or less randomly. They must make sure that the wickets of both colours are mixed up and not too close together. When this is done, each team goes to the opposite side of the field. Someone places the ball in the centre and so on.

Hurling Frootmig

The fouinder of the Guide, establishing its fundamental principles of honesty and idealism, and went bust.

There followed many years of penury and heart-searching during which he consulted friends, sat in darkened rooms in illegal states of mind, thought about this and that, fooled about with weights, and then, after a chance encounter with the Holy Lunching Friars of Voondon (who claimed that just as lunch was at the centre of a man’s temporal day, and man’s temporal day could be seen as an analogy for his spiritual life, so Lunch should

(a) be seen as the centre of a man’s spiritual life, and (b) be held in jolly nice restaurants),

he refounded the Guide, laid down its fundamental principles of honesty and idealism and where you could stuff them both, and led the Guide on to its first major commercial success.

Hyde Park

This park gets a couple of mentions in Adams’ work, as a place in which Trillian does a rather startling manoeuvre with a motorbike, and where Arthur and Fenchurch have a nice picnic. Arthur - and thus, I imagine - Adams describes Hyde Park as “stunning”.

Ident-i-Eeze

This encodes every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology’s greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense. It was invented because of the many ways in which people have to prove their identity. Jon, just how prescient do you think Adams was?

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Mark and Jon Hickman are joined by Jon Bounds to continue pawing through the H section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Hooloovoo

A super-intelligent shade of the color blue

Hoopy

A person who is hoopy, or posesses the property of hoopiness is a “really together guy”. I feel like I meet hoopy people from time to time, and I’m never quite sure how to recover.

Horse & Groom

Arthur’s local pub on Earth, in which hung for many years a battered old Guiness clock which featured a picture of an emu with a pint glass jammed rather amusingly down its throat

Hotblack Desiato

The frontman of Disaster Area, the biggest, loudest, richest rock band in history. He spent a year legally dead for tax purposes, and in the TV show his body guard was played by the guy inside the Darth Vader mask.

How I Hate the Night

A poem by Marvin, which he uses to comfort himself while he’s hooked up to the Krikkit computer.

Hrundi

A manufacturer of small spaceships, and those associated with the Advanced Vectoid Stabilisis feature wediscussed back in episode one.

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Mark and Danny Smith are joined by Jon Hickman to continue working thorugh the H section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Hastromil

A star system we can see disappear into the black void of space, at Milliways.

Hawalius

A planet of soothsayers.It’s where Arthur met the old woman who lives in a cave, and the man on a pole when he seeks guidence.

Heart of Gold

The starship Heart of Gold is a beautiful ship, shaped like a running shoe. We’ll talk about the Infinite Improbability Drive in a later episode, but here the team explores the ship a little.

Heavily Modified Face Flannels

A terse work by Frap Gadz on the subject of towels. Here, Jon introduces the panel to his ethnic towel.

Herring Sandwich Experiment

The Herring Sandwich Experiment was conducted millennia ago at tThe MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious.

A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, and a sandwich was placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, “Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches.” It would then bend over and scoop up the sandwich in its scoop, straighten up, and in so doing cause the sandwich to slip straight back off the scoop and fall on to the floor. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, “Ah! A herring sandwich…”, etc., and repeated the same action over and over and over again.

Hig Hurtenflirst

Hig Hurtenflirst is the mastermind of the Shoe Event Horizon. He only happens to be the risingest young executive in the Dolmansaxlil Shoe Corporation. He only happens to have masterminded the entire rationalisation of the planet Brontitall to total shoe orientation. He only happens to be sitting on top of the biggest development deal in the entire history of footwear and he only happens to be very deeply disturbed at finding his planet riddled with subversives bent on undermining the whole structure of the Dolmansaxlil operation.”

We ask who would win in a fight between Hig Hurtenflirst, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

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Mark and Jon Bounds are joined by Danny Smith to start work on the H section of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers’ universe.

Hactar

Hactar is the first computer ever to be shocked. The Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax disintegrated it into dust, but it still functioned, slowly. In the radio series, he was played by Leslie Philips.

Haggunenons

The Haggunenons of Vicissitus Three have the most impatient chromosomes in the Galaxy. Whereas most races are content to evolve slowly and carefully over thousands of generations, discarding a prehensile toe here, nervously hazarding another nostril there, the Haggunenons would do for Charles Darwin what a squadron of Acturan stunt apples would have done for Sir Isaac Newton.

Hamlet

Adams uses a Hamlet reference when writing about the story Arthur wants to tell Fenchurch, upon their first actual meeting, where they’re able to talk while he drives her to Taunton.

Han Dold City

A dangerous part of the universe. Ford ends up at the Old Pink Dog Bar, where there’s a bird that screaches out the names and numbers of local contract killers, as a free service to patrons.

Han Wavel

A world which consists largely of fabulous ultra-luxury hotels and casinos, all of which have been formed by the natural erosion of wind and rain.

Happy Vertical People Transporters

Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons” jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. This is because they’re able to travel to the floor you want, even before you realised you wanted it. They ended up sulking in basements because their passengers wouldn’t take them anywhere interesting.

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