[nonrandomstring]

"The Belcerebons of Kakrafoon Kappa were sentenced to telepathy by a Galactic Tribunal because the rest of the galaxy found peaceful contemplation contemptuous." - HHGTTG

I often think smartphones were inflicted upon Earth by our alien neighbours to distract us and stop us ever getting off this rock.

[marttt]

I also liked the digital watches quote:

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea...

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches."

Douglas Adams seems strangely forgotten these days (or is he, in the UK?), considering how great he really was. It would be extremely interesting to hear his thoughts or spinoffs on the climate crisis.

Then again, he did offer many straightforward solutions, though, e.g.:

"FOOT WARRIOR: Do not panic! Lay Down your arms. We just want you to relax and enjoy your shoes."

[slowmovintarget]

> ...And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains. -- Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut

We don't need Diana Moon Glampers, we do it to ourselves.

Another quote:

"Writing is thinking." -- David McCullough

We need to write more, for ourselves, to others, in slow, careful sentences, building arguments. Tweets don't cut it.