>Aye, I understood that. I wasn't too struck with HGTTG - too many "pan-Galactic ..." and "mega ..." prefixes in it.

I think Adams was equally annoyed with the proliferation of such prefixes elsewhere, so he pushed it to absurdity. That's how I read that.

>The TV series anyway (bit dated now) (and the original BBC Radio 4 production whence it came). I read all the books though. Was very disappointed to see they made a major film of it, and with an American Ford Prefect (that was an old Ford UK model, back in the 50s/60s BTW),and had no intentioon of seeing it.

The guy who played Ford was actually good, compared to the rest of the movie. I took my youngest daughter to see it, and there were several good things about it:

- we asked when does the movie really begin, and, amazingly, the box office lady did tell us, so we had another dozen minutes of fun outside and skipped almost all of the ads

- we really laughed once, when nobody else did - nice feeling

- we didn't laugh for most of the rest of the movie when everyone else did - nice feeling

- we didn't go to the movies since then

- we had our point proven: once Disney Co gets its hands on it, it can't be good. Imagine, they even removed the "and disappeared in a puff of logic" bit.

And mind you, my daughter has read the book (probably several times), knows many places by heart and actually took the book with her to school quite a number of times.