Tuesday, November 30, 2010

42

Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (A Trilogy in Five Parts), called it the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

It is also the name of a domino game people in Texas played when I was a kid. They still do. Not the same people, of course. It has bids and trumps and is something like bridge. I have never heard of it ever being played anywhere else.

It will be, for a few more weeks, the age of the youngest of my three children.

But I have devoted a whole post to the number 42 for one reason and one reason only. As of a couple of days ago, it is the number of official followers of this blog. Unofficially, however, there are at least 17,643 of you lurking about. I can feel it in my bones.

At the rate I am gaining official followers, I should be able to give a victory speech in a park in Chicago in about three or four million years.

(Photo by Michelle Marcotte, appeared in the Nacogdoches, Texas, Daily Sentinel)

10 comments:

  1. I love the number 42, for who wouldn't adore the answers to life, the universe and everything?

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  2. all the4 poopleple that i live around tyhink that the MORMON church has any answer you need to life the universe and EVERYTHING<><<>OF COURSE ME BEING AN ALIEN MYSELF I QUESTION THAT

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  3. As an unashamedly unofficial follower of "Rhymes With Plague" may I say that Fox Mulder, one of the main characters in The X-Files lived in Apartment 42 at 2630 Hegal Place, Alexandria, Virginia. So there! Also ever heard of the formerly pretty successful English band - Level 42? They're worth listening to.

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  4. Jinksy, if only it were that simple.

    Putz, I found a great quotation recently (but I don't know its source):

    The opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty.

    Y.P., as they used to say in Texas and other parts of the southern U.S., do tell!

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  5. so funny.
    Just enjoy your blog . Thats the most important thing.
    :)

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  6. 42 Skiddoo!! My youngest was 49 this year. Of course, I'm much older than you. :)

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  7. I looked up the painting and Yes that is a good painting by Millet although seems it was criticized.
    I don't know why. When you need to,you do what you have to do to survive. Better than stealing.
    I remember the adults using wooden barrels for their salted cabbage.
    Every fall they would get this shredder and do it by hand everyone pitching in.Those used to be good times cause people all had something tho do and compare. Today you just go to the store and take what they give you and no one knows what or how it's prepared.

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  8. Pat, don't you mean 23 Skiddoo? (My mother used to say that). As for your being "much older" than moi, I have but one word: NOT!

    A Lady's Life, I understand your comment because I had gone to your blog and left a comment on the one with the painting of the woman churning butter by Jean Francois Millet, but I'm afraid none of my other readers will.
    Cross-blog commenting makes me dizzy.

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  9. I am a follower who occasionally goes astray, but if you want to make you son feel better about his age, tell him he is only 30 if he doesn't count weekends.

    On a darker a note, there was a woman in Croatia who sat dead in front of her tv for 42 years.

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  10. Shooting, if it's my daughter and not my son, will that make a difference?

    That woman whose body was found in Croatia died in Yugoslavia and yet you say nothing had changed?

    The real question, though, is how many people alive today have been sitting dead in front of their tv for 42 years?

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<b>Always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion</b>

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