The Pencil of Life

My last day of high school was yesterday, when I took my physics final.

Physics was interesting. My lab partners were Andy, a 25-year-old sarcastic geek with a bit of a stutter, and Parul, a hyperactive 16-year-old girl from India. She drew henna on my hand earlier this week, when she was bored during class. In order to keep it from looking like notes, I had to quickly lick it off five minutes before my final.

But I digress. My topic today is the Pencil of Life.

During the first few weeks of class, I found a pencil outside of the physics building. It had been stepped on numerous times, and maybe driven over once or twice, but I picked it up and carried it into class with me. I was able to nurse it back to health with the help of a pencil sharpener. The pencil lead hadn't been split, so it worked pretty well, and there was even a bit of eraser on it.

Over the course of the class course (I would have called it the classy course of the class course, but it wasn't.), I used my new chewed-up pencil as often as possible, making it my good luck charm. By the time the finals troundled around, it had shrunk to half its height. Parul decided to sharpen all the pencils on the table, whether they needed it or not (hyperactive, remember?) and thereby shortened it even more. My hand was a little cramped from using a three-inch pencil by the time I was done.

Finished with my quarter, I decided to ceremoniously return the magical pencil to its spot outside the physics building. I'd like to think that it will inspire a physics student next quarter, binding us together in our pencil commonality as said student completes his or her course aided by it's magical powers. However, it's much more likely that the pencil was thrown away the next day together with all the other useless litter on campus.

But that's life.

An interesting thought

It would be strange and cool if you actually could send information back in time through the internet, rather than physically. It would have to work differently from normal time travel. Huh.

And Another Thing...

And Another Thing… is the title of the sixth installment of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. Since Adams is currently dead, the book was written by Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl series. Much as I like Artemis Fowl and all of Eoin's other books, I'm skeptical about this one. Douglas Adams wrote unique books. In fact, the whole basic point of the books was to be weird. I don't think anyone can really replace him, and that's not just a sentimental statement. However, I'm only mostly skeptical. I used to be very skeptical, until I read a plot summary:


“The story begins as death rays bear down on Earth, and the characters awaken from a virtual reality. Zaphod picks them up shortly before they're killed, but completely fails to escape the death beams. They are then saved by Bowerick Wowbagger, the Infinitely Prolonged, who they agree to help kill. Zaphod travels to Asgard to get Thor's help. In the meantime, the Vogons are heading to destroy a colony of people who also escaped Earth's destruction, on the planet Nano. Arthur, Wowbagger, Trillian and Random head to Nano to try to stop the Vogons, and on the journey, Wowbagger and Trillian fall in love, making Wowbagger question whether or not he wants to be killed. Zaphod arrives with Thor, who then signs up to be the planet's God. He almost kills Wowbagger, but thanks to Random, he only loses his immortality, and gets married to Trillian. Thor then stops the first Vogon attack, and apparently dies. Meanwhile, Constant Mown, son of Prostetnic Jeltz, convinces his father that the people on the planet are not citizens of Earth, but are, in fact, citizens of Nano, which means that it would be illegal to kill them. As the book draws to a close, Arthur is on his way to check out a possible university for Random, when, during a hyperspace jump, he is flung across alternate universes, has a brief encounter with Fenchurch, and ends up exactly where he'd want to be. And then the Vogons turn up again."

Sounds entertaining and strange enough. But what I really liked was that the title is  taken from the third chapter of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, where it appears in the following passage:

“	The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying "And another thing…" twenty minutes after admitting he's lost the argument."

This reminds me that Colfer's adding another book a while after the series has died, which I find funny. I suspect that's what Colfer meant by the title as well.


I haven't read the book, so I can't say whether it's any good. In fact, I mostly just made this post so that I wouldn't have a little mindless post about HSM as the first post on the blog page.