by Peter Gill
And Everything
Mana
It is the 1300s. If you are carving stone into the image of an ancestor you are on Easter Island, and believe in Mana, the spirit associated with living, and dead, souls. If you are fashioning glass into the image of a deity within a stylised tree design you are in mediaeval western Europe and you believe in God. The contemporary Moai of Easter Island and Tree of Jesse Windows in Europe’s churches demonstrate the best of religion in the same sense that Douglas Adams had believed that while JS Bach had been entirely wrong in his religious belief, an outcome of his error was the Mass in B Minor which he considered simply the finest work of genius ever created by man.
Moai are big. In comparison, Stonehenge’s trilithons look fiddlin’ and small. Of the 887 completed Moai the greatest approach ten metres (33 feet) in height. They are the largest stone sculptures in the world and all were made without metal tools. A giant of 21 metres, bigger than the Mount Rushmore Presidents, rests with his back attached to the rock never having been completed, the islanders possibly realising they couldn’t have lifted or moved him. None taller than three metres have left the island, the smallest of these being the 42 centimetre fun-sized one in the Louvre in Paris.
The idea of the ancestral Tree of Jesse is from the bibles; there being forty two generations between Jesse and Joseph, the ‘earthly father’ of Jesus. The Jesse Windows, of which there are many, show this family lineage within a stylised tree’s branches. Jesse is always lying on the ground at the bottom, propped on an elbow as if on the sofa but with a tree trunk curling away from the region of his trunk. Ascending branches support assorted bible characters, sometimes with the local great and good, before topping out the crown of the tree with a Mary and Jesus. Jesse Windows are invariably remarkable: so the only entirely surprising thing is that few people now know of them or appreciate their art—the earliest known English stained glass was part of a Jesse Window in York Minster, probably from around 1150. The most magnificent stained glass window in England (and you can still visit this treasure) is the Jesse Window of 1340 or thereabouts at Selby Abbey in Yorkshire.
The tree window idea had travelled from Europe; being effective as a way of impressing illiterate congregations, the thousands upon thousands of magically coloured, illuminated, irregular yet ordered, pixels telling a pictorial story that could only be appreciated—symbolically—from within the church. 1000 years or so later, Jesse Windows are still being installed. In contrast, the last Moai were being chiselled 350 years ago at the same time as nearly all the trees disappeared from Easter Island. It isn’t known whether the events were connected. The end was sudden enough for perfect faces of unfinished heads to remain in the quarry wall, their eyes now gazing forever on a trickle of tourists.
Easter Islanders dropped their allegiance to tedious stone-age chiselling to favour a far more exciting birdman cult that required swimming with sharks to a craggy islet, scaling its cliffs, and swimming back again bearing the egg of a sooty tern; the winner achieving the mythic tabu status for his clan’s religious leader, at least until it was time for the next round*. This idea had legs. Later additions, including cameras and Ant and Dec, have made the cult attractive to watching millions round the world who know new versions of it as reality TV. And once every year, the television in many millions of homes will share prime front-of-sofa space with a decorated tree.
Cash Barrels
Crude oil is traded in ‘barrels’ of 42 gallons. A record price per barrel of $147.27 was reached on July 11th 2008. At this price, estimated 2010 North Sea oil production would be worth £93 billion and Bill Gates’ fortune, as estimated by Forbes magazine in 2010, could buy 139 days worth. Well rich Saudi Arabia’s estimated production is 8.5 million barrels a day in 2010 and at $147.27 the Microsoft founder’s fortune would be gone in 42 days. But he would have plenty of oil.
Offers in the region of…£300m
How often do you wonder what a good skyscraper would set you back? Tower 42 has everything the discerning buyer could want, being a 600ft London landmark, visible from most points in the city, and very easy to make your way back to after even the most comprehensively liquid night out. If your interest lies in social climbing the tower brings an impressive lettre de cachet having been opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1981 and being the tallest building in the UK for ten years. It is most definitely still A-list, making frequent movie appearances in establishing shots of London and even appearing in the BBC’s TV version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. At the top is a 42nd floor restaurant; the non-revolving Vertigo 42. And the location enjoys supreme connectivity with red London buses displaying the number 42 passing every five minutes. The 2010 asking price of £300m ($461m) seemed low.
Eye Pods
Contrary to popular belief the London Eye does not have 42 pods. It has 32, a deficiency of ten. There have been a number of wheels with 42 pods, some wheels being more temporary than others.
Purists seeking the full 42-pod experience should head for Manchester.
Wheel Location Pods
Wiener Riesenrad
(featured in Graham Greene’s
The Third Man) Vienna, Austria 15
Singapore Flyer
(at 42 storeys, the world’s tallest) Singapore 28
The London Eye UK 32
Mr Ferris’s First Ferris Wheel Chicago, USA 36
Wheel of Manchester UK 42
Beijing Great Wheel
(to be the tallest once opened) China 48
Star of Nanchang China 60
Six Pints of Anti-Matter (in clean glasses, please)
The highest rate of hyper-inflation was just under 42 quadrillion percent or 42,000,000,000,000,000%. This occurred in Hungary in 1946 when the price of six pints of bitter was doubling every fifteen hours. A 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 Pengo note was in circulation which was worth a few pennies in Britain. In 2008 Zimbabwe came close to matching the Hungarian rate, when their price for six pints of bitter was doubling every 25 hours.
It can be inconvenient to carry enough moolah for an evening out when inflation really sets in. A million dollars in single dollar bills weighs a metric tonne. Each bill has a thickness of one ten-thousandth of an inch more than 0.0042 inches which doesn’t seem much but still stacks up very nicely: $1m in dollar bills is high enough to be able to stand on to peer over the top of St Paul’s Cathedral and see what’s on the other side. The most convenient means of carrying enough cash where beer is dear is the US $10,000 bill—discontinued in 1969 but still legal tender. One million dollars would then weigh 100 grams, about as little as a quarter-pounder. More than 300 of the notes exist so check your billfold for a portrait of Abraham Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary, Salmon P. Chase. His rarity means that the value to a collector is about ten times face value—around $100,000 for a gram of paper.
This is very, very, very cheap compared to the costliest thing to make, which is anti-matter. Costs vary according to supplier and it pays to shop wisely. In 1999 NASA in the US estimated a cost of $62.5 trillion per anti-gram whilst in 2001 CERN in Europe quoted a price of £325 quadrillion for an anti-gram of anti-protons. This was slashed to £65 quadrillion in 2004 to try to kick-start the anti-European matter market. Whomever you select, the least convenient way of paying them would be Rai stone money from Yap Island. Their circular ‘coins’ resemble carved mill-stones with the largest weighing up to four tons. They are easier to carry than value, even in the past rarely having been traded for discrete goods or anti-goods. If it helps, a very small one is believed to have been worth about one good pig.
Every Picture Tells This Story
TIFF is a popular computer picture file format that belongs to Adobe. Every picture file contains the number 42 for the following reason:
‘The second word of the file is the TIFF ‘version number’. This number, 42 (2A in hex), is not to be equated with the current revision of the TIFF specification. In fact, the TIFF version number (42) has never changed, and pr
obably never will. If it ever does, it means that TIFF has changed in some way so radical that a TIFF reader should give up immediately.
The number 42 was chosen for its deep philosophical significance. [my italics] It can and should be used as additional verification that this is indeed a TIFF file.’
Separated After Birth
Weighing about 4200 tons if you could coax it upon the bathroom scales, a Type 42 destroyer is a warship of the British Royal Navy, and the Argentinian Armada.
Sixteen Type 42s were built between 1970 and 1983, with the first two ships having shared the same slipway for hull construction within six days of each other at Barrow-in-Furness shipyard in Cumbria. HMS Sheffield and ARA Hercules, as they were known when commissioned were then on opposite sides in the 1982 Falklands Conflict (not a war). Sheffield was sunk, Hercules is still on active service.
The first Falklands Crisis had been in 1770 when a Spanish force, also setting off from Argentina, invaded the islands. The Falklands Conflict of 1982 started when an Argentina force invaded the islands on 4/2*.
Blood On The Wrong Side of The Tracks
A deed performed by an an American, Frederick Methvan Whyte, has been of inestimable timesaving value to all those interested in chatting about the number of wheels on a train. Since around 1900, railway engineers no longer needed to turn to one another to exclaim ‘Hey! Did you just see that! No little wheels! Six big wheels! No little wheels!’ Instead, without fuss or drama they have been employing the Whyte Notation to describe Thomas the Tank Engine as being an example of a 0-6-0T configuration—the ‘T’ denoting Tank and not Thomas. Of course.
EXTREME DANGER. The Whyte Notation works logically when reading the wheels from left to right as you stand facing the left-hand side of the locomotive i.e. with the cow-catcher pointing off to your left. On its right-hand side a 4-2-0 would appear to have become a 0-2-4! Under no circumstances should you go over the rails to identify a train travelling in the other direction—you would place yourself in extreme danger of being seen coming from the wrong side of the tracks which would end your hopes of winning invites to snack at dinner parties with sophisticated and intelligent people. Avoiding potentially fatal social faux pas takes real determination. There is no substitute, I’ve found, for doing up the top toggle of your duffle coat, pouring hot Vimto from the flask, and standing at the end of the platform to wait for the right locomotive the right way round.
Rainbows
The light that makes a rainbow has been refracted-reflected-refracted (bent-bounced-bent) through between 41 and 42 degrees. Did you know:
There are also moonbows, which have seven colours but appear white
Looking down from a plane you can see circular rainbows
You only see one colour from each rain droplet
In 1987 and aged 42, Richie Blackmore had disbanded Rainbow and was back playing with Deep Purple
From the 42
Much of the world can be viewed through the window of the 42 bus. Catch number 42 to see the following:
See
City
The 42 bus route
The Golden Gate Bridge (on the left) San Francisco Richmond to San Rafael
The Eiffel Tower (on the left)
Paris
Gare du Nord to Georges Pompidou European Hospital
Tower Bridge (route crosses the bridge), and Tower 42 (on left, looking up) London Denmark Hill to Liverpool Street Station
The CN Tower (on the right)
Toronto Finch Station to Kennedy Road
Pearl Harbour and the Arizona Memorial (on the left) Honolulu
Waikiki to Ewa Beach
The monument to the first westbound transatlantic flight by Charles Kingsford-Smith in 1930 (on the left) Dublin Downtown Dublin to Portmarnock
42nd Street (part of the 42 route) New York Circle Line to East Side
* Dangerous enough to cause deaths, the birdman competition and the birdman cult were ‘ended’ by European proselytisers in the 19th century. Breakfasting at Easter I had been desolated to find that there wasn’t an Easter Egg on the whole of Easter Island and about to jam a consolatory bread roll when my host said that I might like to examine the underside. Baked into the bread in a bas relief was the spooky shape of the crouched birdman. Kindly and charming Oscar gave me a knowing look. Mana.
* The second of April is 4/2 when using the date notation known as ‘middle endian’—I promise I’m not making this up—which goes mm/dd/yyyy rather than the logical dd/mm/yyyy. The middle endian system is fashionable in the USA and almost nowhere else in the world.
But Why 42?
In the beginning was Ken Welsh
The great hitch-hike began, suitably enough, on the Great Ocean Road at Warrnambool, near Melbourne. In 1966 Ken Welsh and his wife, Ann, had been using travel guidebooks to plan a trip hitchhiking around America and Europe. Five years after sailing from Australia, Ken Welsh (who had been working as a writer for television in Melbourne) had written a guidebook for other hitch-hikers. It was called Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe.
Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe (without a definite article) is a remarkable book. Obviously not for being a European travel guide. Mariana Starke* had done that a little earlier in 1820, and she was quickly followed by the better known Karl Baedeker**. Nor for inflaming desires to go on self-guided road trips; André Michelin attended to that when calendars started showing the start of a twentieth century; and Ken and Ann Welsh themselves had ‘pored over’ Arthur Frommer’s Europe on Five Dollars a Day before leaving Australia.
No, Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe is remarkable for two other reasons. It was the first guidebook to show the world in a new light. Like the Frommer’s guide it was based on practical research giving details of the price of accommodation and meals in US cents and dollars. Very unlike Frommer’s the reader was emphatically not a respectful ambassador for her or his country and certainly wasn’t, heaven forfend, a tourist. Ken Welsh frequently recommended going there now or seeing that soon before each had vanished as the numbers of tourists grew. It was published two years before the first Lonely Planet Guide to which it may be compared in voice and style.
‘This was at the time of Vietnam and anti-authoritarianism,’ Ken Welsh told me when I called to ask when he’d first had the idea for a new kind of travel guide. ‘And people had little money.’ Anti-authoritarianism meant the travel was about exploring an alternative life as much as reaching any one destination, and the voice speaking from the book was that of a fellow hitcher, ahead of you on the road, with practical advice plus some thoughts for when lifts were slow about the philosophy of travel, happiness and life. By hitching the travelling was being seen to be done in the most alternative and unpredictable way possible. It was the heterodoxy to today’s gapper trekking an itinerary worked out with one of our experienced friendly representatives in the specialist call-centre with mum’s credit card and amazing I’ve still got five bars on my mobby now here’s one of me, Cordelia and Tatiana leaning over the edge of Tierra del Fuego… Then, even the journey home was an option. Australians Ken and Ann Welsh were to make Spain their home. They live there still.
Summer of 1971: In the news: The first lunar rover was driven on the moon. A US table-tennis team had gotten an invitation to play in China on the say of leader Mao Zedong, to be followed by Henry Kissinger, to be followed by President Nixon—a man focussed on the effect of his failure to end the war in Vietnam on his potential for re-election in 18 months. The construction guys had just done finishing off a multi-use development in Foggy Bottom, Washington D.C. called Watergate. Ozzie Osbourne and Black Sabbath released a 42-minute album, Paranoid, the first song was an anti-Vietnam message called War Pigs. Hundreds were suddenly imprisoned without trial in Northern Ireland. A court listening to the Oz obscenity trial had heard the judge say that losing defendant Felix Dennis—publisher, poet and philanthropist—had ‘limited ability’. Woodstock and the Isle of Wight 1969 music festivals were the colle
ctive fading memory of hippy idealism. Douglas Adams was looking forward to seeing the release of the first Monty Python film. Abbie Hoffman, who lead and symbolized anti-Vietnam protest nailed the paradox facing an alternative society, and simultaneously topped the list of unbeatable book titles, with three words: Steal This Book. And Pan published a new book called Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe, which in a deft marketing stroke became the book most often stolen from libraries.
The second reason the first hitch-hiker’s guide is remarkable is that it was to be the direct inspiration for The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. Douglas Adams told often the story of how he had borrowed a copy of Ken Welsh’s book as an aide-de-camping while travelling in Europe in the summer between leaving school and going to Cambridge. Later on he said that the telling had been so frequent that he had begun to doubt the veracity himself. A thank you letter written to Ken Welsh in 1981 expressing his gratitude for the book confirms perfectly the details and adds a darker side describing his mood on the night as ‘frantically depressed’ and ‘jaundiced’ having had a bad day, and liking neither his surroundings in Innsbruck nor the idea of heading off anywhere else. Douglas Adams’ ‘most profitable’ idea seems to have come out of an attack of the grumps. We are getting slightly ahead of ourselves here so we will pick up on more details of the relationship between the two hitch-hikers guides later but first it is important to understand exactly what it was about Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe that made it worth Douglas Adams tucking it into his rucksack.