I have had the horror of carpenter ants falling out of a ceiling light fixture onto my keyboard. New pup eats ants, with much distaste showing by head-shaking. She was stymied getting out onto the deck because Ants!!!!

it's not that boring, or a joke.

Maybe. Probably.

Adams always vowed that there was nothing special about his selection of the number 42 as the "Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything." He consistently maintained variations around the claim that he decided the Ultimate Answer "should be something that made no sense whatsoever—a number, and a mundane one at that." That he lit upon 42 "at random." That 42 is "a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven . . . the sort of number that you could without any fear introduce to your parents."

But, you know: probably he was lying. Because it is a fact that brains lie all the time, and Adams was, so far as is known, an Earth creature, and one with a brain. So even if he was not consciously lying, his brain could have been lying to him.

I'm pretty sure that this is the case—that Adams, or his brain, knew what the number 42 represented, and employed it as The Answer intentionally. I believe this because of what is in The White Goddess, a book with which, without doubt, Adams was familiar.

Among what is relevant, that is inscribed therein, is that among the ancients the true and real Lofty Name of the divine was always intentionally obscured. The Real name was "conveyed from one High Priest to another" by "a description of the alphabetical process which yielded it." And "the Name taught in the Academies is likely to have been a complicated one of either 42 or 72 letters. Both forms are discussed by Dr. Robert Eisler in the Jubilee volume for the Grand Rabbi of France in La Revue des Etudes Juives. That of 42 belongs to the Beth-Luis-Nion system." The Beth-Luis-Nion system is a tree-alphabet originally Cretan, surviving as "a genuine relic of Druidism orally transmitted down the centuries," and "latterly used for divination only." Furthermore:

42 is the number of the children devoured by Elisha's she-bears. This is apparently an iconotropic myth derived from a sacred picture of the Libyo-Thraco-Pelasgian "Brauronia" ritual. The two she-bears were girls dressed in yellow dresses who pretended to be bears and rushed savagely at the boys who attended the festival. The ritual was in honor of Artemis Callisto, the Moon as Bear-Goddess, and since a goat was sacrificed seems to belong to the Midsummer festivities. 42 is the number of days from the beginning of the H month, which is the preparation for the midsummer marriage and death-orgy, to Midsummer Day. 42 is also the number of infernal journeymen who judged Osiris: the days between his midsummer death and the end of the T month, when he reached Calypso's isle, though this is obscured in the priestly Book of the Dead. According to Clement of Alexandria there were forty-two books of Hermetic mysteries.

So. The Real name of the Divine is expressed in 42 letters. And that is why Adams, or his brain, selected the number 42 as the "Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything."

; )