Bedtime story

Every night, before she goes to bed, Hannah nurses Tessie and I read her a story. We have been trying to read things that we will enjoy, rather than the usual kiddie lit stuff about fuzzy anthropomorphic animals doing improbably cute things.

To that end, we have been reading, at roughly one chapter a night, Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide Trilogy. We are now up to the fifth [that's not a typo; it's a five-part trilogy, according to the author] book, Mostly Harmless, where I found the following in Chapter 2:

"One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it's prepared to put up with living. Anywhere it can get some kind of a grip, [even] burrowing around in the lower intestines of a rat for the sheer unadulterated hell of it, life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere.

"It will even live in New York, though it's hard to know why. In winter time the temperature falls far below the legal minimum, or rather it would do if anybody had the common sense to to set a legal minimum. The last time anybody made a list of the top one hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.

"In the summer it's too darn hot. It's one thing to be the sort of life form that thrives on heat... but it's quite another to be the sort of animal that has to wrap itself up in lots of other animals at one point in your planet's orbit, and then find, half an orbit later, that your skin's bubbling.

"Spring is over-rated. A lot of the inhabitants of New York will honk on mightily about the pleasures of spring, but if they actually knew the first thing about the pleasures of spring they would know of at least five thousand nine hundred and eighty-three better places to spend it than New York, and that's just on the same latitude.

"Fall, though, is worse. Few things are worse than fall in New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyway, so their opinion can and should be discounted. When it's fall in New York, the air smells as if someone's been frying goats in it, and if you are keen to breathe, the best plan is to open a window and stick your head in a building."

Hmmm. Apparently I'm not the only one who feels that way.