> It was a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it.
> "It's so... black!" said Ford Prefect. "You can hardly make out its shape... light just seems to fall into it!"
> The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it.
> "Your eyes just slide off it..." said Ford in wonder
This Is Spinal Tap (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds7FRivVMgA)
"the hue fuligin, which is darker than black, admirably erases all folds, bunchings and gatherings so far as the eye is concerned, showing only a featureless dark.
I got (still get) stuck on the overlap between moving, and steering. Moving like a fish seems to include sinuous paths, schooling with sudden acceleration and darts to the side, etc... nimbleness and speed.
I understood it was a proxy for "accelerates like/is as fast as" but found that unsatisfying.
Also, cow works to evoke large, stubborn perhaps, unresponsive... but was an odd choice in as much as few try to steer cows. Shepherd, maybe. A water buffalo or ox or even mule felt like a missed opportunity, since they are prototypically steered and there is a sense of their owners/drivers laboring against their desire to not labor...
Total Nicolson Baker rabbit hole, just a specific reading experience that has always stood out from that series. I have uttered that line countless times over the years in various contexts, including while dancing late at night on the playa.
Face-palm.
Reminds me of another ‘joke’ I never got which, for all I know, might have been obvious to everyone else:
“Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.”
I never knew that “the other side” was referring to death... like, at a seance when you contact the “other side”.
Apparently the joke was a big hit in the days of the Spiritist movement (back with Houdini, Doyle, and all the others promoting or debunking seances.)
I thought it was some intentionally stupid joke about crossing a road. Doh.
A quick Google shows that at least one guy — some person named Nick on Twitter — and his followers subscribe to the suicide version: https://www.esquire.com/uk/life/news/a12346/the-upsetting-tr...
Waiter: How did you find your steak sir? Man: I looked under a mushroom and there it was
I could only put it down to a terrible, Christmas cracker level pun on "much room".
The second was something like "What has three feet but no legs? A yard stick" with a picture of a ruler with three feet on it. I found that utterly perplexing... the joys of living in a metric country with predominantly imported imperial system based media!
Both took me probably over a decade to understand.
Or in other words, it was funny.
Immediately after this quote Ford (or maybe Zaphod?) says something about how he had been passed by some ship at great speed, and shortly after it crashed into a planet or something. I can't remember off the top of my head. But that seems to support the interpretation that it can move fast but can't steer.