Zaphod looked and liked.

The craft they were looking at was in fact pretty small but extraordinary, and very much a rich kid's toy. It was not much to look at. It resembled nothing so much as a paper dart about twenty feet long made of thin but tough metal foil. At the rear end was a small horizontal two-man cockpit. It had a tiny charm-drive engine, which was not capable of moving it at any great speed. The thing it did have, however, was a heat-sink.

The heat-sink had a mass of some two thousand billion tons and was contained within a black hole mounted in an electromagnetic field situated half-way along the length of the ship, and this heat-sink enabled the craft to be manoeuvred to within a few miles of a yellow sun, there to catch and ride the solar flares that burst out from its surface.

Flare-riding is one of the most exotic and exhilarating sports in existence, and those who can dare and afford it are amongst the most lionized men in the Galaxy. It is also of course stupefyingly dangerous — those who don't die riding invariably die of sexual exhaustion at one of the Daedalus Club's Apres-Flare parties.

The audiobook narrated by Stephen Fry is excellent.

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Hitchhikers-Guide-to-the-Galaxy-Audiobook/B002VA9SWS

"Meanwhile the pot of begonias' only thought was 'Not this again!' and if we ever figure out why, the universe will be a wiser place indeed."

Forgive my mangled recollection of something I read a quarter-century ago.

It was a bowl of petunias.

I have no mouth and I must scream.

Mike

Eep.

That was you?

[youtube]https://youtu.be/c-NSAGHMWco[/youtube]

You may go... after I have killed you.

But I haven't been to Stavromuller beta yet.

I hated the movie. I may try it again in a few years, but maybe not.

I am old, and I LOVE the BBC (video) version, even though Zaphod's second head was cheap paper mache.

"Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don’t know why I bother to say it...Ohhhhh, God, I'm sooooo depressed...."

You mean I brought you here to zarking soon?

Belgium!