13 Things about Juliadamus
It's a wonderful, funny and witty book, or better said an encyclopedia or dictionary. Douglas Adams is known as a critic for restaurants at the end of the universe, and as the famous founder of the Hitchhikers Guider to the Galaxy, but this book is much more about everyday life on earth.
The purpose of the dictionary/encyclopedia is to give names to things, behaviours and feelings in life that are common and well known to all of us, but not named, yet.
For example:
To SPOFFORTH (vb.): To tidy up a room before the cleaning lady arrives.
I hope you get the gist, and here is the first part, letters A-D:
1.) ABILENE (adj.): Descriptive of the pleasing coolness on the reverse side of the pillow.
2.) AHENNY (adj.): The way people stand when examining other people's bookshelves.
3.) AITH (n.): The single bristle that sticks out sideways on a cheap paintbrush.
4.) BALDOCK (n.): The sharp prong on the top of a tree stump where the tree has snapped off before being completely sawn through.
5.) BLITHBURY (n.): A look someone gives you by which you become aware that they're much too drunk to have undertood anything you've said to them in the last twenty minutes.
6.) BROMSGROVE (n.): Any urban environment containing a small amount of dogturd and about forty-five tons of bent steel pylon or a lump of concrete with holes claiming to be a scuplture.
7.) CLIXBY (adj.): Politely rude. Bliskly vague. Firmly uninformative.'Oh, come my dear, and come with
me.
And wander 'neath the bromsgrove
tree' - Betjeman.
8.) COTTERSTOCK (n.): A piece of wood used to stir paint and thereafter stored uselessly in a shed in perpetuity.
9.) DEAL (n.): The gummy substance found between damp toes.
10.) DIBBLE (vb.): To try to remove a sticky something from one hand with the other, thus causing it to get stuck to the other hand and eventually to anything else you try to remove it with.
11.) DOBWALLS (pl.n.): The now hard-boiled bits of nastiness which have to be scraped off the crockery by hand after it has been through a dishwasher.
12.) DROITWICH (n.): A street dance. The two partners approach from opposite directions and try politely to get out of each other's way. They step to the left, step to the right, apologise, step to the left again, apologise again, bump into each other and repeat as often as unnecessary.
13.) DULEEK (n.): Sudden realisation, as you lie in bed waiting for the alarm to go off, that it should have gone off an hour ago.
Make sure to stop by next week, to read the next 13!