essays

[National Review Online, April 29, 2005]

What's wrong with this picture? Take your red crayon and draw a circle around the whale falling through space. Now draw a circle around the bowl of petunias falling beside him.

A whale and a bowl of flowers falling through endless space are not impossible-they're merely *improbable*, which is how they happened to get there. The spaceship Heart of Gold has an Improbability Drive. It would be improbable for this elegantly minimalist spaceship to leap from one end of hyperspace to another, so if you push the big Improbability button on the dashboard, that's what will happen. Other improbable things happen too: the two missiles pursuing the spaceship are changed into a whale and a bowl of petunias. The people inside the spaceship might be changed into anything. When the Heart of Gold first picks up the hitchhikers Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, they arrive in the form of sofas. In a later scene, the whole crew is turned into yarn-doll copies of themselves. Arthur, spacesick, emits a brilliant flow of multicolored yarn.

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[National Review Online, April 5, 2005]

You'd be excused for thinking that the storyline of "Millions," while appealing, is not all that exceptional. A pair of brothers have recently lost their mom, and moved with their dad to a home in a brand-new development. The younger boy, Damian (Alexander Etel), a charmer with a freckled, open face, is playing in a grassy field near his home when a gym bag thrown from a passing train crashes through his cardboard fort. The bag contains a lot of lot of cash.

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