Ford Perfect
| @ Ford Perfect (No tile) | |
|---|---|
| Attacks |
Claw 2d4 physical |
| Base level | 8
|
| Speed | 18 |
| Base AC | 10 |
| Base MR | 0 |
| Alignment | 0 (neutral) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | Unique |
| Genocidable | No |
| Weight | 1450 |
| Nutritional value | 400 |
| Size | medium |
| Resistances | none |
| Resistances conveyed | none |
|
Ford Perfect:
| |
Ford Perfect (sic), @, is a monster that appears in NetHack: The Next Generation and SlashTHEM. He is a unique human monster.
Ford Perfect has a single claw attack.
Origin
Ford Prefect is one of the main characters from the Douglas Adams franchise, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He is a Betelgeusian (rather than human as in SlashTHEM) who spent some time on Earth doing research for the titular guide, but what was intended to be a week of time became 15 years when he was stranded there, which is how he encounters Arthur Dent and eventually rescues him from the destruction of earth by the Vogons.
"Ford Prefect" is an assumed name based directly on the popular line of British cars manufactured from 1938 to 1961 - the story states that Ford had taken great care to blend into Earth's society, but had "skimped a bit on his preparatory research" and thought that the name "Ford Prefect" would be "nicely inconspicuous"; Adams later clarified in an interview that Ford "had simply mistaken the dominant life form" of Earth to be the British car. A footnote in the novel explains that Ford's birth name is "only pronounceable in an obscure Betelgeusian dialect", which was almost wiped out by a mysterious catastrophe on the planet Betelgeuse Seven, which Ford's father was the only survivor of - Ford thus never learned to pronounce his birth name, which caused his father to literally die of shame (which is still considered a terminal disease in some parts of the Universe).
Adams observed that US audiences believed his name was intended to be spelled as "Ford Perfect"; the joke about the line of cars as explained above is also largely lost on younger audiences in modern Britain, since the Ford Prefect now a rare sight on British roads. The film adaptation never states Ford's last name on-screen, but it is given in the credits as "Prefect". Ford's last name is deliberately spelled as "Perfect" in NetHack: The Next Generation and SlashTHEM: the source code emphasizes this is not a typo in both instances, with spoilers included in the original patch of The Next Generation jokingly suggesting that "Prefect" is the misspelling, and the comment included in the monst.c entry is left unaltered in SlashTHEM[1]. Editors on this wiki who make this error, genuinely or otherwise, are advised to use a towel to erase their engraving and try again.
Encyclopedia entry
Both "Ford Prefect" and "Ford Perfect" return the following entry:
By a curious coincidence, None at all is exactly how much
suspicion the ape-descendant Arthur Dent had that one of his
closest friends was not descended from an ape, but was in fact
from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from
Guildford as he usually claimed.
Arthur Dent had never, ever suspected this.
This friend of his had first arrived on the planet some fifteen
Earth years previously, and he had worked hard to blend himself
into Earth society - with, it must be said, some success. For
instance he had spent those fifteen years pretending to be an out
of work actor, which was plausible enough.
He had made one careless blunder though,because he had skimped a
bit on his preparatory research. The information he had gathered
had led him to choose the name "Ford Prefect" [sic] as being
inconspicuous.
References
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