Golgafrincham, home of the circling poets of Arium, decided that one third of its population was useless, and devised a ruse to get rid of them by concocting a story that their planet would shortly be destroyed in some great catastrophe. The useless population consisted of middle management[?], telephone sanitisers, management consultants[?], marketing executives, hairdressers[?] and the like. Although there were conflicting accounts of the exact nature of the supposed catastrophe, they were generally told that a giant mutant star goat was threatening Golgafrincham. All these people were packed into one of three giant Ark spaceships, and told that everyone else would follow shortly in the other two. Of course they did not follow, and lived happily for a while; but, ironically enough, the whole remaining population shortly afterward died out from a deadly plague spread by unsanitized telephones.
The Ark eventually crash-landed on the planet Earth, and the Golgafrinchans gradually usurped the native cavemen, becoming the ancestors of humanity but thereby ruining the computer program that the Earth was running to find the Ultimate Question[?].
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump