The number 42
Douglas Adams was asked many times during his career why he chose the number 42. Many theories were proposed,[6] but he rejected them all. On November 3, 1993, he gave an answer[7] on alt.fan.douglas-adams:
“The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘42 will do.’ I typed it out. End of story.
Bahh, no wonder the monkeys picked it out of a scrabble bag and he couldn’t come up with the question.