Ups. I thought everybody understood the joke. First, Bridgestone means Shojiro Ishibashi. That is, the surname of the founder of the brand, which in japanese means a bridge made of stone.
Second, I was trying to be funny, not pedantic. This is a long explanation, sorry:
NickT mentioned that the meaning of life was "42".
This is an elaborated joke from "The Hitchhiker's guide to galaxy": in this book, the superhypermega computer DeepThought has been pondering for 7 million years the "Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything". The answer it finally gives is "42".
"Our heroes" find the answer absurd and then they launch a quest to understand the
question that DeepThought has answered.
They have to build an even great computer to find the question: is the so-called
Earth, so big that some people confound it with a planet. The program that runs in this computer is managed by mice (I swear I am not making this up). The mice cannot find the big question. They propose that, instead of the question, we can use "
How many roads must a man walk down", a line from Blowin' in the Wind, by Bob Dylan.
In the third book of the series, appropriately called "Life, the Universe and Everything" (this is why Saribro complained that Nick_T was forgetting "The Universe"), "our hero" Marvin the "paranoid android", has the following dialog with the mattres Zem:
[Marvin speaks]...I am at a rough estimate, thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number."
"Er, five" said the mattress.
"Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?"
So the big question solved by Deep Thought, whose answer is "42", probably is "Think of a number, any number". The irony here is that this is not even a question.
Whew! That is the explanation to my post.
Thank heavens I did not mention that
the real answer is lila
I am truly sorry if I offended you. I can see that if you do not know all that references, my post s*cks and seems totally out of thread.
The part about "Michelin is better" is mine... and is on thread. Why is better? According to Marvin, "because I say so"...