What's seven times eight?

[anywebsite]

Quick, somebody tell the Chancellor of the Exchequer!

 

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/video/george-osborne-grilled-kids-074304524.html

[LeMaquis]

I remember the times tables up to 12 being drilled into us every day at primary school. We had to chant them endlessly. I can still go through them in my head. If only Osborne had gone to a state school.

[ALAN 58]

I knew the tune , but couldn,t remember the words.

[Jeffrey Shaw]

Reminiscent of "Hitch-hikers Guide to Galaxy". I quote:

 

At the end of the radio series, the television series and the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Arthur Dent, having escaped the Earth's destruction, potentially has some of the computational matrix in his brain. He attempts to discover The Ultimate Question by extracting it from his brainwave patterns, as abusively suggested by Ford Prefect, when a Scrabble-playing caveman spells out forty two. Arthur pulls random letters from a bag, but only gets the sentence "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?"

 

"Six by nine. Forty two." "That's it. That's all there is." "I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe"

 

Six times nine is actually fifty-four. The program on the "Earth computer" should have run correctly, but the unexpected arrival of the Golgafrinchans on prehistoric Earth caused input errors into the system—computing (because of the garbage in, garbage out rule) the wrong question—the question in Arthur's subconscious being invalid all along.

 

Some readers noticed that 6b13 × 9b13 = 42b13 (= using base 13). Douglas Adams later joked about this observation, saying, "I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13."

 

[source: http://uk.ask.com/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy?lang=en]

[Plain Talker]

I knew the tune , but couldn,t remember the words.

 

Me, too....!