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Friday, May 25, 2007

Towel Day

 

Towel Day :: A tribute to Douglas Adams (1952-2001)


Today is Towel Day in honor of Douglas Adams. You're supposed to carry your towel with you all day but I left mine at home because I forgot what day it was. Thanks to my favorite daughter for reminding me, but next year try and remind me the day before.

If you don't know about towels, here's a reminder from the website ...
To quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

6 comments :

Anonymous said...

Did you know that every day is towel day at a nudist camp? In fact they require that you carry a towel with you at all times (for sitting on).

Honjii

Larry Moran said...

Thanks, but that's more information than I needed. :-)

Mike Haubrich, FCD said...

I had just finished this section of Hitchhiker yesterday, re towels. I had no idea that this was "Towel Day" as it were, but in my defense I carry a spare towel in my car every day; in order to lend to a hitchhiker whose towel may have been stolen.

Anatoly said...

Darn! Totally forgot about Towel Day!

Torbjörn Larsson said...

Zum towel! I am without the necessary implement.

Perhaps I will make a puddle and ponder the nature of the universe over it instead.

Bora Zivkovic said...

Whew! I did it by coincidence. The only place I went today was the pool so I had my towel with me. And so did my daughter.