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May 25, 2006
Happy Towel Day!
Today is Towel Day.
Celebrated every year on the 25th May, Towel Day celebrates the life and work of Douglas Adams - author of the quintessential novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy.
Why Towel Day? From the book:
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels. A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker 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 brush, but very, 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 [non-hitch hiker] discovers that a hitchhiker 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 hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker 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." (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter Three)Now if only I'd known that before I came to work this morning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towel_Day
Addendum:
The official site: http://www.towelday.kojv.net/
Proof that there are lots of weirdos out there (ahem, sorry guys), who actually carry around a towel. Really, go look - there's hundreds of them! http://www.towelday.kojv.net/2005-europe.html.
(Scroll down a bit. There are some rather cute weirdos!)
Posted by scally at May 25, 2006 02:24 PM
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