It is Towel Day, once again. Those truly wishing to pay their respects to the comic genius of Douglas Adams should consider reading his relatively little known but excellent book Last Chance to See.
Towel Day 2008
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climate change activist and science communicator; event photographer; amateur mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
RIP Douglas Adams…
I appreciate how your towel is tossed carelessly over the art supplies behind you. It gives you a debonaire air. (Am I allowed to use those two words in succession??
Just did. Too bad.)
We rock the party that rocks the towels in honour of wise and witty writers.
“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 vapors; you can sleep
under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of
Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft 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 avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast
of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you
can’t see it, it can’t see you); 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.”