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Are you a hoopy frood, like me?

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life, Links

If so, you bet­ter have your towel with you today! As today, is Towel Day.

For those not famil­iar, Dou­glas Adams was one of the fun­ni­est writ­ers of our time. He wrote a won­der­ful series of radio plays which were con­verted in a a series of books and a TV show and later into a really awful movie. This was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In this, Mr. Adams wrote:

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.

After Mr. Adams’s death some lunatics decided to cre­ate Towel Day as a trib­ute to his genius. I only heard about it this year (about a week ago to be more pre­cise) and decided to join in on the fun. And the fact that I’m telecom­mut­ing to work today had absolutely noth­ing to do with that deci­sion. *grin*

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