Happy Towel Day!

This post contains Affiliate Links to my Amazon Account.  Purchases made through this link will support this blog.

Douglas Adam's book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was a cult classic back in the day.  I adored the book - along with millions of others.  The tale wrapped golden nuggets of truth in a wonderful coating of silly, slightly off kilter events and random stories.


If you're not familiar with the book, Arthur Dent awakens one morning to find that his house has been scheduled for demolition by the highway board.  They sent him notice about the hearings to condemn his house, but the mail was never seen.  His friend Ford arrives on the scene and instead of helping him resolve the situation, he pulls him off to the local bar, gets a couple of shots of alcohol into him and then tells him that the entire earth is scheduled for demolition for the creation of an inter-spatial highway, and that notice has been sitting in a filing room for years and nobody had filed any objections, and today was the day of demolition.

As Arthur attempts to wrap his mind around this news, the giant space bulldozers appear in the sky over England.

Ford has found a solution, though.  It turns out that he is a contributor to the book "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy".  He has traveled across the galaxy hitchhiking through space on various freighters and pleasure craft.  He has "arranged" a ride with one of the arriving space ships.  He and Arthur are whisked away from the planet just before the first push from the space bulldozers.

Arthur is given a tiny little book to help him figure out what in the world has just happened.  It is entitled "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", and emblazoned on the cover are the very comforting words "Don't Panic".

Does Arthur panic?  Can he adapt?  Where does this wild and madcap adventure take him next?

You really need to read the book and find out!


So, back to the towel...  It's best described in Douglas Adams' own words from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:


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-tohand-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-hitchhiker) 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.


So, my friends.... do you know where your towel is?