Towel Day - May 25th

May 25th is officially "Towel Day" and I observed it quite fashionably I think, and color coordinated as well. It shared a more recognizable holiday this year since Memorial Day also fell on the 25th of the month this year.

You may ask yourself what would cause such a reserved and sane person to wear a towel such as this out in public. Let me quote the handbook, better known as "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."

So, there you have it. Oh, yes. It is also to remember that hoopy Douglas Adams who was possibly the first to hitch the galaxy. Now there's a frood who knew where his towel was. So, on the 25th day of May each year, we join our fellow hitchhikers in mourning the loss of the man who really knows what "42" is all about.