Today is the Geek celebration know as Towel Day for all fans of Douglas Adams and the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Towel Day is a yearly day to remember the great humorist Sci Fi Author, Douglas Adams at the two week mark after his early death. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy of Five Books (yes that is how it is referred to even though there are Five books and not Three). This is one of my all time favorite Sci Fi series and writers. Douglas Adams was a genius on telling a good story with tons of humor. He passed away at a very young age of 49.
Below is a quote From the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy about the importance of having a Towel.
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.
Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.”
We have three fun videos. The first one shares the quote above in video form.
The second video from the 2005 movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It blends in various parts of the movie about towels.
The third video is also from the 2005 movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It is humorous clip with Marvin the robot, Zaphod Beeblebrox, and Trillian.
Stay Geeky My Friends and Don’t Forget Your Towel!
