Happy Towel Day, My Hoopy Froods – Day 259

Tomorrow (or today, depending on when you are reading this) is May 25, otherwise known as “Towel Day”.

In case you haven’t heard, Towel Day is an annual celebration of the works of Douglas Adams who wrote, among other things, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a wholly remarkable book).

Towel Day started initially as a tribute to Douglas Adams in the weeks after his death. Today, people all over the world celebrate by (a) carrying a towel around with them all day, (b) getting together for some event like a movie showing or a Vogon poetry writing contest, (c) taking pictures of themselves holding a towel and posting on a special Flickr group (usually with the hitchhiking thumb up…), and (d) any number of other freaky, random ways to celebrate the day and generally just have fun.

I made this neat animated gif. (Gifs? Don’t talk to me about gifs.)

I will also be working on my novel some more, trying to channel a bit of Douglas Adams. Not steal, exactly. “Be inspired by” or “pay homage to” him. Maybe I’ll even slip in a little, obscure reference. I mean anyone who can come up with a line like “He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea…” should be admired — nay, revered — by all writers as far as I’m concerned.

To help you get in the mood for Towel Day yourself, here’s an excerpt from the Guide about towels:

…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.

You can find out more about Towel Day in its Wikipedia entry, or visit the officially unofficial website at towelday.org, which also has a list of events happening in your corner of the galaxy.

Whatever you do though, have fun.

~Graham

(Go to 1:21:00 in the video below for an explanation about where the towel idea in H2G2 came from…)