Happy Towel Day! Celebrate “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” Author Douglas Adams

May 25th marks the 12th annual Word Towel Day, which is a celebration of Douglas Adams, author of  “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

What’s Towel Day, you ask? Well, sit right back and let me break it down for you.

Douglas Adams, died of a heart attack on May 11, 2001 at the age of 49. Two weeks after his passing, fans decided they wanted to have a wake of their own in his honor and thus, on May 25th, 2001, the first Towel Day was held. It was a success and it has since become an annual tradition.

I know what some of you may be asking yourselves right now, “but why a towel,” and to you people I will first say, you have obviously not read “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” in which case you should immediately go do so. You can thank me later. In the book, Adams writes this about towels:

“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.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)”

Now, you know a little about importance of towels and why, when hitchhiking the galaxy you should always carry one with you. So, grab yourself a towel, fling it over your shoulder and remember DON’T PANIC!

Also, I should mention that today’s date 5/25/12 is an especially cool Towel Day due to the fact that 5+25+12=42!

Happy Towel Day everyone!