Towel Day

Towel Day

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of 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-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 mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you. Daft as a brush, but very, 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 [non-hitch hiker] 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.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter Three

Yes, today is Towel Day! Are you carrying your towel?

David avatar

11 responses

  1. Shhhhh! I'm not sure good business etiquette can quite stretch to towel wearing!

  2. Ushi avatar
    Ushi

    No i'm not 🙁 But then again – neither are you so :-p

  3. Ushi avatar
    Ushi

    Yes they can…you just need to know how to phrase it…”I'm developing a system for a towel making company, and need to get a feel of the towel, so I develop a suitable system”….or something like that…

  4. Kitty avatar
    Kitty

    Now, I got away with taking a towel into an exam (admitidly I kept it in my bag but still) so it can't be that hard. Do you have that many towels in your house or did you nick the photo from somewhere?

  5. I own exactly 3 towels – all of which are various shades of blue! The towels pictures above I found on some random Japanese website through Google Images – I bet you can't guess what they sell!

  6. Kitty avatar
    Kitty

    Little holographic pictures of dancing hamsters?
    Nope sorry no idea :p

  7. Ushi avatar
    Ushi

    ok…so what else did that shop sell? You're making me too darn curious.

  8. Hmmmm… how come I get 8 comments on a post about towels and not one on more interesting topics like China or Technology?!! Perhaps I should write more about towels from now on!

    Ushi – I will leave you in suspense but I'm sure with a bit of Googling you could find out fairly easily 😉

  9. Ushi avatar
    Ushi

    NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. No fair. Hmph.

    Well…towels are very interesting. They come in all type of shapes and colours and fuzziness….yeah…and thats all i got on 'em :-/

  10. darryl jones avatar
    darryl jones

    Hiya yes, i am a hoopy frood that really knows where my towel is

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