Don’t Panic
Wednesday - 25 May 2011
It’s not just midweek. Nor is it just new comics day or D&D 4.0 game night…
Today is also Towel Day. (1, 2)
For those who don’t grok why a towel should have it’s own day, perhaps this will help explain it:
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 vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft 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 avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); 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.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking 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.)1
That pretty much sums it up.
Last night, SaraRules! and I ran a few errands - including setting up a baby registry at the local Babies ‘R’ Us - and then capped the evening with cups of ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery. We also (finally) got around to watching last season’s finale of NCIS… which, not so oddly, explained a few things about this past season. Go figure.
Stray Toasters
- Given that the sun was out for about seven hours before I got home, I mowed the lawn yesterday. I may have cut it a little shorter than I had originally planned… but it’s cut. And it looks much better. Now, I just need to find some time to do the edging.
- What Will Come After
- The Facts (and Fiction) of Tornadoes
- A New Approach to Railroad Switching
- USA comes up a bit short in global Better Life Index
- Oh, the Stuff Those Lions Guard
- Secret Origins: Firestorm
- Google Expected to Introduce a Wireless Payment System
- This is what happens when we don’t vaccinate
- The Stanford Prison Experiment
- Chrysler Pays Back Rescue Loan
Quote of the Day
“Rebar is not forgiving…”
So long and thanks for all the fish.
1 - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Current Mood: caffeinating...
Originally published at Random Access
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