Don’t forget your towel
On this, Towel Day, the 25th day of May, we celebrate the life and writings of Douglas Adams, whose sublime silliness has kept my family entertained on long car trips and brought us some of the most memorable—and occasionally annoying—catch phrases ever, including such treasures as:
So long and thanks for all the fish.
Ford, you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it.
If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
You should send that in to the Reader’s Digest. They’ve got a page for people like you.
There’s no point in acting surprised about it.
Apathetic bloody planet, I’ve no sympathy at all.
If you’re so clever, you tell us what colour it should be.
Funny how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.
The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved.
Stick it up your nose.
The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
Life is like a grapefruit. (It’s sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It’s got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.)
Forty-two.
Once you know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.
And the most important advice ever given, in any book ever in the history of the Universe:
DON’T PANIC!
You may ask yourself, Why the 25 of May?
Why not?
You may also ask, Why 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-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.)
~Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Of course, Gunnar and the rest of my guys each carry a towel everywhere.
Today, you should join them, in memory of Douglas Adams. Carry your towel proudly, and if anyone gives you an odd look, tell him to stick it up his nose.
Shortly after the kids arrived, it was clear they did, indeed, have no interest in football, as they brought a Wii and all its accoutrements. By then, the chili had been brought up to temp and dumped into the crockpot, and dh asked me to taste it for spices.
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