Happy, belated, towel day!
This very good holiday is celebrated every year on May 25. It is a day to celebrate the life and work of Douglas Adams.
If you know Adams, it is probably for his book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – the first book in the increasingly inaccurately named trilogy. (Five books were eventually published in this “trilogy.”)
This is a great association to make, and I applaud your good literary taste!
“Seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.
Together, this dynamic pair began a journey through space aided by a galaxyful of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox—the two-headed, three-armed ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian (formerly Tricia McMillan), Zaphod’s girlfriend, whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; and Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he’s bought over the years.
Where are these pens? Why are we born? Why do we die? For all the answers, stick your thumb to the stars!”
I’m into it!
And to celebrate it, among other reasons, I was doing my part by taking a massive, foolish road trip! This is very much the spirit of the Guide series.
I’m on a quest to visit all 50 states this year, and took a few days to bang out some visits. (Okay, to be fair, it was kind of a coincidence. But rest assured: I had my towel, and clutched it in the car with me on Towel Day!)
On this trip I visited: Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana.
I did also drive through Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin. But I already visited those states on prior trips, so I didn’t count them toward this trip.
What else should you read by Adams?
Of course, read the entire Hitchhiker’s series. The early ones were the most fun for me; but I wasn’t sorry to read any of them!
Another really interesting, this time nonfiction, book from Adams is Last Chance to See. “New York Times bestselling author Douglas Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine take off around the world in search of exotic, endangered creatures.
Join them as they encounter the animal kingdom in its stunning beauty, astonishing variety, and imminent peril: the giant Komodo dragon of Indonesia, the helpless but loveable Kakapo of New Zealand, the blind river dolphins of China, the white rhinos of Zaire, the rare birds of Mauritius island in the Indian Ocean. Hilarious and poignant—as only Douglas Adams can be—Last Chance to See is an entertaining and arresting odyssey through the Earth’s magnificent wildlife galaxy. “
And he has a series with the same zany sense of British dry wit and zanniness: Dirk Gently . It’s only two books, but I really enjoyed both. The first is:
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
“From Douglas Adams, the legendary author of one of the most beloved science fiction novels of all time, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, comes a wildly inventive novel—in trade paperback for the first time—of ghosts, time travel, and one detective’s mission to save humanity from extinction.
DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY
We solve the whole crime
We find the whole person
Phone today for the whole solution to your problem
(Missing cats and messy divorces a specialty)”
Adams let Dirk focus on the important things in life, with his own perspective:
““Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!”
“The what?” said Richard.
“The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a …”
“Yes,” said Richard, “there was also the small matter of gravity.”
“Gravity,” said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, “yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered.” … “You see?” he said dropping his cigarette butt, “They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap … ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention. It is a door within a door, you see.”
(Yes, Newton did indeed create the catflap. He was a very multi-talented guy.)
The official Towel Day website gives some important background information on the purpose of the holiday:
Why a towel?
From the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
“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.)”