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Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Towel Day for Douglas Adams

Towel Day :: A tribute to Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

From the Towel Day homepage:

You sass that hoopy Douglas Adams? Now there's a frood who knew where his towel was.

You are invited to join your fellow hitchhikers in mourning the loss of the
late great one. Join in on towel day to show your appreciation for the humor and
insight that Douglas Adams brought to all our lives.

What do I do?
Carry your towel with you throughout the day to show your participation and mourning.
When do I do it?
May 25th.
Where do I do it?
Everywhere.
Why a towel?
To quote from
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practicalvalue - 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 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-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.

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The background image on this page is a Hebrew translation of the verse from Bob Dylan's song  It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), from which the title of this blog is taken. Translation courtesy of Yoram Aharon of Hod-HaSharon's page--found via YudelLine-- which has many Dylan lyrics in Hebrew.