So this afternoon, when I went to Wikipedia to research jazz trumpeter Wallace Roney, who celebrates his 54th birthday today, my eyes wandered down the Wikipedia main page to check what national holidays were being celebrated today. I saw that……
Mother’s Day is being celebrated in Algeria, France, Morocco and Sweden
First Patriotic Government in Argentina (1810)
Independence Day in Jordan 1946
and Towel Day….
Towel Day 2005, Innsbruck, Austria, where, by his own account, Adams got the inspiration to write the Guide.
Towel Day??? My inquisitive senses are tingling – I hit the link and discovered that the celebration of Towel Day began in 2001, two weeks after the death of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s author Douglas Adams’ on 11 May 2001. The commemoration was started as a way for fans to show their appreciation for both Adams and the books he authored! On the day fans carry towel with them all day. Why a towel?? The importance of a towel is described in 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 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 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 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.)[3] —Douglas Adams, Read More
To see what’s happening around the world on Towel Day visit Towelday.org. Last year according to Wikipedia…..
In recognition of Towel Day, the Norwegian public transportation company Kolumbus gave away a limited number of special towels to customers. Each towel contained an RFID chip that allows a free ride on their buses and boats.[15] In Washington DC, the Chevy Chase branch of DC public library offered special prizes for those who wore a towel to the library on Towel Day
Now I know I have to look at these celebrations early in the day!! I think I will mark my calendar so that next year I’ll remember Towel Day….. I’ll end this with the words of D Clyde Williamson on 5-14- 2001 when Towel Day was inaugurated….
So long Douglas, and thanks for all the fish!
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