The Mystic Ranger

I missed the Towel Day, which was to be cel­e­brated on the 25th of May. Which is in fact. a very sad thing to hap­pen, but yeah… I’ll take care not to miss it the next time around! 364 days left for it, after all! :-O

You can also know if it is Towel Day, just to keep your own check! Apart from that, one impor­tant ques­tion that might come to you is — (or at least it came to me!) as to why the 25th of May. As I men­tioned, the offi­cial site of the Holy Day, says:

Many other dates for cel­e­bra­tions had been pro­posed. For those with an excep­tion­ally long atten­tion span: the 42nd day of the year (“Happy Adams Day”), 42 days after his death (“Sec­ond Day of Remem­ber­ing”), the 11th of March (his birth­day, around which from 2003 on a yearly “Dou­glas Adams Memo­r­ial Lec­ture” is held), the Fri­day before the 42nd week-end day of the year (occa­sion­ally falls on 25 May, as it did the year he died), etc.

Of all these dates, May 25th turned out to be the one that gained a sig­nif­i­cant following.

As the uni­verse that Dou­glas Adams cre­ated was full of absur­dity and ran­dom­ness, it may be a fit­ting choice after all. And if you need an addi­tional rea­son: if you add the hexa­dec­i­mal num­bers 25 and 5, and con­vert the result to dec­i­mal, you get 42!

Thrilling, eh? The FAQ answers most ques­tions most ques­tions of any­body. Even non-geeks. But still, for who­ever doesn’t want to go off this site to read some­where else (Thanks for the love!! ), why the towel at all? Once again I quote, but this time, the HitchHiker’s Guide to The Galaxy:

A towel (…) 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.)

Hope you too, by now, regret hav­ing missed Towel Day. Read about it, and you could also check about the com­ing of the Towel Day, in min­utes and sec­onds, here. [Do Remem­ber to remind me the next year! ]

P.S.: You can down­load the .psd of the above image– as proof of the fact that I myself hand-crafted it. Nice, eh? Hope it some­how, some­where helps you in your life.…

Here goes the link.