Can a Brother Get a Towel?
From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.
Published by Harmony Books in 1979:
"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-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 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." (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter Three)So with the release of yet another iteration of the story in the form of a fairly popular motion picture, why haven't the marketing conglomerates of London, New York, Tokyo, Hollywood or Ursa Major released a commemorative towel? A Froogle search hinted at the availability of special towel tie-ins, but after a fair bit of searching I've yet to find one. The best I've seen is a lame t-shirt with "Got Towel?" printed in plain letters on the front. It's not even an adequate rip-off of the Milk Marketing Board campaign.
Needless to say, my search turned up some good towel information from the BBC. Well, any towel in a storm, I guess. Got yours?
BTW - According to IMDBs trivia for the movie, "Sam Rockwell has said that his interpretation of Zaphod Beeblebrox was based on a combination of George W. Bush and Freddie Mercury." Dang! I knew it! And that's one of the things that I found disappointing about the film. And look into the Towel Day article in Wikipedia or click the banner below.
