Right now is Towel Day. A day of recognition for the late creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to your Galaxy, Douglas Adams.

The day first came to exist in 2001 two weeks following your author’s passing, and since next carrying a towel with you in tribute of the Author’utes works.

The reference originates from an “entry” in the Hitchhiker’s Manual that outlines the most important gear.

A towel, it claims, is about the most massively valuable thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. In part it has great practical worth. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you certain across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it about the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under that beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a new miniraft down the slow heavy Water Moth; wet it for use throughout hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your mind to ward off noxious smells or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (this kind of mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); it is possible to wave your towel in emergencies as a distress transmission, and of course dry yourself served by it if it still looks like it’s clean enough.

More importantly, the towel has immense mental value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch walker has his towel using him, he will automatically think that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, jar of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, moist weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, your strag will then happily lend your hitch hiker any of these or possibly a dozen other items that the hinderance hiker might accidentally get “lost”. What the strag will think is any man who can problem the length and breadth with the galaxy, rough it, slum the idea, struggle against terrible probabilities, win through, and still understands where his towel can be, is clearly a man to become reckoned with.

Hence an expression that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass in which hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a new frood who really knows where his / her towel is.” (Sass: know, be familiar with, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really collectively guy; frood: really amazingly jointly guy.)

Well I definitely know where my soft towel is at.

Douglas Adams gave us an outrageous world of scifi fantasy and a way with words that was a thrill you just read.

Thanks for all the fish.