The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: May 27, 2007

Official News - page 5


THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN A GREAT IDEA FOR A PARTY...

by Hazed

Oh darn, we missed celebrating Towel Day, which was on Friday May 25. What a shame. It would have been an absolutely fantastic excuse to throw a party.

Towel Day started not long after the death of Douglas Adams, the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books (and radio show and records and TV series and, after his death, film...). It was conceived as a way to celebrate his life and work and to mourn his passing. If you have read the books (or seen the film or TV series or heard the radio show or listened to the records...) you will know the significance of the towel. The guide says that a towel:

"...is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker 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 brush, 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 clearly a man to be reckoned with."

Take a look at http://www.towelday.kojv.net/ for information about Towel Day. I'll mark my calendar for next year and try to remember it early enough to organise a party in 2008!


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