May 25th, 2012 is Towel Day! On this special day, in tribute to the late author Douglas Adams, fans all over the world proudly carry a towel in public to show their respect. And they don’t panic. For information on Towel Day happenings near you, check out towelday.org. For instance, in Toronto, no less than four flash mobs organized by the Toronto Froods are set to take place at 42 minutes past the hour. How appropriate!
And for the folks who haven’t had the pleasure of reading Douglas Adams yet, you may be asking “Why a towel?” Well, it has particular meaning to all fans of Adams’ not-really-a-trilogy trilogy, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. To quote the first book:
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 brush, but very 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.“
Just that excerpt alone should be enough to win over any person lucky enough to be reading Douglas Adams for the first time. :)
We offer a fun gift to introduce newbies to Arthur Dent’s hilarious odyssey through space. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Towel Gift Set contains the “trilogy” of the first four Hitchhiker’s books all in one lovely volume, along with an embroidered towel that says Don’t Panic. After all, who doesn’t want to be a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is?
On a personal level, when I was a kid The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a huge favourite with my family across multiple media platforms. In fact ,the British TV series kicked off my love affair with the BBC. I think I was only around 7 or 8 the first time I saw it aired in Canada so I didn’t catch all of the humour, but I do remember giggling over the whale / bowl of petunias animation sequence. And a few years later, after I read the books, I was thrilled to catch the series on TV again and find that it was even funnier than I remembered. If you haven’t seen the original six-part series before, it’s worth hunting down. In fact, you can order it from the BBC Canada store for around $20 last I checked. (And don’t be put off if you happened to see the hideous movie a few years back; I promise the TV series is far, far better.) It’s a great series to watch with the entire family.
Besides the introduction to the BBC, the Hitchhiker’s Guide was also one of the first video games I played in DOS. It was an interactive game following the novel where you typed your commands to make events move along, like a Choose Your Own Adventure but where you made up the turn-to-page-x choices. (At one point, you actually did have to put your towel on your head to fool the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal!) As I recall, it was a very complex game – and there weren’t any hints. Even though we knew the books inside and out, my brother and I could never get by the part where you played as different characters. Felt like we were caught in an infinite loop with Zaphod on the speedboat. (Our frustration would have tickled Adams greatly, I’m sure.) If anyone can find a working copy of that game for computers these days, let me know – I’d love to see if 20 years later, I can finish the darn thing!
Finally, for those of you who are over the legal drinking age, why not mix yourself up the (debatably) best drink in the universe: a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster? Be careful it doesn’t sneak up on you, though, because according to the Guide, the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster “is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick”.
1 oz Jack Daniel’s® Tennessee whiskey
1 oz peach schnapps
4 – 6 oz orange juice
1 splash Blue Curacao liqueur
Shake the orange juice, the Jack and the peach schnapps in a shaker 3/4 full with ice cubes. When it’s chilled, strain into the highball glass and drizzle some of the blue Curacao liqueur over the top of it. Add a citrus twist (and, bizarrely, an olive if you’re a DNA purist), sit back and be prepared to have your brain smashed out by gold bricks, lemons and allsorts.
Douglas Adams never did give a recipe for the drink in his books, but we found the above recipe online courtesy of drinksmixer.com. And since it’s the official recipe used by the legendary club Zaphod Beeblebrox in Ottawa (wicked fun club, btw – great live music!), we’re going to believe that this is the drink as Zaphod invented it. Plus, it’s delicious.
So on May 25th, wave your towel, knock back a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, and toast Douglas Adams – his wit, humour and sheer love of all things silly should be celebrated!
As published by By Heart Books - children's books, children's gifts and loot bags