A: I'm not exactly qualified to explain what Towel Day is, but as I understand it, Towel Day is May 25th of every year. It started the year Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) passed away on May 11th. I'm not sure what the significance of having Towel Day two weeks after that date, but there you are. On Towel Day, fans of Adams' works carry around a towel in order to honor him.
"Why a towel?", you ask?
Well, there's this fantastic quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that explains why a towel. It has to do with towels being the most useful thing an intergalactic hitchhiker can carry around, with that quote enumerating the different things one can do with a towel including (but not limited to) drying yourself off.
Basically, I love this book. There are currently six books in the "trilogy," with the first five having been written by Douglas Adams himself, and the sixth written by Eoin Colfer (author of the Artemis Fowl) series. The sixth book came about after Adams' death because Adams' estate said that he had always planned to write a sixth installment, and they (Adams' estate) decided that Colfer would be the right man for the job. I personally think that the sixth book (And Another Thing...) stays true to the spirit of the original books, this coming from the girl who has read the first book maybe three times, and the remaining books only once. In short, I highly recommend the first, because it's my favorite, but I suppose the rest are worth reading as well, but it's not absolutely essential that you do.
Q: What are your plans for today?
A: Because today is so stormy, I'm probably going to go straight home after class and take a nap. Or maybe I'll go home and pack, because that would be a little more useful than a nap. It's days like these that make me really tired though. The overcast skies full of cotton ball clouds dipped in gray. Puddles shining on the sidewalk and the leaves looking either bejeweled or ten times greener when set against the gray. Of course, the smell of wet pavement is always pleasant, and I welcome the rain, but it's highly inconvenient weather for carrying around poster boards. But this morning the thunder woke me up. I lay awake watching the storm for a little while, the lightning flash and the grumbling thunder that shook the building. I think that's what woke me up, the thunder shaking the building.
And then of course when I woke up with the storm, I remembered my dream. I was in a boat with someone else, but I don't know who it was. This boat was on Loch Ness. I don't remember how I knew, but I just knew that I was on Loch Ness. Off in the distance, I saw some sort of animal, and my first instinct was to say that it was the Loch Ness Monster, because of course it would be the Loch Ness Monster in Loch Ness. But whoever was with me said that it was a bear, and when I looked a little closer, I could see it's head poking out of the water as it swam. I turned around and then I saw a whole bunch of bears just swimming around in Loch Ness. I thought, "Oh, they're just bears." Because the water was so clear, I could see their bodies paddling under the water, so I could see a whole bear. But they looked small as far as bears go. But it was a dream, so I'm really not questioning it too much.
"The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase."
- Yogi Berra
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