I'm a bit early but I'll post this anyway because it is important:
It is just a few more hours until the 25th of May (or not depending on your timezone), which is towel day. Today you should take a towel with you everywhere you go and tell people how great towels are.
To all the strags* out there. Towel Day is the tribute day to DNA, Douglas N. Adams, writer of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when froods all over the galaxy bring their towels with them for the entire day.
For more information please refer to the towel day web site.
* Strag: Non hitchhikers, used here to refer to the people who haven't read the books.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy wrote:A towel, it says, 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 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 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 is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
PS: stick that banner in your signature to show the others that you are bringing a towel with you for the entire day.
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