Do you know where your towel is?

Calling all hoopy froods: it is (at the time of writing) 42 days until Towel Day!

Towel Day is celebrated every year on 25 May as a tribute to the late author Douglas Adams. On this day, fans openly carry a towel with them, as described in the fabulous
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to demonstrate their appreciation for the story
and its author.

I know exactly where my towel is!

As highlighted by towelday.org, Towel Day 2020 is special as this year marks the 42nd anniversary of the first BBC broadcast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978). And if you don’t know what’s special about the number 42, you clearly have no idea where your towel is….

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of towels:

“A towel is about the most massively useful thing any interstellar hitchhiker can carry. For one thing, it has great practical value: you can wrap it around you for warmth on the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; sunbathe on it on the marble beaches of Santraginus V; huddle beneath it for protection from the Arcturan Megagnats as you sleep beneath the stars of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow, heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (which is such a mind-boggingly stupid animal it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you) and even dry yourself off with it if it still seems clean enough.”

Personally, although I think that ‘Towel Day’ is a terrific concept, I believe that it doesn’t go far enough. There should be a specific time of day on 25 May at which Hitchhiker’s afficionados all do something to salute the passing of Douglas Adams. The time is easy to fix: it ought to be ten seconds past ten minutes past ten in the morning. Why? Because 10:10:10 is 42 in binary. But the something to do is harder to determine. Since ‘forty-two’ is the answer, the question here is clearly ‘What?’ Suggestions welcome!

So… do you know where your towel is?

(PS If you haven’t seen it already, check out my Hitchhiker’s Guide trivia quiz!)