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Towel Day is celebrated every May 25 as a tribute by fans of the late
Douglas Adams. The commemoration was first held on Friday in May 2001,
two weeks after his death on May 11, and since then has been extended
to an annual event. On this day, fans carry a towel with them
throughout the day. The towel is a reference to Adams’s popular
science fiction novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
“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 [non-hitch
hiker] 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.” (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy, Chapter Three)
Other possible dates were 11 February (42nd day of the year), 11 March
(Birthday) and 11 May (his death). 25 May was chosen because it was as
close to his death as expedient notification of fans could allow, and
kept by custom although there were some attempts to switch to one of
the alternate dates.
