Community Corner

Why is May 25 Towel Day?

More than a tribute to brilliant author Douglas Adams, it's a day to donate a towel to benefit a local animal shelter in need.

If it's May 25 it must be International Towel Day, a nod to author Douglas Adams, who penned among other books, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

And where else would you expect to find the hub of Towel Day celebrations, but at the Nashua Public Library, where this display is set up and towels will be collected for donation to a local animal shelter.

Stop by, drop off a towel and pick up a book. (*Note: The library is closed for Memorial Day Weekend, but you can stop by with your towel on May 28. Thanks to an alert reader for reminding me to post the "Library will be closed" photo I took so I could remind you, dear readers. Also, note the note: The library will be closed Sundays during the summer.)

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For those who've not read "Hitchhiker's Guide," here's an explanation, via Wikipedia:

The original quotation that explained the importance of towels is found in Chapter 3 of Adams' work The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

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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 miniraft 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 avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); 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.

Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.) —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


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