| Towel Day | |
|---|---|
 Towel Day 2005, Innsbruck, Austria, where, by his own account, Adams got the inspiration to write the Guide. |
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| Official name | Towel Day |
| Observed by | fans of the author Douglas Adams |
| Type | International |
| Date | 25 May |
| Observances | carrying a towel throughout the day |
| Related to | Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy |
Towel Day is celebrated every year on 25 May as a tribute to the author Douglas Adams by his fans. On this day, fans carry a towel with them to demonstrate their appreciation for the books and the author, as referred to in Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The commemoration was first held in 2001, two weeks after Adams' death on 11 May 2001.
The original quotation that explained the importance of towels is found in Chapter 3 of Adams' work The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
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-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 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.
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
The emphasis on towels is a reference to Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe by Ken Welsh, which inspired Adams' fictional guidebook and also stresses the importance of towels.
The original article that began Towel Day was posted at "Binary Freedom", a short-lived open source forum.
Towel Day: A Tribute to Douglas Adams
Monday 14 May 2001 06:00am PDTDouglas Adams will be missed by his fans worldwide. So that all his fans everywhere can pay tribute to this genius, I propose that two weeks after his passing (25 May 2001) be marked as "Towel Day". All Douglas Adams fans are encouraged to carry a towel with them for the day.
So long Douglas, and thanks for all the fish!
- D Clyde Williamson, 2001-05-14
Chris Campbell and his friends registered the website towelday.org to promote the day, reminding people to bring their towels. Towel Day was an immediate success among fans and many people sent in pictures of themselves with their towels.
Several news sources around the world have mentioned Towel Day, including the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten and the television news show NRK Nyheter, and National Public Radio, Los Angeles.
In May 2010, an online petition was created asking Google to recognise Towel Day with either a Google Doodle or by returning search results in the Vogon language for a day.
In Canada, Volt, a French/English television show, created a skit in which Towel Day was explained and featured.
In Ecuador, Radio City, a BBC affiliated radio station, interviewed one of the organizers of Towel Day in Toronto to introduce their listeners to Towel Day. The interview was in Spanish and English.
In the United Kingdom Planet Rock aired an "Alternative Thought Of The Day" by David Haddock about Towel Day and Siren FM broadcasted "Dean Wilkinson & the Importance of International Towel Day".
In January 2012, The Huffington Post listed Towel Day as one of ten cult literary traditions.
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