Knowing Where Your Towel Is

Always Know where your towel is.

All true Hitch hikers can at a moments notice produce at least one towel and many carry more than one.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of towels.

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.

As you can see no hitch hiker alive today would be caught dead without their towel, (and many hitch hikers are buried, cremated, blowen up or otherwise disposed of holding their favourite towel).

"Knowing where your towel is" is the first of the all important Pillars of Hitch-hikertology.

A Guide entry on towels
More pedestrian uses for towels (for froods and non-froods alike)


So long and thanks for all the fish

In The Beginning

In the Beginning there was nothing. Then, 10 million years ago, at the request of a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings called "Mice", the planet building people of Magrathea constructed the greatest computer ever to exist "The Earth" for the sole purpose of finding the ultimate Question of Life The Universe And Everything. This Planet sized computer was then placed into the orbit of a small, unregarded yellow Sun in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy. This new planet was populated with many living creatures including dolphins and a creature that had been derived from the chimpanzee and didn't live in caves. The planet was filled with fossils, layers of rock and various chemical element to make it seem like it had existed for approximately 4.5 billion years.

The computers program continued for 8 million years until the rejected third of a race of people called Golgafrinchans (mostly telephone sanitizers and management consultants) crashed into the Earth with the intention of colonising it. These people wiped out the native ape descendants and assumed their position as future dominate creatures on earth thus ruining the program to find The Question. These people went on to become humans.
Like your self.
Unless your a hitchhiker stranded on earth.

And that is the origin of The Earth and Humanity

So long and thanks for all the fish