Frequently Asked Questions
What's the origin of Towel Day?
Douglas Adams, best known as the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, died of a heart attack at age 49 on 11 May 2001.
He was cremated in Santa Barbara (USA) and his ashes are buried in London (UK).
His fans wanted to organize some kind of wake in his honor. Because some time was needed to get the word out, Towel Day was organized two weeks after his death, on 25 May 2001. After its initial success it became an annual event.
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Extract from the proposal posted in the "Binary Freedom" forum by D Clyde Williamson, on Monday May 14, 2001 06:00am PDT:
Douglas 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 (May 25, 2001) be marked as "Towel Day". All Douglas Adams fans are encouraged to carry a towel with them for the day.
Make sure that the towel is conspicous- use it as a talking point to encourage those who have never read the Hitchhiker's Guide to go pick up a copy. Wrap it around your head, use it as a weapon, soak it in nutrients- whatever you want!
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Why celebrate on the 25th of May instead of a more meaningful date?
Many other dates for celebrations had been proposed. For those with an exceptionally long attention span: the 42nd day of the year ("Happy Adams Day"), 42 days after his death ("Second Day of Remembering"), the 11th of March (his birthday, around which from 2003 on a yearly "Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture" is held), the Friday before the 42nd week-end day of the year (occasionally falls on 25 May, as it did the year he died), etc.
Of all these dates, May 25th turned out to be the one that gained a significant following.
As the universe that Douglas Adams created was full of absurdity and randomness, it may be a fitting choice after all. And if you need an additional reason: if you add the hexadecimal numbers 25 and 5, and convert the result to decimal, you get 42!
Why a towel?
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Quoting from 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 mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-tohand-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-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 which has passed into hitch hiking 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.)
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What kind of towel should I carry?
Any towel will do. One is enough, though some fanatics may try to carry 42 towels.
Towel Day was a blast! But what am I to do the rest of the year?
If you're a hardcore hitchhiker, you may need something stronger than Towel Day. And yes, there is such a thing. Listen carefully, we will say this only once. What you are looking for is called ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Appreciation Society. Beware, these folks are really weird. But then again, so are you.
Please tell me the exciting story of the Towel Day site!
We get this question all the time! Really! (yeah right)
On 16 May 2001 Chris Campbell and his friends registered towelday.org. They created a website to spread the word. People all over the world celebrated Towel Day and sent them pictures of themselves with their towels. After several celebrations the creators moved on to other projects, but... (suspense)
In February 2004, Tobbe "Kojv" Landin relaunched the site on his own server at towelday.kojv.net! He kept the tradition alive and ran a rather successful online forum. Until in late 2008 he unexpectedly died at the age of 30, and his site disappeared. But all was not lost, because...
In the meanwhile, fans had bought back the original towelday.org domain from a domain squatter. Strapped for time, they started out with a minimal webpage, but they're gradually improving the site along the way.
Contacting towelday.org
Send e-mail to: info at towelday dot org
We welcome feedback, but apologize for being unable to individually reply to all e-mail.
Back to the Towelday.org homepage
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