Today is...

[IceWizard]

Wednesday 25 May 2016

Towel Day



Towel Day is celebrated every year on 25 May as a tribute to the author Douglas Adams by his fans. On this day, fans openly carry a towel with them, as described in Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, to demonstrate their appreciation for the books and the author. The commemoration was first held 25 May, 2001, two weeks after Adams' death on 11 May.

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 — 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 (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

And

Senior Health and Fitness Day



2016 Theme: “Improve Your Health for a Better Self!”

100,000 older adults will participate in activities at more than 1,000 locations throughout the U.S. on Wednesday, May 25, 2016 as we celebrate the 23rd annual National Senior Health and Fitness Day.

The common goal for this day: to help keep older Americans healthy and fit. Always set for the last Wednesday in May, National Senior Health and Fitness Day is the nation's largest annual health promotion event for older adults.

National Senior Health and Fitness Day is organized as a public-private partnership by the Mature Market Resource Center, a national information clearinghouse for the older adult market.