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"Ford was hanging from the towel, gripping its seams.
Other hitchhikers had seen to modify their towels in exotic ways, weaving all kinds of esoteric tools and utilities and even computer equipment into the fabric. Ford was a purist. He liked to keep things simple. He carried a regular towel from a regular domestic soft furnishings shop. It even had a kind of blue and pink floral pattern on it, despite his attempts to bleach and stone wash it. It had a couple of pieces of wire threaded into it, a bit of flexible writing stick, and also some nutrients soaked into a corner of it so he could suck it in an emergency, but otherwise it was a simple towel you could dry your face on.
The only actual modification he had been persuaded by a friend to make was to reinforce the seams.
Ford gripped the seams like a maniac."
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
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"‘Here, suck this,’ said Roosta, offering Zaphod his towel.
Zaphod stared at him as if he expected a cuckoo to leap out of his forehead on a small spring.
‘It’s soaked in nutrients,’ explained Roosta.
‘What are you, a messy eater or something?’ said Zaphod.
‘The yellow stripes are high in protein, the green ones have vitamin B and C complexes, the little pink flowers contain wheatgerm extract.’
Zaphod took it and looked at it in amazement.
‘What are the brown stains?’ he asked.
‘Bar-B-Q sauce,’ said Roosta. ‘For when I get sick of wheatgerm.’
Zaphod sniffed it doubtfully. Even more doubtfully, he sucked a corner. He spat it out again.
‘Ugh,’ he stated.
‘Yes,’ said Roosta, ‘when I’ve had to suck that end I usually have to suck the other end a bit too.’
‘Why,’ asked Zaphod suspiciously, ‘what’s in that?’
‘Anti-depressants,’ said Roosta.
‘I’ve gone right off this towel, you know,’ said Zaphod, handing it back."
Some alternate uses for that infinitely useful device: the towel.
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
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"It’s very funny the thing about the towel because… I’ll tell you where it came from. I was on a holiday with a bunch of people, and we were on a Villa in Corfu. And every day we would set out to the beach, and just as we were setting out for the beach there would a problem, and the problem would be that Douglas could not find his towel!
Where was my towel? Was it under the bed? Was it on the end of bed? Was it in the bed? Was it the bathroom? Was it hanging on the line outside? Was it in the washing …? Was it …? I had no idea, day after day, where the fuck my towel was.
And after I while I just began to think this must be symptomatic of somebody who is so sort of deeply chaotic. But I then … I don’t even know whether I even came up with it first, or somebody on the hold of it came with the idea that somebody who was rather more together than I, would be someone who would really know where their towel was."
Douglas Adams, Parrots, the Universe and Everything, a speech given at the University of California, 2001.
(Source: hitchhikersguidequotes)
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
hitchhikersguidequotes:
A reading of a passage from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
Hope you enjoy!
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly because 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 that 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 avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindbogglingly 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-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in the 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 may 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 know where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase which 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.)
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"Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still know where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with."
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"‘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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buttgenie:
Rule One:
Grow at least three extra legs. You won’t need them, but it keeps the crowds amused.
Rule Two:
Find one good Brockian Ultra-Cricket player and clone him off a few times. This saves an enormous amount of tedious selection and training.
Rule Three:
Put your team and the opposing team in a large field and build a high wall round them.
The reason for this is that, though the game is a major spectator sport, the frustration experienced by the audience at not actually being able to see what’s going on leads them to imagine that it’s a lot more exciting than it actually is. A crowd that has just watched a rather humdrum game experiences far less life-affirmation than a crowd that believes it has just missed the most dramatic event in sporting history.
Rule Four:
Throw lots of assorted items of sporting equipment over the walls for the players. Anything will do - cricket bats, basecube bats, tennis guns, skis, anything you can get a good swing with.
Rule five:
The players should now lay about themselves for all they are worth with whatever they find to hand. Whenever a player scores a ‘hit’ on another player, he should immediately run away and apologize from a safe distance.
Apologies should be concise, sincere and, for maximum clarity and points, delivered through a megaphone.
Rule Six:
The winning team shall be the first team that wins.
~ Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
(I was going to put this up at some point anyway, so I figured reblogging this would work as well)
(via needlesslydefiantwithtea)
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"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some people have chosen to see it as the final and clinching evidence for the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this. ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing.’
‘But’, says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’
‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
‘Oh that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing."
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
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| Arthur: | You know, it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and I'm about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young.
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| Ford: | Why, what did she tell you?
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| Arthur: | I don't know, I wasn't listening. |
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"I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."
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"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
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"The great thing about human beings, I mean—while we make fun of it—is not only that we invent stuff that’s new, and better, and does things better. But even stuff that works perfectly well we can’t leave well enough alone, and it’s really the most sort of charming and delightful aspect of human beings, that we keep on inventing things that we’ve already got right once."
Douglas Adams, Parrots, the Universe and Everything, a speech given at the University of California, 2001.
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"It’s very funny the thing about the towel because… I’ll tell you where it came from. I was on a holiday with a bunch of people, and we were on a Villa in Corfu. And every day we would set out to the beach, and just as we were setting out for the beach there would a problem, and the problem would be that Douglas could not find his towel!
Where was my towel? Was it under the bed? Was it on the end of bed? Was it in the bed? Was it the bathroom? Was it hanging on the line outside? Was it in the washing …? Was it …? I had no idea, day after day, where the fuck my towel was.
And after I while I just began to think this must be symptomatic of somebody who is so sort of deeply chaotic. But I then … I don’t even know whether I even came up with it first, or somebody on the hold of it came with the idea that somebody who was rather more together than I, would be someone who would really know where their towel was."
Douglas Adams, Parrots, the Universe and Everything, a speech given at the University of California, 2001.
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"We always ask ourselves “why” because we look for intention around us, because we always do something with intention. You know, we boil an egg in order to eat it. So, we look at the rocks and we look at the trees, and we wonder what intention is here, even though it doesn’t have intention. So we think, what did this person who made this world intend it for. And this is the point where you think, ‘Well, it fits me very well.’
And it’s rather like a puddle waking up one morning—I know they don’t normally do this, but allow me, I’m a science fiction writer. A puddle wakes up one morning and thinks, ‘This is a very interesting world I find myself in. It fits me very neatly. In fact, it fits me so neatly, I mean, really precise, isn’t it? It must have been made to have me in it!’
And the sun rises, and he’s continuing to narrate the story about this hole being made to have him in it. And the sun rises, and gradually the puddle is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, and by the time the puddle ceases to exist, it’s still thinking, it’s still trapped in this idea, that the hole was there for it.
And if we think that the world is here for us, we will continue to destroy it in the way that we’ve been destroying it, because we think we can do no harm."
Douglas Adams, Parrots, the Universe and Everything, a speech given at the University of California, 2001.
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"For us there is no longer a fundamental mystery about life. It is all the process of extraordinary eruptions of information. And is information that gives us this fantastically rich complex world in which we live. But at the same time that we’ve discovered that, we are destroying it at a rate that has no precedent in history, unless you go back to the point that we’re hit by an asteroid."
Douglas Adams, Parrots, the Universe and Everything, a speech given at the University of California, 2001.
