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HalfBee's Blog
Topic: Slightly Better Than Vogon Poetry
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fiogf49gjkf0d Everywhere in the Universe, or so says the Guide
A towel around your head can always be tied
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast
That can't see you to feast
Happens to be too stupid to know how you manage to hide
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fiogf49gjkf0d If you wrap one around your head, you can move about incognito in Brampton, Ontario. (It's so much better since I came to Sarnia!)
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fiogf49gjkf0d Towels are the most useful thing it is possible to have handy in a crisis. One of the first things that Ford Prefect did for Arthur Dent after the demolition of the Earth was to equip him with a towel.
They can be used for snaring birds whilst falling from a three-mile high marble statue.
They can be used to signal temporally unstable spaceships by fossilizing them in planetary strata.
They can be soaked in nutrients to provide sustenance in awkward situations (Although, as Zaphod Beeblebrox found, this is not a terribly tasty solution to hunger).
They can also do a really good job of drying between your toes.
The Hitchhiker's Guide is full of suggestions for successful towel deployment. It is worth noting that a cup of white vinegar in a wash will help keep your towels fluffy and soft.
The Guide had 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 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 vapors; 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. 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."
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