May 25, as of course you already know, is celebrated worldwide as Towel Day*. Whatever you do, do not forget your towel today. If you cannot be properly entoweled, you might consider alternatives… carrying somewhere on your person folded-up paper towels purloined from the restroom, say.

The point is, do not go about unprepared. Because, well, you never know.

Per Wikipedia, here’s the passage in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy encouraging towelage:

A towel, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide] 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 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); 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.

Note: The image at the top of this post is but one of thousands of Flickr images tagged “towelday.” (Edit to add: …to say nothing of YouTube videos.) The photographer, one per_p, helpfully reminds us that inanimate objects, too, deserve protection. Especially sentient inanimate objects.

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* Or, as it is known in Colombia, Dia de la Toalla.