A big shame to hear about the passing of another great man.

-- Anonymous, May 23, 2001

Answers

Ya, really. On friday its Towel Day. So take your best towel and bring it with you all day to honour Adams.

-- Anonymous, May 23, 2001

Why a towel?

A towel 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 soredly 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 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.

-- Anonymous, May 23, 2001

Barman : You going to the match this afternoon Sir?
Ford Prefect : No
B : Arsenal without a chance eh Sir?
FP : No the World's about to end
B: Really? Lucky escape for Arsenal if it did.

There is a theory which states that if anyone ever works out what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will be immediately replaced by something even more bizzarely inexplicable.
There is a second theory which states that this has already happened ...

-- Anonymous, May 23, 2001