42 (10.10.10) The Answer — Just Don’t Panic and Know Where You Put Your Towel

In cel­e­bra­tion of today, 10 Octo­ber 2010, we remem­ber Dou­glas Noël Adams, cre­ator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a true modern-day clas­sic in which we learn not only the “Answer to the Ulti­mate Ques­tion of Life, the Uni­verse and Every­thing” but also why the heck the Earth is here. It turns out to be truly unfor­tu­nate that the Ulti­mate Ques­tion itself is unknown.

OK, you have to be a bit of a geek and you must have a twisted sense of humor and you have to espe­cially be able to sus­pend any sense of real­ity; but if this is you and by some chance the world has passed you by and you have never been exposed to this won­der­ful, uplift­ing, bit of time away from daily stress, or you just need to revisit Mr. Adams’ cre­ation, go to the orig­i­nal BBC broad­cast web­site, buy the books. This is how san­ity is maintained.

But you must remember:

where you put your towel

… a towel has immense psy­cho­log­i­cal value. For some rea­son, if a strag (strag: non­hitch­hiker) dis­cov­ers that a hitch­hiker has his towel with him, he will auto­mat­i­cally assume that he is also in pos­ses­sion of a tooth­brush, wash­cloth, 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.

and what­ever you do

DON’T PANIC

Is Still Here