Xanga Archive

ok, so I think I am kind of starting to get sick.  have been coughing a bunch ever since I woke up this morning.. and… yeah.  Don’t really feel too bad or anything, but my throat is definately way scratchy.

I have resumed my re-reading of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  It is indeed a very good book.  All you strags who haven’t read it yet should definately go pick it up.  It’ll make a real hoopy frood out of you.

An excerpt for you, as anyone who reads a portion of this book is forced to have an intense desire to read the rest of it….. ;):

“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 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 (a mind-boggingly 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: 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 hitchhike 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 know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase that 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.)”

So yeah… good book 😉  You can also learn the answer to life the universe and everything… how the universe will end… and other interesting things.

I am going to finish my frappucino now.  I will write another post out of my own head rather then borrowing that of the late Douglas Adams later today….  😉