The Towels of May  It's that time of year, friends. Time to get out the Towels. You know, that travelling requisite no self-respecting hitchhiker would be without.
A towel [says the Hitchhiker's Guide] 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-boggingly 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. (Douglas Adams, of course.)
Where is your towel? And where will it be on 25 May? Check with the Towel Day Ambassador for events in your spatial quadrant. Tell your friends why you're carrying a towel around. And if anything really cool happens, snap a photo and send it to us so we can give it some publicity. Tune in for your Towel Day music, or reminisce about last year's Towel Day celebration on the ISS Lots to enjoy here.
Do the h2g2 Core Team members know where their towels are? Of course they do. The problem was getting them to admit it. Finally, once they had been hounded so thoroughly that threats were made in the Editor's direction involving a spacecraft and a convenient airlock, they succumbed to journalistic pressure and shared their towel pics. You see what lengths I will go to to provide this 'zine with high-class copy. You will get a kick out of these photos. They will either go viral or be used as evidence in an interplanetary lawsuit, so be sure to take a look. They can even be printed off the interwebs and used for framing, t-shirt iron-ons, or target practice, whichever is preferred.
We do have other things in the Post this week, but frankly, most of them have towels in. Even the 'literature' and the 'artwork' have towels. Okay, Awix' movie probably doesn't have a towel in it, just superheroes. And Willem's extinct pig doesn't have a towel. Maybe that's why it became extinct. It does have three, count 'em, three horns. That's pretty impressive. We suspect Kubanochoerus could give the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast a run for its money. (We won't swear he could take on Wolverine, though.)
Frankly, getting all of this Towel Day stuff together has been so much fun, we're really psyched for the day itself. Go out there and party like it's the year 5.5/Apple/26. (Don't get that? Ask a Whovian.) And send Stuff, I'm tired out from chasing the Core Team around.
Dmitri Gheorgheni
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