h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Paper towels are an immensely useful sub-class of towels, due to their small size, easy portability, disposability (they can be used for more disagreeable tasks than you might be willing to expose your good traveling towel to), and multipurpose uses common to all types of towels.

Paper towels are an indespensable resource for the college living space, and it goes without saying that they travel well. They can be used to soak up the messes caused by leaking water bottles in your pack, as napkins because no matter where you go, there are never napkins, as tissues to blow your nose, as wrappers for your garbage to stuff back in your pack until you can get to a garbage can, because there are no garbage cans any more for fear someone will drop bombs in them. You can use your paper towels and a little water from your leaking bottle to wash your face on the go.

Around the house, towels are wonderfully useful as substitutes for other paper products you've temporarily run out of, such as napkins, tissues, or toilet paper. You can scribble notes on paper towels when someone starts rapid-firing phone numbers or directions at you and the scrap paper is out of reach. You can put a wet paper towel in a plastic bag and grow bean sprouts, and thus keep entire classes of kidnergarteners enthralled and off the streets for a few weeks. Paper towels are excellent at cleaning up cat puke and a host of other biological substances.

Let's not forget our friend, that most humble of towels, the paper towel!

-- Bluewyvern

I must agree. For I am a firm believer that it was from the humble paper towel that today's quality cloth towels evolved. I salute you, Bluewyvern, for your loyalty to the predecessor of towels - the paper towel. May you always find a super-absorbant roll of them in the supermarket.

As yet a sub-class of paper towels, might I humble suggest my little cousin the 'paper towlette'?

It's heady aroma and pre-soaked, anti-bacterial cleanliness might be linked to the recently submitted entry on wetwipes.