Towel Day?!? Hasn’t the blog covered that before ? Well, yes, and a few other Douglas Adams-related things . How could we not? This year, the day itself even falls on one of our (intended) blog posting days: May 25th. (It isn’t like we’d post on a Thursday... never could get the hang of Thursdays.) The writings of Douglas Adams seem to be one of those touchstones that most nerds of all ages and backgrounds can agree upon. You might prefer Star Wars to Star Trek, or Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings, but all of those people seem to appreciate the absurd, yet dry humor of Douglas Adams. Though he may have left us almost a quarter century ago, his daft spirit lives on in all of his fans. So what better way to celebrate than to once again appreciate the legendary towel! As if you weren’t already familiar: “Just about the most massively useful thing any interstellar hitch hiker can carry. For one thing it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth on the cold moons of

Douglas Adams would have turned 70 this year, and, over two decades after his untimely death, the impact he made on all our lives and culture, particularly through The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, remains largely unknown… just the way he liked it. Adams loved to blend the precisely known with the manifestly unknowable by turning the very concepts on their heads, filling his stories with asides, detours, and commentaries, usually(but not always) for their own sake, even especially when there was no way the characters themselves could possibly be aware of it. He took a shortcut through the entirety of human philosophy and religion by giving us the answer to the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything... but kept the question itself a mystery all the way up to the end of the series. He never shied away from the very real massiveness and incomprehensible scope of the universe, but addressed the problems of long-distance space travel in some of the silliest (and most imagi