“A towel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 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 (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, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
If you haven’t read it yet, you really should.
Bookshelf Battle 
Are you a hoopy frood?
There are some true comic gems in these books – I like the Somebody Else’s Problem Invisibility Field.
Vogon Poetry was my favorite. Have you seen the movie? I haven’t and was wondering if it’s worth it. It was a short novel, but Adams goes into some pretty extravagant ideas, i.e. the place where they build new planets….fun to think about, not sure how it would translate on film.
I did watch the film but to be honest I wished I hadn’t bothered. Something just got lost in translation…which is usually what happens when they make films out of novels.
I was present at a lecture he gave in Anchorage, AK (which was not only awesome, but I also got credit for a lit. class for going… ha, ha sucker!!!). Someone in the audience asked him where the towel thing came from. (This being Alaska, I met and got to know, by way of stealing the girlfriend of, the person asking the question in college not a year later.) DA described how that came to be. He said that he was at the beach in Australia, and forgot his towel, and this was the genesis of the don’t forget your towel. His point was that it is a pretty good idea to have a towel, and I can say that in my life having a towel at the ready has generally been a good idea. He also somehow managed to turn it into a parable relating to protecting wildlife. That guy was a genius.
Thanks for the fun story. The towel thing does kind of tie the whole novel together. Did you at least keep the stolen girlfriend?
Yup, wife of 13 years now.