Monday, May 25, 2009

Today is Towel Day

This morning, as I was making breakfast, I reminded the children that today was a public holiday. "Yes, we know," they barked, "It's TOWEL DAY!". Mmm, our eccentric homeschooling ways are showing. Our kids know all about "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" but don't know about Memorial Day.

Marc and the kids plan on wearing towels around their necks for the entire day. Marc has already proven how useful a towel is. He proudly showed me all the spinach he brought inside from the garage freezer, all neatly packaged in his towel.



Just in case you are not aware of the towel's import in a hitchhiker's life, I leave you with this quote:
A towel (...) 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 vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-tohand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you — daft as a bush, but 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: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, 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 hitchhiker 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 knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking 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.)

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Thursday, May 7, 2009

Separation of Church and State.

One of our local Congressmen Randy Forbes has introduced a legislation to recognize the role of religion in official America"
During a visit to Turkey last month, Obama said, “One of the great strengths of the United States is, although I have mentioned we have a very large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation; we consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.”

That’s just incorrect, Forbes said Wednesday.

Forbes wants to establish the first week of May as America’s Spiritual Heritage Week to mark the involvement of religion in “official American life.” He and other sponsors of the resolution will hold a news conference in Washington today , the National Day of Prayer, to publicize the effort.


Just what part of the separation of Church and State does Forbes not understand?

Hopefully his resolution is voted down by saner minds. I'm no Obama fan, but it is truly refreshing to see a President who understands that there is no official American religion and that religion should not play a role in official life. I wish our politicians would keep their religious and private lives private.