Towel Day Notification
Tomorrow is “Towel Day”. An event that comes around every year in remembrance of Douglas Adams the author of “Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”. He wrote in the Hitchhiker's Guide this.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker 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-to-hand-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, 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-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker 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 hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker 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.
I try to keep a towel handy at all times and tomorrow is the only day that I can justify that. I intend to wear a towel all day.
Now for some Good news.
Wrens have returned to the Wren House. That made “She Who Must Be Obeyed” and myself very happy. I asked “SWMBO” if she would like to take it down again and check (see earlier post) and all I got was #$%^&@! and a dirty look. Nevermind
The new story is that House Sparrows built a really nifty nest in a hanging planter basket on the back porch. They tolerated SWMBO watering the plant and the constant roaming around of cats and produced four hungry chicks. Yesterday morning I told her that the parents were
calling for the chicks to fly but I had to go to the store on my bike before the coming thunderstorm hit.
So she stood watch. She got to see all four fly. One didn't make it and became trapped behind one of the other plants. She plucked it out of there and put it into another plant higher up. After it got over that trauma it took its second shot and was a success. They are still around here and a constant joy. Those tiny birds can sure make a lot of noise and in the words of the peasantry “they don't take no crap off nobody”. While trying to entice the young'uns out the adults cleared the area on the back porch of all other birds and that includes around the feeder.
When I was a kid with a BB gun my grandmother ask me to never shoot her songbirds. I promised and I have never done so. Throughout my life I have forbid anyone, on or around property I had some control over, to not either. As a flier it just goes against my grain to shoot anything that flies. Come to think of it I don't want to shoot anything else either.
Something that brings me to despair is a big shiny gas guzzling new pickup truck with a sign in the back window that says “If it flies it dies”. Ah, bird hunters are a brave lot.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------One of the things about being a senior citizen is that no one ever ask me these questions.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
What do you do?
When I was younger my answer to the first question would be that I want to be a rock and roll superstar. Unlikely of course but in the past it stopped all other inquiry's. One look at me and they knew I was nuts. The answer then was really “I don't know” and it still is. For a while I thought it was astronaut but realized that I was already a space and time traveler so what was the point of pursuing that.
As for the second; in the early '70's there was a TV series by the title “Kung Fu”. When Kwai Chang Caine (David Carradine) is asked “what do you do” he replied “I live”. That reply impressed me very much and I have used that answer for more than 35 years. It also gave me the resolve to “do” instead of “watch”. And I have.
Master Po, I am ready for another lesson.
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