Usually, in our courses with Ariel Ortiz, we are to read three books, one fictional, and the other two technical. This provides a great gateway to explor e new books, and reminds us that not all is about coding, but that we should not forget the beauty of arts.
This semester, we read “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, being a cornerstone for the cultural panorama of the computer science world, I loved and understood plenty of references I’ve been missing throughout the years. I’d say this is as basic as the normal Star Wars / Star Trek crowd.
One of the things that struck me as pure Genius, is the way Adams always comes up with something incredibly illogical, but really plausible, which in turn, you could even say it makes total sense.
One of those is this excerpt.
A towel is just about the most massively useful thing any interstellar Hitchhiker can carry. 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 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 (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you — daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course you can 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: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, 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."
See? This is wonderful. A towel is being used as the best thing a person can have, and he explains it in a way it ends up making perfect sense to carry a towel around.
I’m really happy I got to read this book, it was wonderful, and definitely a highlight for the highlight course of my education.
Adams, Douglas “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, 1979.