I am outraged, simply outraged at the number of people who don’t know the difference between two major holidays! On this May 25th, as pop culture loving Americans we need to make sure that everyone knows the difference between Towel Day, and Geek Pride Day. So here goes my meager attempt to enlighten you…
Towel Day is celebrated annually on the 25th of May as a tribute to the author Douglas Adams by his fans. On this day, fans carry a towel with them, as described in Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to demonstrate their appreciation for the books and the author.
A towel, it 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 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 (such 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 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 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 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.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking 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.)
Geek Pride Day on the otherhand, is celebrated each year on May 25th (the anniversary of the release of the first Star Wars film- entitled “Star Wars” before George Lucas started changing things around). It is a day in which everyone should embrace their geekiness, although there is an actual manifesto/code that goes along with Geek Pride Day, defining the rights and responsibilities of every Geek, while they don’t apply to everyone, it’s a good place to start.
Rights:
- The right to be even geekier.
- The right to not leave your house.
- The right to not like football or any other sport.
- The right to associate with other nerds.
- The right to have few friends (or none at all).
- The right to have as many geeky friends as you want.
- The right to be out of style.
- The right to be overweight and near-sighted.
- The right to show off your geekiness.
- The right to take over the world.
Responsibilities:
- Be a geek, no matter what.
- Try to be nerdier than anyone else.
- If there is a discussion about something geeky, you must give your opinion.
- To save and protect all geeky material.
- Do everything you can to show off geeky stuff as a “museum of geekiness.”
- Don’t be a generalized geek. You must specialize in something.
- Attend every nerdy movie on opening night and buy every geeky book before anyone else.
- Wait in line on every opening night. If you can go in costume or at least with a related T-shirt, all the better.
- Don’t waste your time on anything not related to geekdom.
- Try to take over the world!