Do you know where your towel is?

It is an important and popular fact thatthings are not alwasys what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, many had always asumed that he was mor intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - while all the dolphins had ever done was much about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.
~ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)

If you happen to see someone walking down the street this afternoon wearing nothing but a towel, Don't Panic! She's probably just celebrating Towel Day in tribute to the late Douglas Adams. Click the link for pictures, posts and related information. If you upload your own towelish photo to Flickr and you could win a cool Sony e-reader.

Adams was not only the author of the Hitchhikers Guide the Galaxy and many other humorous science fictiony novels. He was also deeply interested in wildlife conservation. In the mid-1980s Adams and biologist Mark Carwardine traveled around the world to search for nearly extinct species, including the aye-aye in Madagascar, white rhinos in Zaire and the Yangtze River Dolphin in China. Those excursions were parlayed into a book,Last Chance to See, as well as a BBC radio series (UK listeners only, alas). And despite Adams' premature death in 2001, his legacy is living on in a new Last Chance to See TV series hosted by comedian Stephen Fry. It will be shown on BBC 2 beginning in August.

If you are in the UK, you can watch Fry and Carwardine discussing the original series and Douglas Adams' legacy here:


You can get the latest information about the series and related information on the unofficial Another Chance to See blog.

Image: Thumbs Up by kreg.steppe on Flickr.
Tags:Towel Day, Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See