Anywhere In Time And Space

Importance of a Towel: The Dictator vs Ryan Seacrest

You may have missed the quick few moments that Sacha Baron Cohen was on the red carpet (invited, showed up, and inevitably escorted away by security in a civilized manner). Ryan Seacrest was left wearing the smart Burberry tux, and ash.

Mr. Seacrest held it together really well, and seemed mentally prepared for any shenanigans that The Dictator may have been plotting. The end of the segment is what caught a nerdy eye. The clip from E! is below to view the Red Carpet moment.

Ryan Seacrest: “They brought a towel, I don’t know why you have a towel…”


Perhaps someone should enlighten Mr. Seacrest to Douglas Adams’ reasons on why a towel is so important to keep with you.


From the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“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); 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.

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.)”


E!Entertainment’s coverage of Ryan Seacrest’s Ash Coverage.