Holy Cow, we almost missed it. (Thanks, Ginger.)

“2001: Two weeks after the death of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, fans get together and celebrate May 25 as “Towel Day” in his memory. The tradition continues each year since.”

Why towels, for the three non-Hitchhiker fans out there? Take it away, TowelDay.org:

From the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

A towel 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 vapors; 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-boggingly 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-hitchhiker) 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.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

Oh well dang, they even have a Towel Day 2010 video of people carrying their towels:

Happy Towel Day, everybody, from all of us here at the BRI, and a very special Cheers to the late great Douglas Adams.

Happy Earth Day, Earthlings! Here’s a cool little story for the occasion, from Uncle John’s Certified Organic Bathroom Reader (page 21), on the creation of that nifty little symbol used the world around that let’s you know if a product is recyclable and/or made from recycled materials. Little known fact: It’s creation was timed to coincide with the very first Earth Day.

THE ♲ SYMBOL

Thinking outside the box
The first Earth Day, celebrated by 20 million people in April 1970, not only led to the formation of the EPA, it also launched an unusual contest. A Chicago-based cardboard-box company called Container Corporation of America (CCA), a pioneer in manufacturing recycled products, was looking for a simple design to print on all of their recycled boxes. Inspired by the success of Earth Day, Bill Lloyd, the graphic designer at CCA, decided to advertise the contest nationally at America’s high schools and colleges. “As inheritors of the Earth, they should have their say,” he said.

In Lloyd’s grand vision, the winning design would be more than a symbol printed on CCA’s boxes; it would serve as a symbol to promote the nationwide recycling movement. First prize: a $2,500 scholarship to the winner’s choice of colleges. More than 500 entries came in from students all over the nation.

Twisted
The winner: Gary Anderson, a 23-year-old graduate student at USC. He drew his inspiration from 19th-century mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius, who noted that a strip of paper twisted once and joined at the tips formed a continuous one-sided surface. Commonly referred to as a “Möbius strip,” the geometric shape has since shown up in engineering (conveyor belts that last twice as long) and in popular art, such as M. C. Escher’s fantasy-based woodcuts “Möbius Strip I” and “Möbius Strip II (Red Ants).”

It was that combination of practicality and art—along with the recycling-friendly notion that everything eventually returns to itself—that put Anderson’s design at the top of the contest finalists. “I wanted to suggest both the dynamic—things are changing—and the static equilibrium, a permanent kind of thing,” he later recalled. (After the design was chosen as the winner, Bill Lloyd altered it slightly; he darkened the edges and rotated the arrows 60 degrees so the interior of the symbol resembled a pine tree. In Anderson’s version, one of the pointy ends faced down.)

CCA attempted to trademark the recycling symbol, but after they allowed other manufacturers to use it for a small fee, the trademark application was held for further review. Rather than press the matter, Lloyd and the CCA decided that a petty legal battle over such a positive message was a bad idea. So they dropped the case and allowed Anderson’s creation to fall into the public domain. The three arrows have since come to represent the three components of conservation: Reuse, Reduce, Recycle.

Symbology
Although anyone is free to use the recycling symbol as part of an advertising campaign (or as a graphic on a page…like in a Bathroom Reader), its use to advertise a commercial product’s recycling properties is strictly regulated by the Federal Trade Commission’s “Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims.” There are several variations, but here are the symbol’s two main classifications:
• Recycled: If the arrows are surrounded by a solid black circle, then the product is made from previously recycled material. A percentage displayed in the center of the symbol denotes how much of the product was made from recycled material. (If no percentage is denoted, it is 100% recycled.)
• Recyclable: If the arrows are not surrounded by a circle, then the product is recyclable, but only if the “regulations and/or ordinances of your local community provide for its collection.”

Still at It
Nearly four decades later, Gary Anderson remains active in the green movement. After earning his Ph.D. in geography and environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 1985, the architect-by-trade has spent the bulk of his career as an urban planner with a focus on controlled growth. When asked how it feels to have created one of the most popular symbols in the world, Anderson tries to downplay his accomplishment, but admits that it’s “pretty neat.”

Gary Anderson (right) and his winning design with Container Corporation of America’s Hans Buehler, 1970

Mostly Related Extras

• An article on the symbol from Frieze Magazine

• How to recycle weird stuff

• How Green is Golf?

• How green are cane toad golf gloves?

• 100% recycled shoes

• And a picture of a donut

Or: Happy St. Patrick’s Day!, as an old superstition says for the very best cabbages you should get out to the garden and plant them today. After that you can have some corned beef and cabbage and a good fat glass of Guinness—you deserve it.

A few more St. Patrick’s Day tidbits:

• St. Patrick was born Maewyn Succat in Roman Britain (near what is now the English-Scottish border) sometime around CE 387. At 16 he was captured by Irish pirates who took him to Ireland and sold him as a slave. Six years later he escaped, returned to England, entered the Catholic Church, and in around 431 was sent by Pope Celestine back to Ireland as “Patritius”—from the Latin for “Father”—as a missionary. There he purportedly developed and taught a very Irish kind of Catholicism, which he used with great success in converting the pagan Irish to Christianity. He died on March 17—so the very unreliable story goes—in around 460 (or in 493, depending on the source).

• The legend of “St. Patrick” grew over the centuries, and he eventually became known as the “Patron Saint of Ireland.” The supposed day of his death has been celebrated by the Irish as a Catholic feast day since at least the 1600s, and over time “St. Patrick’s Day” became a mostly secular holiday commemorating Irish identity and culture as a whole. It didn’t become an official public holiday in Ireland until 1903.

• The first St. Patrick’s Day Parade in the world didn’t take place in Ireland, but in New York City, in 1762. (Some sources say Boston, in 1737.) The paraders were Irish members of the British military.

• In 1848 several “Irish Aid” societies in New York, which had until then held their own parades, united to form one New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Today it’s the oldest ongoing civilian parade in the world, and the largest in the U.S., with more than 150,000 participants each year.

• St. Patrick’s Day is a public holiday not only in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, but also in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. And on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat, a British overseas territory settled in 1632 by, primarily, Irish Catholics.

• The shortest St. Patrick’s Day Parade in the world is held in the village of Dripsey in County Cork, Ireland. It’s just 100 yards long—and goes from one of the village’s pubs to the other. (One of the participants: The Randy Handlers. Ahem.)

Do you have any more interesting St. Patty’s day trivia we can add to the list? Please let us know in the comments—we’ll be here until Happy Hour…