This year, for a change, I have not forgotten that it’s Towel Day today, the annual celebration of all things Douglas Adams and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This time around, I managed to throw together a couple of things – head over to DVDLog to read the painstakingly translated review of the 1981 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy televisison series, which was actually a lot of fun to revisit and update, because it’s not only a disc review, but partly the history of the Hitchhiker’s Guide itself. I originally wanted to make this a double review together with the 2005 movie, but that has to wait until next week or so because writing the translation took a bit longer than I expected!

Back in March, it seems I missed something great – the cast of the Hitchhiker’s Guide Radio Series had been on tour with a live show, but this spring there was a 75-minute live radio broadcast on BBC4 from the whole gang. And of course it’s now off the iPlayer and I haven’t found a recording of it yet – but hopefully it will materialize somewhere!

Meanwhile I’ve been poking around Youtube and there are some great Douglas Adams treasures out there, which I have put together in a little playlist. There are several great documentaries and even the rare South Bank show which I originally saw in dubbed version somewhen in the early 1990s on German television. You can actually find the television series itself somewhere if you search for it, but I’m not linking to it because the Youtube uploads have a really bad image quality compared to the DVD and, of course, because of copyright reasons. Buy the DVD! It’s not like it still costs 30 bucks like it did twelve years ago.

And there’s something which Douglas Adams would have really liked: ISS Expedition 42 is wishing everybody a happy Towel Day! Samantha Cristoforetti, Terry Wirts and Anton Shklaperov are standing here holding a towel in front of the very Soyuz capsule which will bring Maksim Surayev, Alexander Gerst and  Reid Wiseman to the ISS in only three days – they are the backup crew and are currently together with them in Baikonur.

Have I forgotten something? Maybe, but I can just add it later here in a sneaky after-publishing-edit – I already added the previous paragraph shortly before posting. Happy Towel Day everyone! :-)