It’s Towel Day again today, the annual celebration of all things Douglas Adams and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This year, I’ll do a repost of last year’s articles with some additions – 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. And this year I even have the translated article about the 2005 movie incarnation ready, which was still missing last time because I wasn’t able to get it readyyet.

Last Spring, I missed something great – the cast of the Hitchhiker’s Guide Radio Series had been on tour with a live show, but there was a 75-minute live radio broadcast on BBC4 from the whole gang. I was really disappointed that I missed it, but recently it surfaced on Youtube in somewhat suboptimal quality, but it’s still immensly enjoyable.

Last year I’ve been poking around Youtube and foundsome great Douglas Adams treasures out there, which I have put together in a little playlist (which only suffered one minor deletion casualty in the last year). 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 and radio series somewhere if you search for them, 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 last year there was something which Douglas Adams would have really liked: ISS Expedition 42 was wishing everybody a Happy Towel Day – and  “thanks” to a failed Progress freighter launch, Samantha Cristoforetti, Terry Wirts and Anton Shklaperov are actually still on the ISS right now because their stay has been extended a couple of weeks. Will they remember Towel Day? Yes, the did! Samantha Cristoforetti has taken the time read a couple of pages from the first book on the ISS! Also, you can always check Samantha Cristoforetti’s Google+ Stream or my Twitter List of Astronauts currently on the space station for more.

So, Happy Towel Day everyone – it’s a very special one with Expedition 42 still in space!