Towel day is the day on which Douglas Adams fans carry a towel to commemorate the late author. The towel, as all fans know, is essential in interstellar hitch hiking. -Along with peanuts and the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic (the electronic thumb).
Here’s another way to commemorate Adams: By (re)reading his favourite among his books (with co-author Mark Carwardine): Last chance to see.
I stumbled across the book some time in the early nineties, in the english-department of Melvær bookstore. I was allready towel-literate, but also in the middle of my master studies in marine biology. I was keenly interested in conservation as well as large African animals, like ‘white’ rhinos and mountain gorillas.
Originally, Adams and Carwardine travelled around the world to report on the state of several critically endangered species in a BBC radio show. I missed out on that, but immensely enjoyed the book. The book was at once amusing (my favourite scene is when Adams uses his laptop to scrape mosquitoes off the mosquitonet he forgot to tie up in a knot) and depressing. The animals they seek are often barely to be found, some have since gone extinct. Still, they managed to also present the kind of conservation work that presented hope to the threatened species; devoted, often ingenous programs. The kakapo, for instance (the flightless New Zealand night parrot), has since managed to more than double it’s populations size.
We later found a CD-rom version (Audiobook? Archae-e-book?) with the original radioshows and wonderful pictures (picture above).
Adams died in 2001, and in 2007, Mark Carwardine and Adam’s friend Stephen Fry set out to make a follow up TV-series. Leaving out species that had since gone extinct or were not considered critically endangered, they instead introduced new, threatened species, like the previously-blogged-by-me blue whale.
Read the book when you have a chance! Listen to the radio show, if you can get your hands on it! Do watch the follow up series! And if you can’t access either of those, listen to this Douglas Adams speech on ‘Last chance to see’, entitled ‘Parrots, the universe and everything’ on YouTube. It’s not much to look at, but I hooked up my computer to the stereo and pretended it was a radio show. A great one it was. Enjoy!
