Towel Day: Celebrating Douglas Adams... and Towels

Apologies for my increasingly erratic posting, my head has been in the ground and my feet in the air lately. That and I'm somewhat distracted by the end of my first year of university rapidly approaching, with all the lovely exams and assignments that come with it. Also, I decided I wanted to change the URL of this blog to something that was both vaguely relevant and did not have 'wank' hidden in the middle of it, as my coursemates gleefully pointed out to me. Little did I know that it would not update links at all, and completely erase my Alexa ranking. For anyone new to this ramblathon I like to call a blog, Alexa rankings are explained in an earlier post which you can read here.

But I digress. Today, Avid Readers, is May the 25th. Not an important day to many, but to me it is nigh on holy. May 25 is Towel Day, an international celebration of the works of Douglas Adams, Primarily his book series 'The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy' (They are all excellent reads, and well worth checking out. Don't watch the film, it's rubbish). On this day, all Hitchikerites are required to carry a towel with them.

Why a towel, well, according to the man himself, 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-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"

Clearly, any person who can do all of this and still have his towel, is a man to be reckoned with. Hence this mildly bizarre celebration of a pretty bizarre man.

Happy Towel Day Avid Readers! And I leave you with some of the man's best quotes:

"He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife."

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

"It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an Airport' appear."

"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."

And a personal favourite:  "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

For more amazing, entertaining, and coma-inducing quotes, head on over here or just read the damn books!

Much Love.

"Regardless of content, quality, or sanity..."

Continuing a week or two of ever-changing blog-content (my apologies but at the end of the day, my course trumps the asinine rants that come vomiting out of the gap between my ears). Today I thought I’d actually talk about this blog. Now, those of you who have visited before will know that in September, I started a journalism course at the University of Winchester (for all you latecomers, consider this an introduction). One of the first things we were asked to do was create our own blog, which were to use as a means of publishing course notes and generally as a means of practicing our writing skills. For the first semester I was pretty religious about posting lecture notes and the like, but (me being a lazy little meerkat) I did virtually nothing towards the extra-curricular side.

After our Christmas break however, that changed. During a lecture about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - this would be relatively difficult to explain, however, one of my course mates has written a blog about the basics which you can read here - our lecturers decided to make the blogs a competition. Now if anything was going to light a fire under my arse, it was learning that I was below the middle of the pack. And so, SuperEwan was born! Dedicated to producing blogs, regardless of content, quality, or sanity. So,  it’s been about six weeks since that fateful day. And I’ve shown, to quote my lecturer: “dramatic improvement.” I’ve moved up the rankings to fourth place, and I’m just about to reach my end-of-semester goal of breaking the three million mark.

I feel I should digress slightly at this point, to explain how the blogs are actually ranked. Well it’s quite simple actually, as long as you use Mozilla Firefox as your web browser you can download the ‘SEO Status PageRank/Alexa Toolbar’ (bit of a mouthful I know).  This gives you a toolbar that ranks web pages. At time of writing this post I am ranked at 3,060,580. It doesn’t sound great but for a blog that’s only been alive for a few months I’m relatively happy.

So, you know, if you felt like telling a few of your friends (or depending what you think of my blog, a few of your most hated enemies) about this little asylum of mine, and help me to become King of the Internet.

Much obliged.