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Archive for May 25th, 2006

There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is!

Published May 25, 2006 geek Leave a Comment

You sass that hoopy Douglas Adams? Now there’s a frood who knew where his towel was. You are invited to join your fellow hitchhikers in mourning the loss of the late great one. Join in on towel day to show your appreciation for the humor and insight that Douglas Adams brought to all our lives. [1]

Towel Day
What do I do? Carry your towel with you throughout the day to show your participation and mourning.
When do I do it? May 25th.
Where do I do it? Everywhere.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels. A towel, it says, 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 vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft 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 to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you—daft as a brush, but very, very ravenous); 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 [non-hitch hiker] discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, 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.”
(The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter Three)

[1.] http://www.towelday.kojv.net/

Everest: the cost of climbing

Published May 25, 2006 books , climbing , Everest Leave a Comment

The Everest summit season is on for 2006, and so far there have been 9 deaths (compared with 1996 record of 12 fatalities). There has been a discussion in the popular press about the ethics of rescuing at altitude, or the lack of rescue …

Mark Inglis told television New Zealand that his group passed the climber on their summit push. “And it was like, what do we do? You know, we couldn’t do anything. That’s, he had no oxygen, he had no proper gloves, things like that. I believe I’ve copped a wee bit of…”

Television New Zealand reporter: “Well, yes. Someone has suggested that maybe you should have stopped the ascent and rescued this man.”[1]

There has been a growing acknowledgment that above the “death zone” (8000 metres) your duty is to look after yourself, but veteran climbers do not support this view.

“In our expedition there was never any likelihood whatsoever if one member of the party was incapacitated that we would just leave him to die …” - Sir Edmund Hillary [2]

This reminds me of one of the books in my bookshelf that I had put aside to ‘read later’, now may be a good time.

Title: Where the mountain casts its shadow
Author: Maria Coffey
Category: NonFiction – Climbing
Publisher: Arrow Books
Date Published: 2003
ISBN: 0099436086
Format: Trade Paperback
Number of pages: 288 pages

Summary:
Maria Coffee confronted one of the harshest realities of mountaineering when her lover, Joe Tasker, disappeared on the NE ridge of Enervest in 1982. This title tackles the romantic myth of moutaineering, revealing its extraordinary moments of exhilation and its far-reaching personal costs.