Towel Day 2024

More Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy inspired LEGO!

The annual celebration of the late author Douglas Adams (1952-2001) occurs on May 25! On that day, fans around the universe carry a towel in his honour.

"A towel is just about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can carry. Partly because 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 miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it around your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly 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 you can dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough."

Of course, we have updated our lifelong Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy LEGO build again on this Towel Day. This year we’ve added a few new builds:

First up there’s Disaster Area:

Disaster Area is a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones. It is generally regarded as not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy but also as the loudest noise of any kind.

So loud audience members listen from within large concrete bunkers thirty-seven miles away from the stage.

The musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship.

In our scene, they appear as holograms at a concert shortly before singer Hotblack Desiato spent a year dead for tax reasons. He is protected by an incredibly aggressive bodyguard.

At this concert, Disaster Area was joined by Cal Kramer, who also managed to hitchhike onto a passing Vogon spaceship before the Earth's demolition after getting into a fight with the cup of tea and the Lakers Tavern jukebox. Cal is reunited at this concert with Galatea, the perfect robot and protector of space-sailor men (LEGO inspired by Chiara Mazzoni's rear sleeve of the Darkness Motorheart album cover)!

If you’re in the UK/Europe check out the Southern River Band. They’re awesome and come from where I live - Thornlie!

There's also a huge (!!!) 18-inch Stonehenge - Spinal Tap's enormous stunt made it all the way to the end of the universe!

Biro Utopia

The biroless office…
 
Digital transformation is real...or perhaps it's just the biros slipping away!

At least that's the theory of Veet Voojajig, anyway:

“Somewhere in the cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the color blue, there was also a planet entirely given over to ballpoint life forms. And it was to this planet that unattended ballpoints would make their way, slipping away quietly through wormholes in space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely ballpointoid lifestyle, responding to highly ballpoint-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the ballpoint equivalent of the good life.

And as theories go this was all very fine and pleasant until Veet Voojagig suddenly claimed to have found this planet, and to have worked there for a while driving a limousine for a family of cheap green retractables, whereupon he was taken away, locked up, wrote a book and was finally sent into tax exile, which is the usual fate reserved for those who are determined to make fools of themselves in public.”
 
Unfortunately, all the paper has stuck around!

The Vogon Spaceship

The Vogons are a race that will not save their grandmothers from certain death “without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subject to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters”!!! (Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

Saved by a Cup of Tea - The Heart of Gold (HOG).

It was the first spacecraft to use the galaxy's most dangerous and valuable device - the Infinite Improbability Drive (IID).

Impressed by its sleekness, Zaphod Beeblebox, the then-President of the Galaxy, stole the ship during its launch ceremony.
 
Zaphod’s & Trillian’s use of the IID picked up Arthur Dent & Ford Prefect while they floated in deep space, having just been ejected from the Vogon Spaceship they hitchhiked onto to avoid the destruction of the Earth.

The IID was created by a student at the University of Maximegalon who “left to sweep up after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning in this way: 'If such a machine is a virtual impossibility, it must have finite improbability. So all I have to do, to make one, is to work out how exactly improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea... and turn it on!' He did this and created the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air. Unfortunately, shortly after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness, he was lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists on the ground that he had become the one thing they couldn't stand most of all: ‘a smart arse’.”

Somebody Mention Tea

Marvin the Paranoid Android

This year, we also had to rebuild Marvin the Paranoid Android. Unfortunately, the original Marvin was dropped from a great height during our house move!

Marvin was an incredibly intelligent but overwhelmingly depressed robot manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. However, despite being so smart, Marvin is typically made to perform menial tasks and labour such as escorting people, opening doors, picking up pieces of paper, and other tasks well beneath his skills.

His workplace wasn't psychologically safe from Marvin's point of view! We've all been there!

If I can fit them all in, I will try to take a photo of all the builds so far and post it to subscribers. There are so many now! Every LEGO build is here, but not in one shot!

Surprisingly, there's no towel, though, yet!!! Definitely next year! 🤔