“What is the purpose of this part of a towel?” McGrady wrote. “I’m convinced that it only exists to shrink and make it impossible to fold the towel nicely, causing you to buy another towel.” Could the rough lines be there as a sort of planned obsolescence? If we removed the rough lines, would towels last a few years longer, costing the towel industry billions? Many people scratched their heads when the question was asked, so instead of solving the problem, they took the opportunity to make jokes about the lines in the towel.
The post also inspired some people to come up with answers that challenged our fundamental understanding of scenes, physics, and reality in general. Some brave people took a genuine shot at answering the question many of us had been wondering about but nobody had thought to ask.