Same. I also wasn't expecting as much air to be wrung out of the cloth as there was, although that might be thanks to the moistening process he used; it would probably be hard to saturate the cloth completely that way without making a mess.

Getting his hands wet is simple enough and it's clear what I wasn't taking into account there, but I'm still trying to figure out why the water wasn't resorbed as soon as he let up the tension on the towel. That doesn't seem like something gravity could account for. Maybe you're right and it's just a quirk of the material.