In Honor of the 2024 eclipse
The “Darker” Side of the Moon
So here on the big blue marble or the little blue dot depending where your ego stands on the whole space thing, we just had a chance to pay attention to the dark side of the moon as it passed in front of the moon—well sort of. We actually saw the same side of the moon we always see, however, the moon got itself directly in between us and the sun on Monday. Even so this seemed to be a good opportunity to revisit a “moon” related blog entry that may prompt some reasonable thoughts. There are a few revisions as this was offered a few moons ago… so to speak. Enjoy!
So… those among you who are real music history experts will find mistakes here. Some of them are probably important, yet read for the spirit of this okay?
Today, or someday that looked a lot like today except it was 50 years ago—holy crap this entry is featuring something that. Was a half century ago which is like a high school senior of my generation writing about something that happened before the depression, the invention of television, smart phones, YouTube, the internet, and yes even before shopping malls remember them? So if there are some slippery inaccuracies put them in the same category as things we don’t know about dinosaurs and get over it.
anyway about fifty years ago today more or less the Dark Side of the Moon climbed up the billboard chart and well it kind of stayed there not for a week or three but for 930 some weeks it has appeared in the top 200. Now these were non-consecutive, but this still merits a ‘stop and think about it” moment. That’s 18 years… so if Dark Side hit the charts when your child’s was born in 2006 it would still be there.
also Dark Side. Has sold over 45 million copies and some of the money it made was used to finance Monty Python’s classic “Holy Grail.” Some other things most people don’t know… it was recorded at Abby road.. yep that place where some quartet from Liverpool was known to do some fooling around. Also unlike a lot of efforts today the entire content of the work was performed live on the road before the studio albums were pressed.
However… this entry. Isn’t really about the music…it’s about the moon.
The moon and the things we use to put things into space have been in the news in recent days due to the fact that a Japanese mission to deliver stuff to the moon crashed instead of landed there and a privateers test rocket experienced a malfunction and blew apart in the sky. This happened again recently and these “events were called “rapid unscheduled disassembly events.” Now … here’s what has. To make folks wonder … why are we giving so much attention to the rockets that blew up instead of the new pile of trash we just put on the moon? Well maybe there’s an answer..
There’s already a all kinds of stuff we have left up there.
Okay we left a flag or two. There are some golf balls up there.. We have of course left some moon cars up there because they don’t have a place in the trunk for a big subwoofer and no cup holders or heated seats.
We needed to reduce the weight of lunar landers in order to relaunch and meet the mother ships so astronauts tossed all kinds of stuff some of which had meaning..like a bible left on the dash of one of the moon cars—(now you can get a “Trump Bible for $60, but what would you pay for a “Moon Bible??” Unfortunately, some of the stuff?—can we really be proud of this?
Like… 96 sealed bags of astronaught crap.. Yes there is moon poop and we left it there. Now in order to see this in context we pick oup our own pet dog crap and dispose of it in a civilized way… So how do we justify leaving bags of stuff all over the night sky? Well NASA actually has claimed they might go pick up these bags at some later date in order to study it. Don’t you want to hear that conversation? “No Eugene, you stay here for a second….…Thomas and Claire are going to study the geologic samples and Harmony is looking at the atmospheric data… we’ve got 96 bags of 100 year old diarrhea sitting on the table in your lab and the world needs to know how space impacts the digestion of Tang and freeze-dried burritos.”
Okay.. with the crash of the Japanese hauler there is about 400,000 tons of stuff that mankind has left on the moon. Are we really ever going to go back and are we going to clean up this stuff? Will we wreck our own planet enough so that we absolutely have to use the moon and if we really think that maybe we should send some things up there worth going back to get. Here are some suggestions..
Let’s send a hundred new and classic cars (they weigh about 4 tons). So guys would stare up there and devise ways to get a 68 Charger or a 73 Corvette.
How about we send 165,000 cases of beer … some folks will go to almost any limit to get beer.
or maybe before we send anything.. we should stop and think about why…
Did we plant that flag up there to say ….. we own the moon or did we do it to say… we let our curiosity drive our science and our human need to seek new knowledge? If we can be proud of seeking new knowledge and wisdom can we take a bit of time everyday to seek that right here on earth? And while we’re. Doing that can we help each other seek some peace and joy too? … or are resigned to have a bad moon risin’? (With a bag of crap to stare at tonight?
Thanks for revisiting this entry and as a very small reward we have thrown in a “Lovely Little Limerick”
When it was all said and done
The Moon slipped in front of the Sun
We might not know why
We all stared at the Sky
But the fancy sunglasses are fun
No comments:
Post a Comment