It is Sunday, July 20 and there are only 158 days until Christmas.  Time to start wrapping gifts and hiding them so you can forget where they are and then have to buy new ones for some people and then find the first set in January when you are putting the decorations away.  Today we recognize the birthdays of Francesco Petrarch, Theda Bara and Carlos Santana.  On this day in 1773 Scottish settlers arrived at Pictou, Nova Scotia, in 1858 the first fee was charged to see a baseball game and in 1969 Neil Armstrong and Edward Aldrin were the first men on the moon.  In Columbia and Tunisia it is Independence Day and in the US it is Moon Day.

I am going to bet that most people do not realize that today is Moon Day or what Moon Day is.  I have to admit that I did not know today was Moon Day.  So, as I am wont to do, I will give just a brief explanation of this little known and little observed holiday.  Moon Day commemorates the day that man first walked on the moon.  The Apollo Space Program was created to put the first man on the moon.  On July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 was launched from Cape Kennedy Space Center atop a Saturn V rocket.  On July 20, 1969, the Lunar Module, nicknamed the “Eagle” touched down on the surface of the moon at Tranquility Base.  Upon landing, Commander Neil Armstrong reported, “The Eagle has landed.”  A few hours later, Commander Armstrong stepped off the Eagle’s ladder, placed one foot upon the moon’s surface and proclaimed: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”  There you have it.  That is why today is Moon Day.  Go out and do something moonish.  Eat cheese or stare at the moon or think about what a great feat was accomplished in 1969.  

When you have done that, spend some time wondering why we bothered and what we have done about it since.  I am all for exploration, but I think there should be a purpose in it.  We landed on the moon in 1969 and went back five more times between then and 1972.  During that time, men walked and drove around, planted a flag, left behind a lunar roving vehicle and then did nothing more.  Was there a plan?  Did we actually intend to do something there?  We took some rocks which, as I have said many times, resulted in all the bizarre weather we have now, but what was the plan?

I could imagine bringing back spaceship loads of moon rocks which could then be used for landscaping.  I could imagine building Disney Out of This World there.  I could see selling franchise rights for Sonic and other fast food places.  What I do not get is spending millions and millions of dollars to go there six times and not having a plan or a reason for going there.  Now they claim that they are closer than ever to finding life beyond earth.  So?  What is the plan if and when they find it?  Don’t we have enough problems with immigration?  What if the life they find doesn’t want to be found?  People claim that there is intelligent life out there and that UFO’s have been here.  If UFO’s have come to earth and they are intelligent, what does it tell us when they decide not to stay?  I am sure that if we put our minds to it we can come up with a better way to spend our money.  There must be something much closer to home that we could try to discover that would be of benefit to a larger number of people. 

Maybe we could try to discover an industrial use for dryer lint.  We have access to tons of it throughout the country.  The lint is a waste product created by drying your clothes.  Perhaps there is a way it could be made into insulation for homes.  There are several benefits to this type of thing.  One, it would help insulate homes, thereby cutting down on the energy used to heat or cool houses.  Another benefit would be that people could become lint collectors (in a positive way, not like some relatives we know) and could go house to house collecting lint and selling it to insulation manufacturers.  Plus, by removing the lint on a regular basis, there is less chance of a house burning down due to fire caused by dryer lint.

Are we to believe that it was worth all the funds expended to get us to the moon just so we could walk around and then leave some debris?  They could have given me half the money and left the debris in my parent’s back yard.  It would have been less expensive, safer and would have accomplished just about as much.  Actually, it would have accomplished more if the stuff was in the yard.  My parents could have charged people admission to come and see a lunar roving vehicle.

I think that we should require a statement of objectives from NASA before we let them go off on any of these missions again.  There should be a purpose for going to Mars, e.g. finding a place to put all the corded phones people have and no longer use, or locating a place to house all the debris we could not put on the moon.  Telling me that we are going to spend 500 million bucks to go to Venus simply because we have not been there is ridiculous.  To say we are going to look for a place to send old Tiny Tim albums is a far more acceptable reason.

This week our fact tells us that another word for volleyball is mignonette.  Now you know why we usually call it volleyball.  Somehow Beach Mignonette makes me think of tutus and leotards.  I also doubt that we would see Mignonette in the summer Olympics.