Thursday, November 20, 2008

Welcome to the Club!

So times have changed. Whereas once, astronauts were named Gus Grissom and Deke Slayton, today we read that they have names like Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, a crew member on the International Space Station, and so, they can even be female! Holy rocketships! Next they'll want to vote...drive cars...own property...


It is a pleasure to welcome a new member to the inept fix-it-club. I earned my stripes for chewing up the extension cord for my hedge trimmer. I used the hedge trimmer to do it, which is sort of like biting yourself in the elbow. Ms Stefanyshyn-Piper had the lousy luck to step outside the ISS and try to use her tool kit to clean out a gummed-up joint. Once out there, tethered to the spacecraft, high above the heavens, a good twenty miles from the nearest Panera, she discovered that her grease gun, inside her tool bag, had schqueeeezed out all over the place. She tried to clean up the mess. As she did, the tool bag left her hand. Had this taken place here on terra firma, the tool bag would have landed on the kitchen floor, or wherever. But this is outer space, so the tool bag and all the tools left her to go on a weightless trip into outer space. Who knows - maybe they'll clomp some Martian right on the melon or something! But I can totally see myself doing that! In or out of outer space!


And don't even think of telling me that The Simpsons didn't foresee all this, in their 1994 episode "Deep Space Homer." That's the one in which Homer confuses President Zachary "Old Rough and Ready" Taylor with old lazy singer James "Old Lazy Singer" Taylor . But why couldn't they have predicted flying tools in outer space? Truth really is funnier than fiction.

UPDATE: Live. local. legbreaking!
The toolbag that fluttered off was valued at $100,000. I thought I had seen Heidemarie in line in front of me at Home Depot!



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