Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons. You cannot see these with the naked eye unless you have been smoking pot. Then everything becomes crystal clear. You can even slow them down in time so you can examine them more closely. Even then it does no good to try and talk to them; they are on a mission. Sometimes I think I understand everything in the universe. Then I regain consciousness.
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One of the first things the Soviets did to show up the USA back during the Cold War when artificial satellites were the latest cool thing, was to send one to orbit the moon and take pictures of the dark side of the moon. Mankind had never seen a picture of the "back" of the moon - the moon always shows the same face to the Earth. It is just as barren and cratered as the side Earthlings can see, but the features are different. No Sea of Tranquility back there.
Actually there is no real "dark" side of the moon; the sun lights up that side too, but you just can't see it. I have a copy of one of the pictures of the other side of the moon that the Ruskies took a long time ago, but I am not going to show it to you because you are not paying attention.
That's a big fat lie. Unless you are blind you have already looked at the photo above. You just didn't know how sublimely awesome it was, did you? Now you know. Beethoven never saw this. William the Conqueror never saw this. George Washington never saw this. You did. Just a little dividend for being alive at this point in history.
But the USA got the last laugh because they won the Space Race. See, there used to be a competition to see who could land a man on the moon first. The Soviet Union had a really big head start. All the USA seemed proficient at was blowing up rockets on launching pads. It was quite embarrassing. But then our scientists, both home-grown and ex-Nazi, got down to business and, just in time to save JFK from being a liar, put men on the moon before the decade was over, as he had promised.
And then we did it again. And again. And again.
And then we played golf on the moon. At least Alan Shepherd hit one up there. A nice little 1200-yard drive. I don't think NASA knew he had sneaked a club and ball into the LEM. Maybe they did. But contraband wasn't new. The astronauts, after all, were American, and that meant ingenuity and free enterprise. Rumor had it that as early as Gus Grissom, they were carrying rolls of coins into space and then selling them for a premium. Space dimes. Come and get 'em while they're hot. And let us not even TALK about the little moon rocks that didn't make their way into the hands of our scientists. Or so they say.
And the Ruskies? It has become very apparent that the only way they are EVER going to get to the moon is if we take them.
Sigh.
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Alan Shepherd was the first American in space in 1961, but many remember him as the man who played golf on the moon 10 years later.
[The photograph at the top of this post was taken by NASA and is not a copy of the photo taken much earlier by the USSR. If you click on the photo, you can make it MUCH larger.]
