Oh, Shit!

Trust the good old news to provide some amusement and bemusement as usual. I was flicking through the channels over dinner this evening and two of them had news bulletins showing.

In the first, a football coach was rambling languidly about how the boys done good and he was over the moon. I wonder why they conduct interviews with football coaches. If they just sent a copy of the Football Coaches’ Guide to Stock Phrases to every house in the land, they wouldn’t have to. They could just flash something like 7.3.21 on the screen, and we could all look it up for ourselves.

The second had a chinless wonder waxing lyrical about how happy we all should be that Prince William has chosen his brother (well, half-brother, one assumes) to be best man at his wedding. I mean, come on. Who the (expletive deleted) cares?!

So I decided to look at the text channel instead, and that was when things became really interesting. The first headline that caught my eye was:

Men Walk on the Surface of Mars.

It seems that a couple of guys in Russsia, having spent a long time in a metal tube to replicate a lengthy space flight to the Red Planet, stepped out and walked across a sandpit in some Moscow institution. They even planted a flag! Well, you’ve got to be impressed by the standard of their preparation, haven’t you? I think I should warn my Yankee pals to be on their mettle, or else those Ruskies are going to steal a march on you this time. They’ve got sand pits.

And then I got to wondering about space flight generally. Mostly I wondered what they do about the latrines on such vessels. Do they simply eject the contents into space, like they do from trains? In which case, does that mean there are countless little conglomerations of American astronauts’ poo floating around the earth somewhere this side of the Van Allen belts like little brown satellites? And what’s the betting that if the British ever conduct a programme of manned space flight, the very first rocket will run slap bang into one of them? We won’t be able to see where we’re going for a mess of Yankee shit splattered across the windscreen! And do you know what? Given how clever those damn Yankee scientists are at calculating trajectories and stuff, they’ve probably planned it.