Out of this World Golf

Fifty Two years ago today, it happened. The longest golf shot in history.

It had a little help. Astronaut Alan Shepard had hidden a six iron and a couple golf balls on the lunar lander of Apollo 14. How he managed that I don't know; engineers were notorious for checking and rechecking weights on spaceships because it affected important things like escape velocity.

Still, he was able to get away with it. I remember watching on TV, through the grainy camera set up on the moon. This big guy in an oversized white suit digging something out of a crevice, Mission Control itself mystified, and dropping small items on the lunar surface. The Shepard produced the club, and swung at the golf balls one at a time. He had to hit them one handed because of the bulky suit. After one, during his follow through, Shepard remarked, "Miles and miles and miles!"

How many miles? Who really knows. I believe an alien race will one day find the golf balls and remark in their home language, "What the hell?"

For the curious, here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_jYOubJmfM

The Marty Standard

As both a student and teacher of history I have long believed that true history stops about fifty years prior to whatever moment in which you live. My most basic reason for that is because we haven't had the proper distance between events and the current era to have enough a sense of perspective to fully understand, to better honestly appreciate, what had happened. More on that, perhaps, in tomorrow's blog, as I think it's an idea worth consideration. For today, I bring this up as a reflection on my recent reading. And my own mortality.

Right now I'm about half through First Man, a biography of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon. The book I read immediately before that was titled simply Apollo 8, which detailed the first space flight to the Moon and back. This came after reading One Giant Leap, a history of the American space program as a whole. 

It occurred to me this morning that the Mercury, Apollo, and Gemini programs, having happened over 50 years ago, now qualify as history by the Marty Standard. Obviously too those are histories I remember witnessing, such as it were, to the degree that we all live in the world of the actions and events around us. So what I saw as a boy now fits my own definition of what history is. As proof, I'm reading about it in what are essentially history books.

Suddenly I feel old. And by my own measuring stick no less.

Channel Surfing

Well, I was propped up in bed last night with TV for muh friend. Yet its offerings were thin. Could you believe they was nothing on despite their bein' hundreds of channels?

I observed Andy Griffith overseein' Mayberry. No wrong ever lasts in Mayberry, 'ceptin there only having two episodes by the time I caught up to it last evening. I proceeded to channel surf.

They was little in the way of sports beyond poker and cornhole. I got nothing against either, though I scratch me head at cornhole fillin' the airwaves of ESPN. It's fun enough, even tho a simple family reunion pastime seems outta place on national TV. Folks actually make money on that?

Scrolling along the guide channel, one show offered the story description that 'Anna panics at finding her room on fire'. Now, I wouldn't wanna presume to speak for everyone, but it does seem that discovering one's room on fire might just incite a body to panic, sure. But that way of tellin' people what a show is about strikes my soul as understatement. 

Whilst I do pray that Anna's plight was resolved to her benefit, I turned my attention instead to the book I been reading, about the Moon landings. You know, I do believe they may have truly happened.