Lunacy

Here we are practically at the anniversary of the first Moon landing – July 20, not the 21st as it is in some reference works, because the Eagle landed on that day as reckoned at Mission Control in Houston, Central Daylight Time. Who cares what the GMT was at landing or when Neil Armstrong descended that ladder?

Not long ago I looked for some Apollo 11 clips on YouTube, and sure enough found a good many. As has been noted elsewhere, the YouTube comment section is often a moron magnet, and the Moon landing clips bring out that very special breed of moron, those who deny that men ever achieved such a thing.

The idea is so disconnected from reality that it’s hardly worth criticizing, and sites such as Bad Astronomy do it so much better anyway. I figure if you’re going to start denying events with many thousands of witnesses and literal tons of documentary evidence (the Apollo program, the Holocaust), you might as well deny anything and everything beyond your immediate experience. Those pyramids that impress everybody so much in Egypt? Built in the 1950s as tourist attractions (Nasser covered it all up). The Roman Empire? Never happened: no country could have been that big without telephones. That whole deal with Magellan sailing around the world? You really believe little wooden boats could do that?

But why stop with musty old history? I’m not sure New York City is a real place, you know. Sure, I’ve been there, or at least that that’s what the people called it when I got there, but it was all mighty suspicious. Fake-like. It must have all been a big set, built just for people sucker enough to buy an airplane ticket to “LaGuardia,” where the deception begins. Otherwise New York exists only on falsified reports by TV- and moviemakers, collaborating with the government. You can’t prove I’m wrong.