I think that guy has taken lessons.

Must be nice to have talent.

Nah. Bush and Cheney didn’t need encouragement. Most of the rest of us do.

Hold your head high.

Don’t you think this video would be better with some wild costumes, lots of fast cutting and flashing lights, and maybe some flames and dancing girls and explosions and stuff in the background?

Yeah, me neither.

There’s even more than one famous Michael Collins.

So, when I saw a song titled “For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me” on Jethro Tull’s Benefit album, I never seriously imagined the song was about the astronaut Michael Collins, who orbited the Moon in the Apollo 11 command module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin flew the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) down to the surface and walked on the Sea of Tranquility.

I played the record a number of times without ever paying much attention to that song. But I had it playing softly one night as I fell asleep, and in a lucid moment between sleep and waking, I heard this:

I’m with you, LEM,
Though it’s a shame
That it had to be you.

The mother ship
Is just a blip
On your trip made for two.

I’m with you, boys,
So please employ
Just a little extra care.

It’s on my mind,
I’m left behind
When I should have been there
Walking with you.

That was how I felt about the entire Apollo program: I wanted to be there. I wanted to experience zero gravity in orbit, and on the way to the moon. I wanted to glide in lunar one-sixth gravity over the rocks and craters of an alien world. I wanted to see the far side of the moon with my own eyes, and see the earth — the entire earth — as a blue marble floating in black space.

I think I missed the point. I think almost everyone misses the point.

One-sixth gravity is fun. Lunar rocks answered persistent questions about the origin of the earth and the entire solar system. The miniature on-board computers were technological breaththroughs. The earth, seen whole from a quarter million miles away, is poetry.

But I think the most important thing about Apollo was not the fun, the science, the technology, or even the mind-altering change of perspective it made possible. All those things are by-products.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade,” said John F. Kennedy, and to confront other difficult challenges, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

Should we return to the Moon now? Should we set a goal of landing a man on Mars? I don’t know. How hard are they?

Is it possible to find a challenge here on earth that will demand the best we have to give? Can we find a challenge that we are willing to accept, unwilling to postpone, and which we truly intend to win? Can we do anything with the realization that this planet, our home, is a small jewel in a vast emptiness?

Happy Moon Day.

If you’re as old as I am, you may even remember harmonica bands. Unless your memory is going.

Happy birthday, Kate!

And I said, “Hey, gunner man, that’s quicksand, that’s quicksand, that ain’t mud.”

And later:

And he said, “Hey kid, you think that’s oil? Man, that ain’t oil, that’s blood.”

Somehow, those two lines, sung more than thirty years ago, seem to be about our present situation in Iraq.

This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.

Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor;
There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh Hard times come again no more.

Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times come again no more.

While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh hard times come again no more.

There’s a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,
With a worn heart whose better days are o’er:
Though her voice would be merry, ’tis sighing all the day,
Oh hard times come again no more.

Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave,
Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore
Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave
Oh hard times come again no more.