The City Weekly (incorporating the Sydney Times),
November 26 - December 2 1998

spaced out

Like a lot of Sydneysiders I was contemplating getting out of bed a bit earlier the other morning to watch the meteor shower but also, like a lot of Sydneysiders, I thought better of it and pulled the doona a little closer to my chin and reminded myself that anything involved with space and telescopes is usually really, really boring.

'Surely not,' you say. 'Space is the final frontier; space is the last testing ground of mankind. We look to space to imagine our own origns.' Okay, imagine this: a bunch of astronomers throwing a New Year;s Eve party. Now there's a gathering of cardigans you want to get drunk and naked with, I don't think.

Sure enough, I was proved right. Even in the parts of Australia not plagued by cloud cover the meteor shower was described as about exciting as a rerun of last year's Logies. Now that's harsh.

But surely history has taught us not to get excited about celestial phenomena. Two words for you hear, people . . . Halley's Comet. Talk about your great let-downs. Halley's Comet was where I finally parted company with the wonders of space. Boy did that damm comet break my heart. I wasn't really expecting the sky to be filled with flame, but I did hope for something slightly more impressive than a slight smudge that could have been a comet or could have been the remains of a bug on my friend's telescope. From now on I'm only getting excited if my comet or meteor comes with Live Tyler, Aerosmith and a more than slight chance of Bruce Willis dying.

While I'm at it, eclipses haven't been fun since we stopped celebrating the things with human sacrifices. It's just not the natural phenomena that are Ê mind-numbingly dull - on the whole, space exploration contains all the excitement of an evening of cribbage at the Howard's. Sure we all got a lump in our throat when a man named Armstrong walked upon the moon, but by Apollo 13 it took a near fatal catastrophe to get space missions back on primt time, and by the final mission not even golf and a funky golfmobile could make it interesting. Although it does show how mind-numingly dull the brains behind space exploration are. "Hey Bill, why not play a bit of golf during the next mission? That'll get the kids involved."; Yeah, sure.

The only thing interesting about the Hubble Telescope was that it didn't work for a while. Remember the photos from Mars? Every night our evening suddenly became the world's dullest slide show: "And here's a rock, and another rock and, oh look, it's slightly bigger than the first rock. And here's a 10-armed monster tearing the head off a . . . No I'm sorry, it's . . . another rock."

Which brings me to the latest exciting chapter in the exploration of the cosmos - the whole damm John Glenn incident. Well, at least grandpa got an outing, although the boffins tried to pass it off as an experiment in how space travel would affect the very old. What's the matter? Haven't these people seen any of the latest Star Trek movies. Don't get me wrong. I know that, on the whole, it's a worthy thing to do, but just like most worthy things it's also an exercise in tedium. As someone much wiser than me once said, "In space, no-one can hear you yawn". #

-mikey robins

typed up by VellaB