Neil Armstrong: August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012
“The next time you look at the Moon, ‘think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.’ “
~ from Neil Armstrong’s family’s statement, published by NASA
sunday song – man on the moon
26 Sunday Aug 2012
Posted in sunday song, video
casa azahar 
I intend to as well.
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Nice song for this. Love the quote, and I’ll probably remember it every time I look at the moon from now on. Bittersweet. On a completely different note: Wasn’t Michael Stipe a gorgeous guy? He really made my heart (or something) go pitty pat in this video.
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I think he even looks good bald with a bandito mask…
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I met him once. Neil Armstrong, I mean, not Michael Stipe. I was in high school, junior or senior year, I forget, and my civics teacher was deft at finding ways to dispatch his students to public events downtown, ferchrissake, we lived a ten minute drive and hour walk from the White House. So he got permission for two of his students to attend the reception for some space science conference with legislators — other pairs of students went to assorted similar events involving other fields — and there I was in this huge hall, where at one end you could see Wernher von Braun deep in conversation with someone, and various people were milling around with name tags telling us they were involved with the Air and Space Museum, or some science think tank, and there was Neil Armstrong.
He said something like, “You young people here to see what we are up to?”
And I said, “Sir… I can hardly remember anything in my life before reading story books about kids building backyard rocket ships to go to the Moon, and you actually went there. Will you sign my notebook?”
Which he did.
His eyes were like pale blue crackle glass. That is honest to God the only thing I remember about meeting him face to face.
In those days we believed that there would be ships to Mars by the time our generation had children. And here we are still fighting each other over who has the real imaginary friend.
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That is amazing, Sled. My only claim to fame was the time I met Stephane Grappelli, for about the same amount of time. He just scowled at me (and everyone else) because he hadn’t got a limo out to the music festival site.
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I wish I had realized at the time how really amazing it was. I mean, I kind of did, but I was so used to being close to the middle of everything.
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Sledpress, that’s an AWESOME story. You had a great teacher. And we would have had ships to Mars if we hadn’t gotten distracted by greed.
And this is the greatest of all moon fan songs.
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Mr. McCafferty. I wish I could remember the year. We had a daily joke about the Mr. Mum cartoon… does anyone remember those? The class was “World Government,” which sounds very conspiratorial in itself. Growing up that close to the seat of government had a bracing effect — you heard everyone bitching about how the cars with low license plate numbers (supposedly Congressmen) were all dicks in traffic. Now no one respects Congress, but we were there first.
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