This page ©2001
Chip Brown.

Help Station

Well, democracy won out, we beat those Ruskies. I don't have to hide my guns and Bibles anymore. I had this crackpot fourth grade teacher that told us every day that the Russians would come one day and take our Bibles away from us. I had no idea then, nor do I now, what the Russians would have wanted with our Bibles. I guess their thing was running around the world stealing Bibles.

Maybe she had some lucid thoughts between her dosing off spells in class, but something like that traumatizes a kid of ten. The eighteen year old in my class assured us that the teacher didn't know what she was talking about. This helped most of us, but I remember wondering why this kid was 18 and in the fourth grade.

The last thing the Russians did right came crashing down to earth the other day. Oh, they say the Mir Space Station came down in a controlled re-entry... Yeah right! That was about as controlled as a car driven by a 16 year old girl. If I was Australia I'd get tired of everyone dropping their garbage on me. First, it was us with Skylab and now Mir.

They told us that the Mir had outlasted it's usefulness. I guess that's kind of like saying a 74 Pinto isn't the top of the line car any more. Most likely they realized it was time to abandon ship when Comrade Ethan took a hammer and fixed that oxygen generator once and for all.

Now, I have nothing against getting another space station. After all, society has learned so much about the mating habits of rats in space from Nasa. Fact is, if we hadn't spent a gazillion dollars on the Space Shuttle, we wouldn't know today, that rats can mate in space.

But I think before we invest a gazillion dollars in another space station we should shop around a bit. Check Ebay for a good used space station, I'm sure there's a couple laying around. Kick the tires a bit before we invest our tax dollars. We don't need a Mercedes of the spaceships, we could do just as well with a cheap used AMC Spacer.

Try to get a 36 million mile warranty. And not one of those where we can't change our own oil. Every three times arond the Earth we have to go wait in line at Ford to get the oil changed. No, we can get it done cheaper at some place like Harold's Last Chance Galactic Jiffy Lube.

And we need to get some collision insurance on our next space station. Every week of so we were running over that Mir thing with something. Someone commented on the amount of laundry generated by the Mir. People, I'm telling you if I'm up there and Comrade Bob runs over my home with a shuttle, I'm pretty sure it would be time for a change of underwear.

But now the Russians are broke. They can't even afford to menace the world with nuclear weapons any more. I saw them blast off a rocket about a year ago that said Pizza Hut on the side of it. Pizza Hut paid several million dollars for that ad. Now, I don't know about Pizza Hut, but I wonder just who or what would be floating around out in space to see this billboard?

I like the idea of going to Mars or to Venus, but I'm just wondering if all the money we spent, and we can't get any farther than just outside the atmosphere is worth it. Nasa says the cost of launching anything to outer space is astronomical. Maybe they're going at it all wrong. You take any old Union County Moonshiner, he knows if the vent pipe stops up on his still all it takes to blow something to the moon is some corn, water and sugar.

Yeah those Russians had it on us when our Skylab crashed and their Mir kept floating around. But after 40 million miles and 3,000 feet of duct tape, the Mir turned into the Amazing Orbiting Barge of Death and crashed back to earth.

That's one less thing floating over my house spying on me!

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