Kissing the Blarney Stone

Even before I realised that I was a skeptic, I thought the tradition of kissing the Blarney Stone was an example of the Irish getting their own back on the English - not to mention the other nationalities!

This is a view of my daughter trying to do it (a little while ago).

Kissing the Blarney Stone

So tell me this.  If this is truly the 'other half of The Stone of Scone', why would anyone build it into the outside of an Irish castle?

It doesn't ring true to me, but I'm open to being corrected.

"The Fly"

At my place of work we have a system for reporting accidents and near misses, as do most places of work.  Sometimes people make informative and factual reports, with or without grammatical errors, but once in a while a modern classic gets into the system.

One such report went like the following paragraph.  I have edited it slightly but only to correct the punctuation and not to change the words or meaning.  In local folk-lore it is now known as "The Fly". 


[Our building] has a fly problem. Recently a large bug zapper has been installed. It's very impressive. Whilst waiting for a key exchange I observed several winged insects meet their end in the device. One in particular was most spectacular, lodging between the electrodes and catching fire as the miniature lightning bolts seared over its dancing carcass. Then its fried insides explosively outgassed through a weakness in its exoskeleton and the flaming body erupted from the grill. Clearing the insect collection plate it tumbled down under the force of gravity onto the paperwork beneath, still aflame. The solid paper sheets didn't have me launching out of the seat to beat them out, but had the remains landed in the tissue box I suspect it would be a different story.

Of course the author has to remain anonymous, but I credit him all the same. 

The Baghdad Batteries

When do you think batteries were invented?  200 years ago or 2000?

I tend to believe in the former, but some claim that some Sumerian artifacts were used as batteries for gold plating of other artifacts, and that they were made about 250 BCE.

These are known as the Baghdad Batteries, or Parthian Batteries and you can see the Wikipedia article here.

I'm feeling skeptical!

This article seems to me to have a much better explanation of the findings.  Electricity then becomes a modern invention again.

Fill your tyres with nitrogen

Did you know that some people claim that there is a special benefit to be gained by filling your tyres with nitrogen instead of air?

Why could that be?

The gas inside a tyre is only there for one purpose - namely to keep the tyre from going flat (and specifically flat at the bottom as it is rare for a tyre to go flat at the top).  The right pressure ensures that the correct area of rubber is in contact with the road and takes up some of the vibration from the uneven surface. 

Air is 78% nitrogen already, and all but 1% of the remainder is oxygen, so what might be the advantage of going for a gas that you have to pay for instead of free air?

Nitrogen is very slightly lighter than air, so the 'moment of inertia' of the whole wheel might be reduced, but only by an unnoticeable amount.  Nitrogen is dry whereas air contains a little moisture which might condense into a tiny droplet or two of water.  So what?  Certainly corrosion of wheels isn't such a massive problem.  When did you last see a wheel rusted away from the inside.  Why could that possibly be worse than the constant attack of the atmosphere on the outside of the wheel?

Some claim that oxygen molecules are smaller than nitrogen so it diffuses more easily through the rubber allowing the pressure of the tyre to vary from optimal more quickly.  This is plain wrong.  Oxygen is bigger and will diffuse more slowly (albeit not much bigger and not much more slowly).

It is also plain wrong to claim that oxygen expands and contracts more if the tyre temperature changes.  Anyone claiming that is unaware of the 'gas laws' -  basic physics taught to 15 year-olds.

There must be only one explanation for the recommendation to use nitrogen in tyres.

Profit!

Surely it just another way to extract money from the gullible.

Small note: Or have I missed something else?

And yes - we really do spell the word tyre with a y in UK English.  

Dinosaur over the cuckoo's nest

I heard a story about the billboard outside a cinema in 1975.  They pasted up the poster for the Disney movie One of our Dinosaurs is Missing . . .

One of our dinosaurs is missing - Disney

. . . and underneath it there was this amazing and amusing coincidence . . .

One flew over the cuckoo's nest - was it a dinosaur?

Apparently, one of them flew over the cuckoo's nest.

Tracks on the moon

You may have heard rumours that the American astonauts never landed on the moon.  Certainly some of the stories are convincing at first sight.  Distrusting governments a little, as many of us do, it is tempting to believe that there is no smoke without fire.  At one time I found some of the arguments more convincing than others.  Pictures like this seem like obvious fakes.

Crosshairs hidden behind a flapping flag - allegedly!

As time goes on though, it become increasingly surprising that nobody has spoken out about the apparent fraud.  OK - they might have been 'silenced'.  But all of them?  How many people would have had to know what was going on to perpetrate fraud on that scale.  Surely someone with nothing to lose would have spoken out by now.

Besides that, nobody could possibly believe that the launch of all those Saturn 5 rockets was faked.  And launching a machine of that sort of size into orbit must have been one of the hardest aspects of the missions.

It would be sad if the conspiracy theories were true wouldn't it?  Photos like this might help to restore your faith, if you ever doubted the veracity of the moon landings.  Over the next few years it would be surprising if we don't get many more pieces of evidence like this, as other countries succeed in putting probes into lunar orbit, with ever increasing camera resolution, and ever more reason to wish to embarrass USA in the event that the tracks are not where they are supposed to be.

Tracks left on the moon by Apollo 12.

You can get pictures of all the landing sites, taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at this amazing web site.  e.g.  Apollo 11, Apollo 12,  Apollo 14,  Apollo 15,  Apollo 16,  Apollo 17.

The moon hoax conspiracy theorists would have had a field day if someone had photographed the landing point for Apollo 13! 

Shakespeare's Surprising Psalm

Some people claim that William Shakespeare assisted with the poetry of the psalms when they were translated for the King James Bible.

Their evidence rests on an interesting coincidence - or else Shakespeare secretly embedded his name in a psalm.

It is a surprise to find that the following is actually true.  If you go to psalm 46, and count from the beginning, the 46th word is 'shake'.  Counting back from the end, the 46th word is 'spear'.

See for yourself.  Psalm 46:

1. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
2. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;
3. Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah.
4. There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High.
5. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early.
6. The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted.
7. The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.
   Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he hath made in the earth.
8. He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire.
9. Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.
10. The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah. 

Numerology is everywhere!

Small note:  'Selah' is sometimes translated as something like the more familiar Alleluia, if that makes more sense.

More popular than Jesus!

The is a guest blog post written by a friend of the creator of Something Surprising.  I think you will like it.

The day that John Lennon said "We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity", he caused a bit of a stir. Many of our friends in the bible belt of America decided to burn records and publications having already paid good money for them.

Burning the Beatles albums!

This was in 1966, 4th March to be exact, and at this time there was little in the way of a benchmark by which to measure the validity of Mr Lennon's statement. But it has to be said that I doubt their careers suffered much as a consequence and it has largely been forgotten.

But how can we quantify how popular something is based upon a world wide audience?

Facebook!

Yes Facebook, the new evil in the world that has been responsible for more than it's fair share of misery for the masses.  One in six of the world's population has a Facebook account and one in three has access to someone who does have an account.   That is in excess of two billion people.  Wow!

So, are the Beatles more popular than Jesus?  Yes, and by more than a factor of two.  At time of writing 25,600,000 people "like" the Beatles and 11,500,000 "like" Jesus.  Even if we factor in his 'dad', God, with 4,700,000 "likes" the figure only hits 16,200,000.

Strangely enough the third member of the "band", the holy ghost, doesn't even have a page. [Should we create one?]

So, I think it is official, The Beatles are still more popular than Jesus.

Having said that, the most popular Facebook page is Texas Hold'em Poker, with in excess of 50,000,000 "likes" so those tempted by money seem to predominate!


*********

This is a guest post on Something Surprising, kindly provided by 'Tony'.

The 'Versailles Time Slip' and what it tells us about the bible

What could be the connection between the story of The Versailles Time Slip and the bible?  Read on.

In typical style, Brian Dunning's excellent Skeptoid podcast covered the account reported by two highly educated and respected English women, Charlotte Anne Moberly  and Eleanor Jourdain, the principal and vice-principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford.  They claimed that they had slipped back in time from the summer of 1901 to the period of the French Revolution.

Dunning's episode transcript begins:

The year was 1901, and a pair of friends, 55-year-old Anne Moberly and 38-year-old Eleanor Jourdain, were on holiday in France. They were both teachers at St. Hugh's College in Oxford. Moberly was in fact the Principal there, and Jourdain would become her successor fourteen years later. With a Baedeker's tourist guidebook in hand, the two set out to see the vast Palace of Versailles, the center of political power in France until the French Revolution in 1789. They turned to visit the Petit Trianon, a small chateau on the grounds given by Louis XVI to his 19-year-old wife, Marie Antoinette, as a private retreat for her personal use.

Moberly and Jourdain got a bit lost searching for the chateau, and it was during this interlude that they made history, even if only in some small way. They encountered several people in 1789 period attire, carrying out period activities, and passed a handful of structures that had not existed since 1789. Their unexpected visit to 112 years in the past culminated with an encounter with Marie Antoinette herself, sketching on the grounds of her chateau. Read on

Later in the episode (listen here) he describes how these two professional academics, who had a reputation to uphold, gradually elaborated on their story over the following years.

Does this remind you of anything?  After all, all the accounts of the life of Jesus were written down decades after his death (if indeed such an event ever occurred).  Somehow we are expected to believe that the stories of his life and ministry are so important that the story-teller's art did not come into play.  But if you have listened to the story above I wonder whether anyone would dare to claim that all the 'facts' in the inconsistent and demonstrably incorrect bible are unquestionable.

I wouldn't.



Small note (but in suitably large text this time):  Skeptoid.com is a podcast that is well worth following.  It is immaculately researched and very professionally presented.  Usually only about 10 minutes long, it should be a weekly habit for all skeptics.

Is this a question?

There is a story as old as the hills about a question that might have been set in a finals exam for a degree in Philosophy at Oxford University (once upon a time).

The question was :

"Is this a question?"

You can imagine the convolutions that under-graduate philosophers might get into.  For three years they have been trained to think tangled thoughts and to back up their reasoning with seemingly logical arguments.

With so much at stake, how brave would you have to be to write as little as:

"Yes, if and only if this is an answer"

Small note:  The myth says that the candidate was rewarded with a first class honours degree!

Dinner for One

Some time during the last year I heard a story about a short black and white British comedy film which is played on German TV every New Year's Eve. I heard that it was a tradition to watch it, and I knew that almost nobody in UK had ever heard of it.

So I didn't really believe a word of the story - at least not until I had asked some of my German colleagues.

And sure enough, each and every one of them confirmed the story and most of them said that they will watch it.  Almost all said that they found it funny, at least at a certain level.

Here it is. Dinner for One, (or The 90th Birthday), starring Freddie Frinton and May Warden It really is quite funny, and although some people in UK claim that it is a pathetic type of humour I think that they are missing the finer points.



This video is only 11 minutes long - and the point of the last scene is worth the wait. Just remember that the butler is required to follow the 'same procedure as last year', four times and that the four empty seats at the table would formerly have been occupied by 'gentleman friends', sadly now deceased.

Browser wars - and Microsoft is losing!

Recently one of my most loyal readers told me that she had swapped from Internet Explorer to Google Chrome due to some sort of problem with Facebook.  She told me that people were leaving IE in droves, and as one who left it a few years ago I wondered whether I could see the evidence for this.

So I decided to trawl through the Google Analytics record (for another site that I administer) as Something Surprising has only been running for 10 months.  This graph is on the basis of 20,000 visits from around the world.

As she had said, Internet Explorer is losing the battle (blue line in the graph).  On balance, Chrome (red) is winning, and Firefox (yellow) is pretty much holding its own after a bit of a fight with Chrome a few months ago.

Is this a result of global legislation about competitiveness or is it due to the power of Google?  I would suggest that it might be a bit of both.  Many people would formerly have had no notion that there were other browsers.  Nowadays in Europe at least they have been forced to consider other options - and the bigger they are, the harder they fall.  Chrome has attractive features and I can understand people liking it. 

For me, the cross-platform nature of Firefox means that I can use the same browser at home as I do at work, and share bookmarks between desktop and laptop with very little effort.


Small note:  This is a small study and might not be representative of the whole of the internet.  My statistics are poor but the consistent trends suggest that they are not inaccurate.

Smaller note:  Other browsers are available for Macs and other unusual operating systems (like Ubuntu which I use).  That is why the percentages do not add up to 100%.

End of the World?

This is the date set by Harold Camping for the end of the world.

The rapture happened on May 21st as predicted by Harold Camping.  See my blog post Judgement Day this week!

The Thinking Atheist covered the rapture event humorously in this Youtube video



Obviously only the very best christians were taken up to heaven, and the fact that nobody noticed any difference meant that none of us knew any of them.  Even the pope has been seen since then.  I suspect that heaven will not be terribly busy.

Other christians tell me that they never believed any of this.  Nor did I.

Of course, predictions of the end of the world are not uncommon throughout history.

Anthropocentric fine tuning

Is the universe designed for mankind or is mankind evolved to be fine-tuned to make the best of a rather hostile universe?  This is one of the old questions of life and the universe.

The evidence suggests to me that life has evolved to make the best of the rather hostile universe that existed already and that no creator was necessary.  Indeed, the existence of such a creator would require further explanation in itself.  Considering the difficulties that life has faced, I think it has fine tuned itself remarkably well to cling precariously to the edges of a safe environment, 'knowing' that at any time it could be totally wiped out.  (At least, humans know this even though the rest of life is innocently oblivious to the fact.)

A recent (almost entirely unrelated) post William Lane Craig to visit has attracted a lot of comments that have strayed off the topic of the original post.  So I take one of the comments from that post and present it here so that the discussion can continue in a more appropriate context.

My friend Derby Sceptic, author of "The Sceptical Curmudgeon" blog,  presented a paragraph from Douglas Adams which I had never seen before.

'... imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' 

This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.'

Comments are welcome, but . . .

Don't expect to be taught the basics of evolution or about the origins of life.  You can read that in a lot of worthy books and there is no point in anyone wasting their time trying to distill fascinating topics into easily digestible 'soundbites' for you here.  I'm happy to build up a reading list here for those who need a gentle but exciting scientific education.

Lets start off with Victor Stenger, who covers the topic of fine-tuning rather well:

Conkering invading spiders!

I was amused when the cleaner of my office at work came in for his weekly visit.  Having removed a couple of spiders he went on to explain to me that the best way to keep spiders out was to put a 'conker' in the corners of the windowsill.  (For those of you outside UK, a conker is the nut produced by a horse chestnut tree.)  He told me that is definitely works and to support his claim he told me about various seemingly rational but arachnophobic colleagues who had conkers in the corners of their offices.  [Note that the presence of a windowsill or an open window is not relevant as much as the use of the corners!]

I laughed (of course) and he complained that everyone laughed when he told them.  (I assume it is the way he tells them!)

Skeptical antenna twitching, I found myself googling for conkers and spiders and found a range of similar claims.  There really does seem to be something special about 'corners', just as much as about the  conkers and whatever mysterious substance they emit to deter the spiders.

Consulting the said rational colleagues, I found them surprisingly credulous and but fortunately all of them were easily amused by the speculation.  Or else they were deliberately winding me up, but if this was the case, why would the conkers have been there when they showed me?

Results of the google searches included several entertaining accounts.  The first, 'Bonkers for Conkers' might be purely tongue-in-cheek:

"Heard on the radio this morning that a conker in the corners of your room deters spiders - apparently conkers attract mice, which eat spiders so the spider, knowing this, steers clear of conkers and hence the room. Obviously mice don't eat spiders? and it is nicer to have mice in your house than spiders (true)" [Is it?  Not for me!]

What a great concept - that the spiders 'know this' about the mice! 

Then, courtesy of Reuters, here is a link (you have to be patient while the advert loads and disappears) to a study carried out by a school.  Seemingly the spiders prefer conkers to wood after all.

Conclusion: Maybe not an Old Wives' tale, but a young wives' tale and a jolly funny one!

Scientology's Deathly Hallows

Have you noticed that I never publish any criticism of Scientology?  There's a good reason for that.  Its not that I like their nasty little cult.  I'm b****y scared of them!  Your average muslim fundamentalist who is determined to get to heaven for his 72 virgins is nothing compared with Scientology's men in black, if the urban myths are to be believed.

You might wonder what the symbol for The Deathly Hallows (from the Harry Potter story) has to do with Scientology.  But I was reading the Richard Dawkins site (as I usually do) and saw this article about the Australian Government taking action to force the Church of Scientology to pay their people the national minimum wage.  They have also been reviewing Scientology's tax exempt status, and a decision on that could come soon as well.  Bankruptcy looms.

Anyway - this picture came up.

See the similarity?  (Or am I just deluded?  It's quite possible!)

Maybe Harry Potter's author, J K Rowling, was hoping for the same outcome as the rest of the rational world?

Betrayed by Fair Trade (and by ISO9001?)

Listening to a programme about the 'Fair Trade' mark on some of the products on the shelves in our shops, I was disappointed to hear that my skepticism is not entirely unfounded.

Fair Trade, for those who live outside the UK, is a label that a manufacturer can apply to their product to indicate that they have paid more than an agreed minimum amount to the original producer of the product.  It is supposed to guarantee that people in third-world countries are not being exploited for the benefit of multi-billion dollar corporations.  (Note that I don't mention the benefit of the consumer as I think that is rarely a consideration.)

Of course I have long suspected that this mark is more of a marketing ploy than a real guarantee of ethical behaviour.  To be perfectly honest, given the choice of a Fair Trade product or another it is likely that I would go for the other, perhaps not even considering the price difference.  But that is just an example of me being deliberately contrary I suppose.

But today I was hearing about a coffee company that was using the Fair Trade label.  This required them (at the time) to pay a guaranteed minimum price of $1500 per tonne.  They also pay a small percentage to develop the community in the areas supplying the product.  This sounds all well and good until you hear that the actually market value at the time was $3000 per tonne.    What does the Fair Trade scheme actually add to the equation?  Precisely nothing at all!

This reminds me of my former professional work as Quality Manager in a high-technology company.  Fortunately I have now escaped from that direct line of work but like almost all of us I am still affected by the scourge of the international quality standard, IS0 9001.  I have always felt that the process of getting registered for this standard is a little bit too incestuous and much too easy.  (Believe me - it really was easy even though we only paid lip service to many of the clauses of the standard!)

You, the 'customer' of the third-party registration body pay them to come and 'beat you up' a little bit - but not TOO much.  If they beat you up too much then they lose a customer, so it is not in their interests to apply the standards too ruthlessly.  On the other hand they have to demonstrate their professional competence to their own registering body, who they in turn have to pay for their services.  The circle starts again.

To me, the Fair Trade mark and the ISO9001 symbol are valueless icons of the era where we are not so much market-led, as led by marketing.

I know it is not quite as simple as that - but life is never simple!  One thing that is simple is the correlation between new initiatives and legislation with opportunities for value-less consulting businesses.  Another  is the anti-correlation with value for money.

Pseudo-ostension in southern England

Trystan Swale spoke at the Oxford Skeptics in the Pub event on 10th August.  The topic of the talk was crop circles.  And it was very entertaining to hear the tales of a circle maker himself.

Recovering from a mental illness that has prevented him for a while from presenting the Righteous Indignation podcast that he founded, he related a lot of interesting anecdotes and factoids.  While admitting that circle making is effectively vandalism, he noted that the circle makers tend to keep the 'ear to the ground' (ha ha) and they know which farmers are most likely to object to their activities.  Apparently a few large Wiltshire farmers seem to bask in the notoriety of their land as crop circle territory.  Still, the makers go to some lengths to avoid being spotted at work.

Many people wonder how they can work in the dark, but it seems that after half an hour outside on a dark night it becomes relatively easy to see what you are doing.  By the time that the crops are ripening they become light enough in colour that you can easily see what you are doing.

He covered some of the history of circle making and then showed some good examples of patterns and indicated have they were set out.  Six fold geometry is favoured because equilateral triangles around a centre point mark the positions that define the patterns.  (In other words, a chord of the same length as the radius of a circle marks out positions 60 degrees apart.  However, other formations, e.g. with five or seven fold symmetry have been made to demonstrate that it is not necessary to invoke alien origins.

It seems that there are about 12 people actively involved in circle making in the UK this year (down from about 20 in 2010), with the majority of circles being in the 'Marlborough Triangle' (which stretches from Swindon in the north to Stonehenge in the south).  When asked how many people it takes to create a formation, he gave an example of the 409 circle created at Milk Hill in 2001 by a team of 12 people.

He got a laugh by mentioning that in the mid 90s there was a bit of a flap about whether it is safe to eat wheat and barley from inside a circle and he went on to describe some of the common 'proofs' used to show that the circles are not man-made after all.  Sometimes the nodes on the stems of the crop are 'blown' as they are bent but not always.  He explained that the fluid in the stems has to go somewhere as the stem is compressed.  It happens particularly to formations made late in the season, or in crops that have been over-fertilised.

He explained that the famous video of circles being created at a site called Oliver's Castle was in fact an elaborate fake that was made in conjunction with the circle makers.  (But then again - he would claim that - he's a circle maker!) But this video agrees with him albeit invoking a slightly different explanation (and I have very little doubt myself).  Note the common six-fold symmetry in this formation.



He also explained about the symbiosis between the circle makers and their circles and with the people who are taken in by their work.  The makers seem careful not to claim an alien connection but also they take care not to deny it too much.  Pseudo-ostension is the term for a process that involves a hoax in which the perpetrator enacts a legend.

All in all - an entertaining evening for all of us!  Thanks Trystan.

Related posts:
'Out' Crop Formation
Cornucopia for Cereologists
Income from crop formations  
Where are the formations?
Japanese Rice Art 
Crop formations in trees? 
Wallabies on opium make crop circles!

7 years bad luck

Feeling, as I do, relatively free from superstition these days, why is it so hard to escape from the myth that 7 years bad luck would result from breaking a mirror.

The last time I broke a mirror I was about 13 years old.  It appeared to me that my 7 years of bad luck really did happen.  Now I think back I can't imagine why I thought that.  The years before that didn't seem to be any better.  The years after the end of the allocated time of retribution coincided with a time when I had a lot more control over my own destiny and it can't be too surprising that I enjoyed that.  I assume it was just normal teenage angst.

Re-decorating a room in the house I finally decided to remove some mirror tiles that had been installed by a previous resident.  I took down the previous  set of these tiles (in another room) a few years ago, and I was very careful not to break them or to put them in a place where their accidental breakage might be 'deemed to be my fault'.  Deemed by whom?  I don't know.  But it just seemed safer to put them safely and unbroken under the floor boards in the loft.

This time I am plucking up the courage to put them in the dustbin.  They will inevitably get broken sometime soon.  Of course intellectually I don't believe that anyone will get bad luck from the event, but somewhere deep inside I am left to wonder who might deserve the bad luck when it happens.  Is it me? After all, when I put them carefully into the bin they were not broken.  But on the other hand I knowingly put them in a place where they will be broken.

Or does the poor man who empties the bin into the lorry unwittingly get cursed?  This type of justice would seem consistent with certain other common superstitions (namely those attributed to the god of the Old Testament).  There is no justice in the world of superstition.  You would have been lucky to get away with a mere 7 years in the OT, instead of dooming the next four generations of your family.

Here goes!  Wish me luck for the next 7 years.

The legendary Mr Gorsky

Continuing the Apollo theme from yesterday's post about astronaut Edgar Mitchell, (for no reason at all), everyone knows what Neil Armstrong said when he became the first man to set foot on the moon (even if they argue about exactly what the words were).  But not so many know about the last words that he said before leaving the surface of the moon in 1969.

Good luck Mr Gorsky!

The story goes like this.

Many people at NASA thought it was a casual remark concerning some rival Soviet Cosmonaut. However, upon checking, there was no Gorsky in either the Russian or American space programs. Over the years many people questioned Armstrong as to what the "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky" statement meant, but Armstrong always just smiled.

On July 5, 1995 (in Tampa Bay, FL) while answering questions following a speech, a reporter brought up the 26-year-old question to Armstrong. This time he finally responded. Mr. Gorsky had finally died and so Neil Armstrong felt he could answer the question.

When he was a kid, he was playing baseball with a friend in the backyard. His friend hit a fly ball which landed in the front of his neighbor's bedroom windows. His neighbors were Mr. & Mrs. Gorsky.

As he leaned down to pick up the ball, young Armstrong heard Mrs. Gorsky shouting at Mr. Gorsky, "Oral sex! You want oral sex?! You'll get oral sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!"

Urban myth or the product of the imagination of comedian Buddy Hacket, the story gets a smile every time you tell it.