Tag: Apollo 11

Sunda’s Theme Music

Sunda, July 20, 2025, has entered the play. 73 F, summer is currently riding the norms in Ashlandia. A high of 90 F is expected and the sky is cloud-free blue. Smoke scents surf the wind, enough to be a smelly irritant but not enough to change the air quality or discolor the sky.

This is the Apollo 11 moon-landing anniversary. One giant leap, all that. Seems like it was last night that I sat in our Penn Hills wood-paneled basement game room, watching the news on the big color television as a 13 year old. Then I went outside and looked for the moon again. Seems like we progressed for a long time after that, but now as a nation, as a world of people, we’re falling backwards. Bummer to consider as my body curves into its 69th year. Of course, history slides on its own spectrum of peaks and valleys as nature and political wins and losses bend the trajectories. Time will tell what we’ll be remembering as history in 2075, and how a person like me will look back on it.

I perused this morning’s news with sighs. Flooding and deaths in South Korea, questions about Trump’s state of mental health, death and disaster in more places, lawsuits, etc. As far as Trump’s worsening gibbering, I don’t expect his loyalists to do anything about it because that would disrupt their power trips. That’s what it’s all about for enablers like Noem, Biondi, Kennedy, and the whole Project 2025 gang.

We went dancing yesterday. An annual thing, a troop of fifteen humans and one dog met on the shores of the Lake of the Woods Resort at 3 PM. Chatting, dancing, eating, we enjoyed being outside in sunshine, cooler air, smoke free air, enjoying Lisa & the Dynamics as they ably covered pop, rock, and country hits. Nice being away from the routines and the news for a few hours.

Today’s song comes from yesterday’s outing. “Everyone just have a good time,” was said and The Neurons said, “Kick it.” So, this morning has “Party Rock Anthem” by LMFAO from 2011 in the morning mental music stream. The song was a pretty big hit back then, was frequently heard via television and radio while I was traveling and running errands, but I haven’t heard it in a few years. Synth music, it’s made for dancing and has simple lyrics.

Back to Sunda I go. Hope you have the best day possible. That’s what I’m gunning for. Cheers

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Can You Remember?

On this day, the moon landing took place.

I remember it. I was a newly-minted thirteen-year-old. I watched the historic event downstairs. Downstairs was the cellar, or basement, as we called it, in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania. That’s where the family room, laundry room, garage, and my bedroom were located. It used to flood when it rained hard. Fortunately, the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suburb only experienced rain about half of the year.

The lights were off in the family room, and cool air bathed the space. Sitting on the couch, the one that used to be upstairs before we bought new living room furniture, I watched Eagle land on the moon on a big Magnavox console color television. I always thought the television was stolen and purchased from a fence. Even when new, it had a small area in the upper right corner where the picture tube – televisions had picture tubes, back then – appeared cracked. At least, what it showed was a distorted bubble of rainbow colors.

It was good enough to watch the moon landing, though. There wasn’t even a need to rotate the outdoor antenna or adjust the rabbit ears. All three major networks were carrying the event. We only had the three, then. Cable news wasn’t carrying it, because cable hadn’t proliferated around the nation like a blackberry bramble gone wild, and there weren’t any national cable news channels. They were still in our future.

We were excited about the future, despite what was happening and had happened. Perhaps I was only excited because I was young. The Vietnam war still continued, and Nixon was in the White House. Watergate was still a few years away. So was our first gasoline crises since World War II. Microwaves were only emerging, and we mostly played music on forty-five and thirty-three R.P.M. vinyl records. We also listened to music on radios, especially in our cars, especially A.M. It was pretty impressive that our old Dodge had a push-button radio. Later on, after the first man walked on the moon and made his famous utterance, I went outside and gazed up at the stars, wondering what the future would bring.

All in all, it was a pretty cool night.

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Today’s Theme Music

I dreamed I was in 2025. I’ll tell you, I looked good for 2025.

With some friends, we were discussing something that had happened in 1985 involving them. Their news amused and astonished me while it depressed and frustrated them, as a clerical error from the beginning of their military career in 1985 had just been found in 2025 and needed to be fixed.

Meanwhile, we were getting ready to party. Guests were already arriving. I don’t recall hearing any particular music in the dream. Awakening, I remembered this old hit, from 1969, ‘In the Year 2525’. Although I remember all the words and the melody, I realized that I didn’t know who performed the song or anything else about it. For this, I trusted Wikipedia.org.

Zager and Evans are the performers. This was their only hit. Rick Evans wrote the lyrics. His words, about what’s going to happen to Humans, are fascinating to contemplate. At least they were for a thirteen-year-old reading science fiction in 1969. This was the number one song in the U.S. when Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon.

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