I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PRIMUS-“Mephisto & Kevin” (1998).

On the South Park Chef Aid album, Primus played this song.  It’s not one of their best, but it’s a fun little number.  The bass is interesting and once the chorus comes along, there are some great guitar sections.

The lyrics are a childish thing about Michael Jackson’s semen–and I don’t think they have anything to do with these two characters directly.

It is of course fun that Isaac Hayes sings the chorus (which has to have been kind of cool).  And the music in the pre-chorus is heavy and interesting.

Apparently, that’s Trey Parker singing at the very end.

[READ: January 16, 2015] “Alan Bean Plus Four”

Yes, THAT Tom Hanks.

Who knows what to expect from an actor, especially one whom you’ve never heard of writing a story before.  And who knows even more what to think when the story is as strangely written as this one.  Well, not strangely written… it’s pretty normally written. But the content is quite unexpected.

The story is about a four people who build a rocket and fly it around the moon and back.

What is strange about the way it is written is that there is never any doubt from anyone that it will work or questions about how it will work.  Even though some of the things they discuss are preposterous, it will still work and does still work. So it seems like the narrator is crazy, and yet we are not given that information.

It begins with the premise that if you could throw a hammer with enough muscle, it would sail around the moon and return to earth like a boomerang.  Of course Anna points out that a hammer would melt upon reentry, so why not just make a shuttle and they could all fly round the moon.  They could succeed where the Russians failed.  And so they set out to build one and sail it on the anniversary of when Apollo 12 landed in the Ocean of Storms (forgotten by 99.999 per cent of the people on Earth).

Everyone did his or her part.  The narrator created the Command Module, which he bought from the widow of a 94-year-old magnate intent on getting in on the private aerospace business.  Our hero named the capsule Alan Bean in honor of the lunar module pilot of Apollo 12, the fourth man to walk on the moon (and the only one he’d ever met).

In order to make room he threw out a lot of stiff and in order to make it lighter her removed the nuts and bolts and refastened it all with duct tape.  The section ends with “in the vacuum of space, the air pressure inside the Alan Bean would force the hatch closed and airtight. Simple physics.”

It took two days to assemble it all and soon they were off: “Weightlessness is as much fun as you can imagine.”

Some of the fun things that make this seem plausible are statements like “the Americans who went to the moon before us had computers so primitive that they couldn’t get email or use Google to settle arguments.  The iPads we took had something like seventy billion times the capacity of the Apollo-era dial ups.”

They marvel at the far side of the moon, taking it all in and using up their phone camera storage. And soon then they are headed for the anticlimactic ride home.

It is a very strange but very funny story.  The tone was certainly the best part and I’m curious if Hanks has anything else like this lined up.