HEAVENLY BODIES (NOT RAQUEL WELCH) - CONTINUED

by Cynthia MacGregor

(cont'd from yesterday)

Neptune is a planet that is confused and thinks it belongs in the sea. Uranus is a planet that is the butt of a lot of jokes, so we won’t go there.

The moon only looks like a planet, but it isn’t. It was put in orbit by songwriters so they would have something to rhyme with “June” besides “spoon,” which they knew would become an outdated word eventually, except when writing about cutlery, and who wants to write a lovesong to a utensil? They were going to call “spooning” by another name, but when Irving Berlin wrote, “Be my wife/For the rest of my life/I want to knife with you,” they knew they had to rethink the terminology. The cost of keeping the moon in orbit is underwritten by lovers everywhere, who want its silver beams to bring love’s dreams. Silver beams are nothing like Jim Beam, which is available even in cloudy weather, unlike the moon, which is a fair-weather friend.

There is a popular theory that in cloudy weather the sun and moon run off to Vegas while no one can notice that they’re gone, but this has never been proven.

Other popular planets include rhododendron, coleus, and the venus fly trap, which eats zippers.
Meteors are fast-moving objects, which leads one to wonder who’s chasing them. Also, we know they’re meteor, but meteor than what? A thick steak? I don’t think so!

Other objects found in the sky include Mir, rainbows, and pigeons. Mir is so named because it is a Mir matter of time now before it plunges back to earth—hopefully into the ocean, or so Russia tells us, but do you believe everything Russia tells us? Rainbows are broadcast in living Technicolor and have pots of gold at the end and Oz somewhere over them. This is not to be confused with Oz as in The Land Down Under (and no, that was not a dirty reference). This Oz is ruled by a great and powerful wizard. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. The wizard makes many promises he can’t keep and governs by smoke and mirrors, which is why Dorothy should have felt more at home when she got there. Although America is very much like that, you don’t need a tornado to get here. Most Haitians do it on rafts. They do this because they heard that in America you can live happily ever rafter. We still haven’t covered pigeons, but usually it’s the pigeons who do the covering…of statues, mostly. So we’ll let that subject go for now.

They say the moon shines in the reflected light of the sun. I have known wives and also husbands who lead similar lives.

Have we left out a few objects that can be found in the sky? You bet your asteroid we have. But for the time being, we return you to your regularly scheduled programming.