Hornswaggler | The culture, the humor, a bit of the sports, not so much the politics, and the workplace distraction
Hornswaggle is an alternate spelling of
hornswoggle, an archaic word that means to bamboozle or hoodwink. I take my
pronunciation from the late Harvey Korman in "Blazing Saddles" --
"I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers,
bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits,
vipers, snipers, conmen, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers,
buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train
robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers and Methodists!"
This is great. Buzz Aldrin punches a moon conspiracy theorist trying to get him to swear on the Bible that he's actually walked on the moon. This is the second incident I've heard on this theme wrt Buzz, the first being the time he allegedly broke down while giving a speech about the landing (skeptics claim it was his guilty conscience).
I'm not 100% convinced we did land on the moon. I don't want to believe that we faked it. I love the idea of space travel. I love the fact that we got there using slide rulers. Not to mention that, if the conspiracy theory is true, it renders moot and obscene one of my all-time favorite movies, "For All Mankind," the NASA documentary of the moon mission. I've based a lot of (for me, anyway) key ideas about the human race on that film and I don't want it to be false. But there are legitimate questions about the landing. The pictures and who's taking them (the take-off and landing of the lunar module in particular). Questions about space debris puncturing the hull of the LEM (Lunar Module), which had the thickness of heavy-duty aluminum foil, questions about the Van Allen Belt (radioactivity that a human being cannot withstand) surrounding at least part of the Earth. Questions about why we stopped going (funding cuts doesn't quite do it for me). I just want those questions answered comprehensively, that's all.
For me, the motivation for the fake would be this: We were locked in the Cold War and losing the space race to the Soviets, we said we could do it and then whoops we discovered that we couldn't, so we faked it to avoid major international embarassment. The hole in this theory is: How difficult would it have been for the Soviets to figure out we were bamboozling everyone and wouldn't they have exposed our lie?
Call me a kook if you want to. I'll find some links so you can look at some of the conspiracy claims yourself.
Good old John McEnroe talks about Sept. 11. He has some good ideas and the best part is, there's no saying Johnny Mac is un-American. He's an unimpeachable New Yawkah.
