Some news of the weird for the previous week.
To commemorate the 40th-anniversary of Apollo 11’s landing on the moon, a group of cheesemakers in Somerset, England, decided to send a piece of cheddar into space on a high-altitude weather balloon.
The logic of this, so it seems to me, is that some thought in the past that the moon was made of cheese. I’ve never understood why our long-ago ancestors thought this. Clearly they were drunk on fermenting cheese or something similar.
In any event, the cheese set forth to the edge of space on the 27th, where it ran into problems.
The GPS system onboard the balloon failed.
The plan was that the balloon would reach the upper atmosphere where, thanks to the very low air pressure, the balloon would “pop,” allowing the cheese capsule to fall back to earth on a parachute.
But, with the GPS failure, there was no way for the cheesemakers to track where their precious cargo would fall.
Fortunately, the cheese was recovered in Cressex. The cheese wedge was recovered intact.
What Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin thought of this bizarre celebration of their first moonwalk we shall likely never know.
Cheese, glorious cheese. Pinky would approve. I think I shall put an Animaniacs CD in the stereo and listen to the madly mental mouse extoll the virtues of the cheese.