farts.

Even as the current mission to the Red Planet is indebted to the appearance of bacteria, so too are we, down here on the Earthly outpost. Whether some of that living stuff came to the third rock from the fourth in some vaguely-explicable cosmic action is a really fun thought to turn round and round. "I turned into a Martian. Woah-oh-OH! I can't even recall my name...".

I was about to say that thoughts like this have already found their way into our zeitgeist, the comfort of the would-be lone-goer, the alienated, the freak. But using the Misfits as evidence is a dangerous game. Brain-trains get derailed.  Mr. Topham Hatt must warn Thomas the Tank Engine sternly against causing more "confusion and delay". Suddenly the compulsion to write about what Mythic Mrs. Zeitgeist teaches us about the God of War becomes impossible.

A few days ago, in the lunch-room, we opened a newspaper and were met with the leering centre-fold gaze of the new Mars rover, Curiosity. From what I saw spread before us in an attempt to cause awe-inspired swoons at the ingenuity of humans, I can safely say that felines need not forsake their lives just yet. They may go on terrorizing creatures capable of gravity-defying flight, keeping neighbourhoods awake in the wee hours, and relieving themselves in our flower-boxes. Do you remember, lovely reader, the lunar rover of decades past? Yes? Well grant it some modern computers and you have Curiosity. Huperdaughterkind (that's the feminist-sensitive way of putting it, though this project is likely starved of the female touch) is STILL stuck on the six-wheeled dune-buggy. REALLY. Grow up, boys.

Lunches went cold, became inedible, were thrown out. Jaws were too much engaged in the act of dropping to bring themselves to chew. Perhaps I hyperbolize, I don't even know anymore. What about a small android boy that can walk upright, uses laser-guided trowels (dare I say "in real time"?), has thousand-mile long harpoon-drills for fingers and operates an impervious suction-cup bubble vehicle that can roll up cliffs as he crawls within? No, N.A.S.A. is going with the dune buggy again. Dune buggies are the best thing for uncovering methane. And where there are farts, there is life.

So, let us go around the corner to see what the artists are coming up with when it comes to Space Exploration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUr1zGq5OMM

Ah! Eh? Yes.