Lunacy, Part I
We’ve been watching the Nova “Planets” episodes on PBS and discovering weird and wonderful things about them like Uranus and Neptune (gas giants and yes we missed that one in trivia recently) are billions of miles from the sun (Voyager 2 took almost ten years to get to them) and that Pluto is no longer considered a planet because it has not “managed its local space,” that is, gathered up all those pesky rocks and asteroids floating nearby. When we ran out of Nova episodes, we turned to the Science channel series The Planets (Nova with ads and annoying “are you getting this children?” repetition).
Venus also has many interesting things about it. For instance, (1) a collision with another large celestial object caused it to reverse its spin, (2) it was once a water world very much like Earth but had its oceans and atmosphere gradually blown away by solar winds (given its slower spin, it cannot generate a protective magnetic shield like Earth does), and (3) in ten thousand years the Sun will have grown much hotter and the Earth will have turned into Venus, that is, become a hellhole with surface temperatures in the thousands. By then all life will have died unless, of course, we find some way to move Earth farther away from the Sun (they actually put this forward as a possibility). After getting this incredibly astropsychobumologious news, we looked at each other and said “wow, and we think we have problems.”
By now, you might be thinking this blog is about actual planets and such. It’s not. It’s about how the celestial bodies present in our Solar System can alter human moods. We started watching “Venus: The Hell Planet” with eager anticipation and ended feeling as if the weight of its carbon dioxide atmosphere (1,350 pounds per square inch, the equivalent of being three thousand feet under water) had just dropped on our chests.
And you might think that this blog is about Venus. It’s not. As you may have guessed from the title, it’s about the psychological impact of our nightly companion, more specifically “The mood-altering power of the Moon.” Over its long history with human kind, the Moon has suffered more than its fair share of being “tied to the whipping post.” The ancient Greeks and Romans believed it caused madness and epilepsy (“lunacy” comes from the Latin for “moonstruck”). Other things it has been blamed for are causing women to give birth when full, increasing violence among psychiatric patients and prison inmates, interfering with our sleep, and heightening manic-depressive cycles in some patients.
While scientists have spent countless hours studying the effect of the Moon’s light, gravitational pull, and magnetic influence on plant, animal, and human behavior, they have not come to any hard and fast conclusions. My theory is this. Despite what all the debunkers say, the Moon really is made of cheese, which we know thanks to the publication of The Proverbs of John Heywood in 1546. John made the astute observation that “the moon is made of greene [overripe] cheese.” Then in 2002, NASA provided actual proof (see photo below, where the crater on the lower right contains the Moon’s “sell-by” date).
So, the Moon is overripe cheese, and everyone knows how bad such cheese, in the process of being devastated by bacteria, can smell. This raises the following question: How can having 73,477,000,000,000,000,000 tons of stinky dairy product hovering a mere 239,000 miles over our heads not affect everyone’s mood? We are being bombarded constantly by malodorous lunar cheese dust. While we can no longer consciously smell it due to centuries of exposure, it is creeping daily and nightly into our cells and our subconscious. The effect waxes and wanes, naturally. While the lunar-induced cheese addiction in most humans is constantly wreaking havoc on our diets and our ability to concentrate, on full moon nights the intense assault of microscopic particles reeking of unwashed bodies or week-old gym socks drives some people into fits of howling and leaves others with strange cravings for Bossa, Boulette d’Avesnes, and Good Thunder.
At this moment, I’m thinking I should find some way to leave a note for the scientists of the future as they try to figure out how to catapult our planet somewhere in the general direction of Mars. My advice for them would be this: Leave the Moon behind. You will all feel better for it. And when you’re leaving, you might call out with a bit of a relieved sneer as you escape the bonds of lactose dependency, “Hasta la Velveeta, baby!”
(Published originally on RatBlurt, August 5, 2023)
