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Sea of Tranquility

By DrKSSMDPhD, September 28, 2016

[Ed. Note: Dr. KSS writes about medicine and biotech stocks for the Irregulars. He has agreed to our trading restrictions, chooses his own topics, and his words and opinions are his own. All of his past articles and most recent comments are on his Stock Gumshoe page.]

“I live in the light

of the bright summer moon.

I’ll take you all sailing

from midnight til noon.

I’ll show you a Sea of Tranquility….”

—Gordon Lightfoot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAYpNVNsZ4c

 

As a corntop child, age in the single digits, I knew I was living in fulsome times, in times when there was a class of larger-than-life people routinely capable of doing things I couldn’t. “Did you know,” I said to a seatmate on the schoolbus, “that for those Apollo guys, they make them stick their bare feet in a bucket of icewater for seven minutes? No way I could stand that!” An ullullational “wow” rose from my quarter of the bus. “And not only that,” I went on, “but they test them by putting them on this, this machine that spins them in three directions at once to see if they puke!” Several of us began tossing our heads in rapid multiple circles and giggling.

“You guys all suddenly have group epilepsy?,” the bus driver said, snarling.

The boy in the seat in front of me waggered his head so spiritedly he succeeded in making himself vomit. “Kyle yorked!,” someone shouted.

My father worked in the newsroom of a busy urban TV station. Once a week during the mid-sixties, he brought home to me a reel of fresh 16mm film in a NASA shipping container: news footage about the Apollo missions released for broadcast. I spliced each one onto a growing reel of clips in our downstairs projection room, and whiled away the heat of summer days screening them again and again.

But an eager heart is tough to slake. I needed a map for a situation room so I could be with them in spirit on their missions….one into which I could place a pushpin at each point of LEM touchdown. “Houston, Tranquility Base here…..the Eagle has landed,” squawked Neil Armstrong at 3:18 pm EST on 20 July 1969. Its occurrence on a Sunday juiced up history’s Klieg lights on its epicness. Who wasn’t watching? I recited Armstrong over breakfast the next morning, making a vivid “pssshhhht” squelchy radio noise so my ...

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