And Now for Something Completely Different...

...a man with a tape recorder up his nose.

Monty Python's Michael Palin as The Man with a Tape Recorder Up his Nose

I absolutely love Monty Python.  I can't help it.  I'm one of those bizarre people who finds British humor positively hysterical.  Human beings seem to come in two flavors: those that flip for British humor, and those that can't stand it.  And you don't get wafers with either variety.

Perhaps my favorite thing about Monty Python, however, is the fact that the members of the troupe are very well educated and inject that into their brilliant comedy.  There's something wonderful about that.  I mean, how else does one conceive of a comedy bit where a Roman centurion vehemently corrects a Jewish ne'er-do-well on the grammar of his Latin graffiti?  Romans you go the house?  It's still one of my favorite bits from Life of Brian.

Astronomy is not neglected by the Pythons either.  If you've ever see The Meaning of Life, you'll certainly remember The Galaxy Song, a jaunty little ditty written and sung by Eric Idle to convince an ordinary British housewife to donate her organs (and right now please).  The words are as follows:

Monty Python's Terry Jones as Mrs. Brown and Eric Idle performing "The Galaxy Song" in "The Meaning of Life"

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

It's a brilliant song, all the more so because it's pretty much 100% accurate.  We'll forgive Eric the use of the word "revolving" when he really meant "rotating"...after all, it's a very common mistake.  But beyond that one slip in lexicon, the song is spot on. 

Our Earth really does rotate, on average, at 900 miles per hour.  Think about that.  Right now, as you sit reading this, you are IN MOTION at almost 1000 mph.  And that's just the Earth's rotation.  Our revolution around the Sun, at 19 miles a second, clocks in at over 68,000 mph.  Comparatively, the entire solar system trundles along at only 40,000 mph as it moves around the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

A second error, if you want to call it that, occurs here.  We now believe that our galaxy probably contains 200 billion stars...but of course, it depends a little on who you ask.  100 billion as an estimate back when the song was written would be perfectly acceptable.  All of the other measures concerning our galaxy are quite correct.

So the next time someone complains about you just sitting on the couch, watching TV, you can explain to them just how fast you're really moving when you do that.  No wonder you need to sit down!

Until next time,
Carpe noctem!
Kelly