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04/12/2001 Archived Entry: "Colonel Knowledge"

According to someone from sci.space.policy, this was a recent question on the USA 'Millionaire' TV show:

On what did a US spacecraft land in Feb of 2001?

A) Moon B) Mars

C) asteroid D) comet

The person used all three life lines. The phone a friend wasn't sure. 50/50 left in Mars and Asteroid. The audience didn't know. Regis (that's Chris for people from UK) kept saying, "It's always those NASA questions that get them."

When I looked at this question, I thought, 'Huh, I don't know the answer to this immediate.' Of course, I worked it out eventually through the process of elimination (it's when NEAR landed on the asteroid Eros - 'land' probably isn't the best term so much as 'fell'). Anyway, as such it's not really a fair point to use as an indictment against the lack of general knowledge about space; perhaps it's more relevant to the fact that it wasn't really covered in the media.

Chatting with a friend last night, we came up with a new rule in interpersonal relationship dynamics: the 'inevitability factor', e.g.

"Oh, we've been such good friends for so long, we might as well go out/have a date/sleep together/get married."

I'm aware that this is in direct opposition to the 'friends zone' rule, as postulated by Bright, Kauffman and Crane ('The One With The Blackout', Friends 1:7), wherein as soon as you pass a certain point of 'being friends', you are no longer considered dating material, but as is the case in all this circumstances, situations vary.