The Angry Red Planet

Mars seems to be all the rage nowadays. We sent some sort of roving Lego dune buggy up there and it's scampering about taking pictures of the planet we'd till now only dreamt about. Well, it was scampering about. Then it broke. But in an amazing show of American ingenuity, we're fixing it all the way down here on Earth, and it will soon be scampering about again.

I really hadn't cared too much about the whole thing; I don't know why. It was certainly exciting for me when we landed on the moon. But I was nine years old then. You're a lot easier excited when you're nine. The whole Mars thing was becoming a big "feh" in my eyes.

Then I realized, why should I be so nonchalant? I should care what they find on Mars. It should actually interest me a great deal. After all, I have the up-till-now definitive theory of All Things Mars fresh in my memory. Yes. After all, it was only in September that I saw the movie "Robinson Crusoe On Mars."

And I know this is hard to grasp, but the real Mars doesn't seem to be much the same as the Mars in that movie!

The pictures we're seeing come down to us of the Red Planet, the ones from the Lego Car, give us a view of a flat expanse of red clay/sand, scattered with little flatish black rocks. This is quite different from the Mars of "Robinson Crusoe on Mars" (RCoM), which told us that Mars looked a whole lot like the deserts of Arizona, with golden sands and craggy rock mountains, plateaus and valleys and all sorts of hills and dales. And while Lego Car's showing us a dark gray shadowy Martian sky, RCoM showed us a sunful, seriously bright blue sky, perhaps with a jet liner smoketrail or two ribboning across it.

Lego Car is sending down pictures of something that scientists think could be ice, thus proving there is water up on Mars. We knew that all along. Robinson Crusoe's traveling companion, the monkey the US so smartly sent into space with him, discovered a whole crapload of water in a cranny in some rocky cave. A neverending spring, pouring into a little stone pool of water for swimming, drinking, and bathing. And those pools had something else that the Lego Car seems to have missed. A food source: the pods which must be eaten raw, because if they're boiled into a soup, they cause bad gas and hallucinogenic nightmares.

Now, I know Lego Car hasn't made a huge swath over Mars just yet, but so far I haven't seen the stones piled on the grave of Robinson Crusoe's late traveling astronaut companion, Adam West. Nor the remains of his spaceship, for that matter.

And probably the biggest difference I'm finding from Lego Car's pictures of Mars are, yes, the absence of Big Martian Slave Guys. I mean, the Mars I knew of up to this current excursion had big monosyllabic men who looked like American Indians, only dressed as Egyptian Slaves, roaming the planet. I haven't seen a single one of those in the pictures coming back now, and frankly, I'm disappointed.

But you know, now that I think of it, I've decided what's wrong. We only sent a Lego Car up there. Robinson Crusoe had that monkey! That monkey discovered every cool thing on Mars. Why didn't we send a Lego Car and a little monkey to drive it around? We'd be finding all kinds of cool stuff on that planet. We could be lining up Big Martian Slave Guys to come down here and do our bidding for us as we speak!

But no, NASA in its neverending intelligence sent a self powered dune buggy made out of Legos. And it's showing us clay and rocks. And ice. Woo hoo.

I want NASA training monkeys, and as soon as possible.