The Intrepid Paddling Pool (The Great Moon Hoax)

Member Name: SlyClone2k

Product:	The Great Moon Hoax
Date:	09/05/03 (352 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's really there

Disadvantages: It's really there

It was 10:15 on a Saturday and I was listening to the song of the same name by The Cure. Now if you are anything like me then by 10:15 on a saturday night you have probably had one or two drinks, my measurement is usually in litres so one or two is usually bottles, but that doesn't matter. The fact that I had drunk two bottles of red wine is of no coincidence, I can handle my alcohol consumption. But it's important that I tell you, because I don't want you to think that I'm a sad loner who drinks to keep himself happy, that kind of person is the sort of person who makes stuff up and I'm just not the fanciful type.

So anyway, 10:15 and I'm casually gazing out of my window looking at the sky, sweeping my head back and forth creating my own shooting stars so I can make a few wishes. Deep down in my heart I know its cheating but you never know when you might get lucky. So there I am rocking back and forth and Pauly, the bloke I shared my hostel room with is wondering what I'm doing. I told him that I like to make the stars whoosh by and he tells me about this time that he bungee jumped on a star lit night. He couldn't remember much about the sky but he did remember seeing stars when he hit the ground. His rope snapped. Funnily enough he'd only done it because his girlfriend, Zelda, had told him she was going to dump him unless he did something manly to impress her. So his rope snapped and he saw stars, then when he tried to get up he realised he'd broken his collar bone and snapped his pelvis. He wobbled in the middle as he stood up. Of course that meant he spent loads of time in traction and because Zelda was a nympho she jumped ship because she couldn't get any action. I suppose with a name like Zelda you are bound to have some sort of insecurity complex.

I had an insecurity complex once, but it's funny how living out of hostels can change all that. I'd spent quite a while as a loner, moving from
one place to the next, not as a traveller but as a back packer. I'd seen lots of places and done lots of things but eventually I got to this point where I was tired of being on my own. Then for some reason no matter how hard I tried I couldn't make friends. I talked to people everywhere I went but no body would listen to me, let alone answer any of my questions. I had a good think about what I was doing wrong one evening in this hostel I was staying in, and the guy in the bed over from me started complaining about the smell. It occurred to me I hadn't looked in a mirror for 3 months solid, and I was more than a little surprised when I did. The image staring back at me was hairier and grubbier than a sloth. Yes, there was moss. Anyway, much to my chagrin the showers were broken, so a good wash and shave was well out of the question. Besides I quite liked how my beard looked, it had grown to an admirable length and I hadn't even noticed the horrible itchy stage. So my options were limited, I really wanted to bath, or at least put water in contact with my skin and wash off the crusts of dirt. I decided that I'd higher a small sailing boat as the hostel was quite near a big clean lake.

With the last of my money I ventured to the hut where the boat keeper lived. He ushered me in and we chatted about the news and the weather, quite a short conversation as I recall because it hadn't rained in six weeks and I hadn't picked up a paper or watched T.V for at least three. But he did tell me about this incident with a large elephant that had escaped from the zoo, apparently some kid had tormented it with a currant bun and the elephant had managed to escape its cage and run amok. The kid was entirely distraught of course as the elephant had nearly stood on his head. But that's another story, for me it was about the sailing and the cleaning, any one who's ever sailed in a Topper will know that given a substantial gust of wind you are q
uite likely to capsize. Knowing this I ventured forth onto the moon lit lake. There was a fair bit of wind and I merrily sailed back and forth for quite some time before a gust took me completely by surprise and left me submerged beneath the sail in the pitch black water. I was quite experienced mind, and managed to get out from under the sail by using a special survival technique I'd picked up on a Red Letter Days 'Learn to be a Marine' thing someone had got me for my birthday a year or so past. That was great, as well as learning how to kill an animal without making it bleed I also learnt how to breath underwater like a fish.

As I re-emerged from the water I was almost blinded by the moon, for some reason it was really big, and when I mean big I mean the way a football looks as it heads toward your face when its been booted at you with the fury of Roy Keane on a bad day. It turns out it was some trick of the light (I asked the boat keeper when I got back), but that's all beside the point. Such a considerable period sloshing about below the surface had made me sufficiently clean and with my primary objective complete I sailed back to shore, clean and ready for what the world had to offer. Fortunately people seemed a lot less stand offish after that and I managed to elicit conversation from several folk and my insecurity complex past. It was about this time I picked up my obsession with the moon.

So a few years later (and it gets to being 10:15 on a Saturday night) and me and Pauly are chatting about making wishes on shooting stars, all be it a bit of a girly thing to do. Then we get chatting about the moon and Pauly tells me about this time that he was staring at a waxing crescent moon, only to watch it disappear for a few minutes and then turn into a full moon right there and then. Pauly being Pauly largely put it down to being very very stoned, which was fine, except I had had the very same experience the same night (we worke

d out the time and date using relevant comparisons with birthdays, weather conditions and complicated scientific astro-thermic nuances that only a PhD in astro-physics can). But I wasn?t stoned when it happened, but not having anyone around to confirm it with I'd put it down to the fluke case of senile dementia I'd been suffering from at the time. Fortunately for me when the doctor said I was too young to suffer from senile dementia it had all cleared up. Otherwise, I guess, I'd have forgotten this story by now, or at least embellished it beyond all believability.

So me and Pauly armed with this new found knowledge of the suddenly shape changing moon went to the big observatory that stood on top of the highest hill in town. Of course it was pretty late, it was now nearly 10:55 the observatory being quite a way from our home, we didn't really expect anyone to be about. We knocked on the big metal door and could hear the sound echo through the room behind it. After waiting for a bit we knocked some more, only to find that the door opened up a fraction. You know how they open in that way that makes you think that there's nothing behind them but a big pool of dark matter from which nothing can escape. Black matter and the odd ghost or ghoul that frequent dark and vacant buildings. That didn't bother Pauly in the slightest, he didn't believe in ghosts. So we stormed on in and were a little bit shocked as to what we found.

We explored the network of tunnels, opening doors to bathrooms, closets and offices before eventually finding what we were looking for, the big telescope. It sat on the gantry above our heads and was pointing directly at the moon. Now Pauly was beginning to get jumpy, he'd opened one door in his quest and a wet broom had fallen out of the cupboard and he thought he'd been smitten by the tentacles of Cthulhu. So he was in no mood for climbing the steps that led to the eye piece. I on the other h
and had overcome my fears and was gaily springing from step to step so I could peer at the sea of tranquillity. This is where I got my biggest shock.

The moon didn't have a sea of tranquillity, in fact all it had on it was a small paddling pool where a couple of ten year olds were frolicking merrily whilst splashing about in the water. I focused the telescope back a bit (I'd learnt how to do that at Astro-physics college), a view of a paddling pool was ultimately perplexing, but by no means as odd as the thing I saw next. The moons surface was all liquid apart from a really small, I mean really really small, piece of land that was currently being occupied by the paddling pool and a couple of adults one wearing a bikini and the other surfers shorts.

After staring at them for a good few moments I was extremely shocked to feel a hand clamp down on my shoulder and to be spun around to face a serious looking dude wearing a black suit and a pair of ray-ban classics. We had a long conversation, in which he disclosed to me that the moon landing had nearly happened, but they'd never been able to actually land because there wasn't enough room for the moon lander. Apparently this bloke named Larry had landed there with his wife and kids space ship that had turned in to a paddling pool upon landing. Apparently they'd been surviving on a simple diet of moon water, which contained all the nutrition that any human needed for eternal life, it also meant that you developed quite slowly which is why his two 8 year old kids had only got to ten in over twenty years.

It was all very interesting, but he got quite shirty when I asked him why they didn't just invade the planet using an amphibious landing craft and a party of highly trained U.S. marines. Apparently they already did, but when they got close to it Larry had turned off all the lights and they couldn't see it in the dark. Everyone had had to turn around and go home again.
What had really got everyones goat was the way that Larry had made the moon really bright as soon as they turned around. So that answered our question, and the question of whether Neil ever actually made it to the moon.

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