Galaxy Song – Monty Python – The Meaning Of Life


www.saultthisweek.com Check out the heavens to see how insignificant earthlings are… Just remember that youre standing on a planet thats evolving. And revolving at 900 miles an hour Ah, Monty Python and crew, God bless em. Never encountered a gang of comics who made me laugh longer or harder than those loopy Brits. The Dead Parrot Sketch. The Lumberjack Song. The Department of Silly Walks. Hells Grannies. And of course, The Galaxy Song. Thats orbiting at 19 miles a second, so its reckoned. Round the sun, which is the source of all our power. Canadas pioneering funnyman, Stephen Leacock, defined humour as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life. Leacock would have loved the Pythons. They deal in incongruities too. Incongruities like the fact that you and me and this newspaper and this country and this continent and this planet we call home. Were moving at a million miles a day. In an outer spiral arm at 40 thousand miles an hour. Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way. The whole incongruity that the Galaxy Song addresses is the cosmic insignificance of self-important bipeds like thee and moi. But hold on! According to the latest scientific data, were not quite as insignificant as we thought. And that applies to the Milky Way as well. It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick. But out by us its just 3000 light-years wide. Poppycock. Monty Python had it all wrong. According to data recently analyzed, our Milky Way is actually about one and a …