Why Don't We Ever Go to the Moon Anymore?

The fact that we never go to the moon anymore bothers me. We spent billions and billions of dollars (and that was in 1960's money - with inflation it's probably more like trillions) to beat the Russians to the moon. Then, we just decided we were all done and stopped going. Did we really learn all there was to learn in 6 missions? We got there, drove around a little, played some golf and left. Now, sure, that's all the exploring I want to do when I go to a new place, but a new place to me is when I do something on the level of a weekend in Miami - not outer friggin' space. I just have a hard time believing that we learned all we could from our time there.

I get that it was all just one big space race and once we beat the Russians to the moon we were good. After all, you don't have to keep running once the race is over. But if you're truly exploring then you shouldn't stop once you've been to a new place, either. You have to go back repeatedly and look around some more. That's kind of how being an explorer works. Hell, I'm not insisting that we go all the time - I bet even now it would be astronomically expensive - but once or twice a decade works fine for me. Instead, we planted a flag (making the moon officially the 51st state - so stop looking at our moon, rest of the world), left and haven't been back since. Now there are only 9 living men who can say they've been on the moon and they're all in their late 70's. (That, by the way, is a way cooler club to be in than the '71 Dolphins getting together every year to celebrate their perfect season.) Just seems odd to me that we've allowed this group to stay at such a low number.

These days we put all our money into the international space station, which I don't like. I feel almost as if this is going to end up like a time-share deal where the U.S. is going to put up all the money and all the time to build it, but then India or some other country will claim it on all the good weekends during the summer. It just feel like the U.S. is getting ripped off in this deal. We won't even get a kick-ass movie out of it like we did when we failed trying go to the moon. But really, this rant was just an excuse to show this, one of my favorite things the Onion has ever produced.

-Some people out there are saying that golf can't be considered a real sport because a man two months short of his 60th birthday almost won a signature event on the PGA Tour. While you could look at it that way, I instead choose to look at it that it should be the sport you push your kids towards. First off, no one breaks their neck golfing and secondly, you can clearly make a crap load of money for a long time. That near 60 year-old just won about $800,000, and that's not counting what will come from sponsor bonuses. Let's see Peyton Manning pull down that size check when he's 59.

-Also, on the strength of his performance Tom Watson jumped from 1,374 in the rankings all the way up to 105. That's one hell of a jump in four days. But, the bigger shocker to me is that they keep rankings that high. Really, after 1,200 golfers, why are you even keeping track? I've been playing golf for less than a year but for all I know, I'm ranked 1,400.