The Crack of Dawn

Volume #386

7/4/23

Newsletter #386

The Crack of Dawn

The Galaxy Song

(from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life)

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown

And things seem hard or tough

And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft

And you feel that you've had quite enough

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving

And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour

That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned

A sun that is the source of all our power

The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see

Are moving at a million miles a day

In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour

Of the galaxy we call the 'milky way'

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars

It's a hundred thousand light years side to side

It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick

But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide

We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point

We go 'round every two hundred million years

And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions

In this amazing and expanding universe

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding

In all of the directions it can whizz

As fast as it can go, the speed of light, you know

Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure

How amazingly unlikely is your birth

And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space

'Cause it's bugger all down here on Earth

Songwriters: Eric Idle / Trevor Jones

Have a lovely July 4^th.