In 1977, Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched from the Kennedy Space Flight Center in Florida. Twenty-seven years later, the spacecrafts are currently more than 90 A.U. — that’s 8.4 billion miles, for all you English majors — away from Earth, and have become the most distant human-made objects in the universe.

Let me pause for just a moment to mull over how amazing that is. It’s been 27 years, and these things are still hurtling through space at an average of 36,600 miles per hour. The batteries in my digital camera don’t last for more than three hours, but somehow these giant toaster ovens have enough juice to travel and send data back to us until 2020. Now past Neptune, the crafts are steadily approaching the edge of the solar system. In 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will pass another star. Clearly, it’s only a matter of time — albeit a very, very long time — before it crashes into some distant planet, denting the roof of an alien trailer home.

NASA has, of course, gone to great lengths to prepare for such an occasion. Mounted upon each Voyager is a copy of The Golden Record, a sort of AAA guidebook to Earth that was designed by a committee chaired by late Cornell astronomy and space sciences professor Carl Sagan. The Golden Record is perhaps humankind’s most impressive feat of conciseness, condensing what is supposed to be a portrayal of “the diversity of life and culture on Earth” into a 12-inch, two-sided disc.
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I’ve been derelict in my columnal duties. Everyone reaches that point in the semester where they verge on breakdown, but a columnist’s self-destruction is more public than most. I’ve spent the past three months immersed in research on douches and feminine deodorant sprays (I know this sounds like the set-up to a joke, but I swear it isn’t), which means I could regale you with tales of the paradigmatic shift that occurs in feminine hygiene advertisements between 1965 and 1975, but I think it would be best (for both of us) if I refrained from doing so. So, in lieu of a coherent narrative structure and sweeping cultural commentary, I present you with a roundup of ideas that never made it past a brief scribble in my Moleskine notebook. For some of the ideas it will become immediately obvious why they remained on the cutting room floor; others may yet turn up in future columns.

Unanswered Questions

* Is the relationship between chocolate and deliciousness a linear one — that is, does something get better every time you add more chocolate to it, or is the function asymptotic to some ultimate, unattainable sublime deliciousness? Is it logarithmic? Parabolic? This is a weighty issue.
* Which is worse: Sunday or Monday? Obviously Sunday has the advantage because it’s the weekend, but at least at the end of the day on Monday, Monday is almost over.
* What is the least sexy food to eat? Not because of what it’s actually made out of, but because of how it has to be eaten. I say corn on the cob.
* Why is New York the only state that has implemented the “I [heart] __” t-shirt format? It’s not like it’s a state-specific sentiment. “I [heart] WY” makes just as much sense.

Random Facts I Have Learned in the Past Month

* According to Professor Michael Lynn, Hotel Administration, when a waitress draws a smiley-face on her check it increases her tips by 18 percent, but a waiter who does the same thing decreases his tips by nine percent.
* Lysol was originally used as a douche. Seriously.
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Last week, as Winter expelled its icy breath across the campus for (hopefully) one of the last times before Spring extends its dewy fingers, the gale-force winds carried with them the vestiges of a fleeting premature summer: bronzed bodies — skin baked pleasantly crisp by tropical suns — filled lectures, ambled across the Arts Quad wearing dissonantly copious amounts of clothing, and unintentionally tripled the ethnic diversity of Cornell.

I was not one of these tanned, refreshed travelers. Instead of voyaging to some small, equatorial island, I went to Denmark — which means that I returned to Cornell with a Scandinavian pallor, not to mention a hacking cough that still clears a three-seat radius around me in every lecture.

Though I’m ashamed to admit it, this was my first time ever leaving the country, and I had relatively high expectations for how much I would grow as a result of the experience. In my mind, one’s first trip to a foreign land was supposed to be life-changing, the sort of experience that forever alters the way you think about the world, making you question all of your cultural assumptions and stereotypes. Up is down! Black is white! Pickled herring is delicious!
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Last week, as Winter expelled its icy breath across the campus for (hopefully) one of the last times before Spring extends its dewy fingers, the gale-force winds carried with them the vestiges of a fleeting premature summer: bronzed bodies — skin baked pleasantly crisp by tropical suns — filled lectures, ambled across the Arts Quad and unintentionally tripled the ethnic diversity of Cornell.

I was not one of these tanned, refreshed travelers. Instead of voyaging to some small, equatorial island, I spent my spring break in Denmark — which means that I returned to Cornell with a Scandinavian pallor, not to mention a hacking cough that still clears a three-seat radius around me in every lecture.

Though I’m ashamed to admit it, this was my first time ever leaving the country, and I had high expectations for how much I would grow as a result of the experience. In my mind, one’s first trip to a foreign land was supposed to be life-changing, the sort of experience that forever alters the way you think about the world, making you question all of your cultural assumptions and stereotypes. Up is down! Black is white! Pickled herring is delicious!

What I discovered, however, is that if you’re looking for culture shock, Copenhagen is not the place to go. Beautiful 18th-century architecture? Sure, they’ve got that. Great museums? Got that, too. A 7-11 on every corner? Yep, there to meet all your microwaved-burrito needs. They drive on the right side of the street, they all speak English and they’ve got a healthy dose of xenophobia; if not for the ubiquity of signs with bizarre letters like � and �, you’d mistake it for some seaside metropolis in the U.S.
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