Tuesday is Chicken Dance Day, Skylab anniversary

The Chicken Dance video we posted last year seems unusually infested with ads this year, and this makes us concerned about whether you should go back there and play it. But you weren't going to do that anyway, were you? Just our bringing the subject up may stick that song in your head for a good long while, won't it?

Please don't hate us. It's not our fault that all the Usual Suspects say that Tuesday, May 14 is Chicken Dance Day (or, alternatively, Dance Like a Chicken Day -- which just gets you back to the Chicken Dance anyway).

Skylab, America's first space station, was launched 40 years ago, on May 14, 1973.

Of course by 1973, America had abandoned its remaining lunar missions. NASA was like a parent who forbade its kids to go walking to the park anymore, but -- in a misguided effort to make up for it -- put up a tent in the backyard. Skylab, the tent in low Earth orbit, was abandoned in February 1974, after the Skylab 4 mission. Skylab's orbit eventually decayed, and it came crashing back to Earth in 1979. Today, America bums rides to and from Skylab's replacement, the International Space Station, from the Russians.

The future was supposed to be better than this.