Spatial Realities

It occurred to me this morning that the woman in the blue pants and green top was in the picture in order to give us an idea of the relative size of the satellite.

And she was staring into the bushes so we should not be distracted by her face. Alas for the best laid plans. No one had realised her orientation would be so intriguing. Why was she staring into those bushes? Satellite, what satellite? I bet none of us saw it.

It's funny how such things only occur to you later. Thinking again about Mr Rocket and Mr Squiggle, I realised something this morning that I should have realised over forty years ago.

Mr Squiggle was the man from the moon. He was a string puppet and his nose was a large wooden pencil. Every day he would come down to earth in Mr Rocket to visit his friend Miss Pat. Miss Pat always had a large piece of paper with a squiggle on it sent in by some child. She would pin the squiggle to Mr Blackboard and Mr Squiggle would use the pencil in his nose to turn the squiggle into a recognisable object like a flower, or a bee.

It was excruciating to watch. His big head and pencil nose would jiggle up and down and back and forth in front of the paper. How he achieved the necessary pressure to draw anything was totally outside the laws of physics.

He usually drew the object upside down. The finished squiggle would need to be turned the right way up before we could see what it was. I used to think this was done to keep us in suspense for longer, but this morning I was struck by the blinding obvious.

The puppeteer who manipulated Mr Squiggle's nose would have been somewhere up above Mr Squiggle out of camera shot. Leaning out over the top of a screen and looking down at Mr Blackboard, he would have seen his drawing right side up.

That was all. It goes to show how life-like Mr Squiggle must have been, that I never thought of it before.