Rockets don't go to the Moon. People go to the Moon.

Just as an illustration of how pervasive this moronic "guns don't kill people, people kill people" meme is throughout large swathes of the US, here's a pearl of wisdom I spotted doing the rounds on Facebook...

"To everyone who is calling for stricter gun laws in light of the tragedy in Tucson, may I offer this little tidbit: If guns kill people, then pencils misspell words, cars drive drunk, and spoons made Oprah fat! Remember: Hold the person accountable for their actions, not just the means they chose to utilize!!! Reposted from another friend's status message. Don't just like it.....repost it."

Quite right too. And let me just add a couple of choice examples of my own. Oxygen doesn't keep us alive. That's silly. People keep themselves alive by breathing. Pretty much any gas will do. And rocket technology didn't take us to the moon. If we hadn't had rockets, we'd still have got there in 1969 - we'd have just...jumped.

The best small unitary authority in the world

Out on my travels on Wednesday, it struck me how bizarrely grandiose some of the slogans used by local authorities on signposts are becoming. Angus is the "birthplace of Scotland" (in what way?), while Perth and Kinross "welcomes the world". Dumfries and Galloway (from what I recall the last time I was there in August) is "First in Scotland" - although of course it could just as easily be last. Whereas North Lanarkshire takes a different tack with the internal contradiction of "take the lead, reduce your speed".

A more colloquial "hiya" would be quite refreshing one day, although I suppose nothing can be worse than Scotland's former branding as "the best small country in the world".

There was also a gorgeous large moon all the way home, which set me wondering (for some reason) whether a man had ever set foot on the moon within my lifetime. The answer, as I should have remembered, is no - the most recent was Eugene Cernan way back on December 11, 1972. And of course NASA couldn't return in the foreseeable future even if it wanted to, a reminder that technology can go backwards as well as forwards, and quite frequently does. We used to have commercial supersonic air travel. We even used to have teletext on ITV...