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} You do realize that the Moon was not always made of green cheese. In
} fact, until quite recently it was made of rock. What happened?
} Simple.
}
} Agricultural price supports. You see, in order to keep the U. S. dairy
} industry healthy, the U. S. Federal government set up a system whereby
} it would buy any excess milk that dairy farmers produced and could not
} sell. This began during the Great Depression, continued through WWII,
} and went on and on...
}
} Some of this milk was dehydrated, but the most practical way to store
} it proved to be to make it into a hard cheese. It was an
} undersecretary of Agriculture who hit on the idea, and he suggested
} that the Feds kill two birds with one stone by using the excess herbs
} (mostly basil, oregano, and chives) bought through the herb price
} support program to flavor the cheese. The result: a hard,
} herb-flavored cheese, tolerably palatable and capable of being stored
} for long periods.
}
} By the mid-1950s, the Feds had accumulated an incredible amount of this
} cheese. Almost all of it was still edible; in fact, it aged
} beautifully, the herbal flavors mellowing, and cheese over twenty years
} old was usually a delicacy. But what to do with it? Selling it or
} giving it away was out of the question: one bureaucrat calculated that
} the huge stockpile contained enough protein to fill the needs of the
} entire planet for several years -- though, of course, not everybody
} likes cheese, and some people cannot tolerate dairy foods.
}
} By 1952, the U. S. had a practical nuclear-powered space rocket -- all
} very hush-hush, of course. The solution seemed obvious once Wernher
} von Braun himself presented it to President Eisenhower in 1954: send
} the cheese to the Moon, and as the amount of cheese grew, remove parts
} of the Moon and send them into the Sun. Through a crash program far
} surpassing the legendary Manhattan Project, a fleet of spaceships,
} designed to resemble the popular conception of flying saucers so that
} anyone seeing one would think it an alient craft, began making Lunar
} trips within the year. Untold tons of green cheese were loaded aboard
} the atomic saucers and sent to the Moon, and as the cheese accumulated,
} fleets of earth-moving -- or rather Moomoving -- equipment were sent up
} as well, to bulldoze the Moon into chunks that could be sent hurtling
} off towards the Sun.
}
} Oh, it took work, and bribery, and swearings to secrecy. Nobody but a
} few thousand incredibly loyal government employees knew about Project
} Cheddar, as it was called, and when in 1957 the Soviet Union launched
} its pitiful little Sputnik I, it was a sore trial to the men and women
} who were shipping untold tons of green cheese to the Moon, and scooping
} out untold tons of Moon rock and hurling it towards the Sun with
} solar-powered mass-drivers. Thousands of scientists had to be bribed
} or silenced; many were replaced by surgicallaltered doubles --
} admittedly, a dark page in an otherwise glorious endeavour.
}
} You can see that the entire U. S. space program is a coverup. Who
} would suspect that vast amounts of surplus cheese were being shipped
} into space, if all he saw were such pitiful efforts? The Apollo moon
} landings took place on some of the few remaining patches of original
} moonrock -- just beyond camera range were great false moonscapes
} sculpted with care out of cheese.
}
} Anyhow, during the 1980s, the Moon's last sections of rock were
} entirely replaced with green cheese. Why do you think that the
} government started giving away cheese then? Note that the altered Moon
} has about the same mass as the old, because the cheese dehydrated in
} vacuum and compacted to rocky hardness and density under its own weight
} -- hence there's been little change in the Lunar tides here on Earth.
}
} The documents pertaining to all this are so secret that you'll never
} see them under the Freedom of Information Act, so don't even try. The
} old nuclear-powered saucers are now considered unsafe, and are buried
} under the Nevada desert in one of those secret areas of government
} land. The Oracle can't think of how you can get any of that green
} cheese -- perhaps the senior Senator from Wisconsin would let you have
} some of his private stockpile of the "vintage" 1935, but it's not
} likely. All the excess milk nowadays gets made into the sort of yucky
} bland gluey cheese they gave away in the Eighties, and dairy-price
} support programs are being phased out.
}
} You owe the Oracle a twenty-pound wheel of five-year-old Canadian raw
} milk cheddar, and none of that lousy Black Diamond crap, understand?
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