Space Patrol
Looking at my Elvis concoction, I was reminded of a gimmick used on my favorite childhood radio (and later TV) show. When you bought Wheat Chex or Rice Chex, you could get funny little black and white negative images printed on cardboard. You’d stare at the reversed image of Commander Buzz Corey or his Gabby Hayes inspired sidekick Cadet Happy, focusing on the “x” in the middle, then put down the card and see a positive image of it floating across the air in the direction of your dominant eye.
Later, I learned these lingering ghosts were called negative after images. I think Don Herbert, Mr. Wizard, told us about that in one of his books about Science, one that also explained how to make flour explode and boil water with an ice cube (I singed my eyebrows and got second degree burns on my hand). There are also positive after images, which only last for 100 milliseconds or so, not nearly long enough to sell breakfast cereal.
One time, I mailed in a couple of box tops from this wretched cereal that I couldn’t stand, taped a pair of quarters in the circles outlined on the cut-off coupon, and mailed it in to buy a Space Patrol walkie-talkie. It turned out to be a sexed-up tin can telephone, but I didn’t know that then. It finally came (on the show, Buzz Corey was using his with increasing regularity, reporting important information such as the incredible darkness in Jupiter’s space station - possibly being caused by “all 12 moons eclipsing the planet at the same time" – this, in contemporary time, being nearly 500 years since Columbus conned a bunch of silly natives in Jamaica into giving food to his crew or he’d let a dragon eat the moon, because astronomy had already advanced that much). I was psyched for weeks. If only I had the Space Patrol walkie-talkie, I could observe great galactic phenomena like Buzz Corey routinely reported to the hopelessly clueless, but useful in a pinch, Cadet Happy.
My Cadet Happy was my neighbor Leslie, who was really much smarter than I. He realized right away that I’d been conned out of 50 cents for 50 feet of string and a couple of cheesy walkie-talkie shaped pieces of cheap plastic, but we went outside to play anyway. I was probably his Smiley Burnette. We stretched out the string. Unfortunately, it was windy and it immediately got snagged on some pine trees. It also got twisted as we tried to rewind it - before I had the chance to tell him that the Arcturians had launched a suspicious craft headed for our moon base, one that I suspected might have hostile intent.
I was shattered. The string was a twisted gnarled mess. We went inside for advice from our crew’s Senior Technical Advisor, Sister Bubbles. She suggested that we install a new 50-foot piece of kite string. I objected, “No, I’m sorry, we can’t do that – this is special Space Patrol string. Earth string won’t cut it.”
Realizing the seriousness of this breakdown in Intergalactic Communications, she submitted her backup plan, drawing on the ancient wisdom of Alexander The Great.
“Cut out the knots, then tie the string back together,” she proposed.
Once again, I was suspicious. I didn’t believe she had seen enough of either Space Patrol or Mr. Wizard to realize how much this suggestion violated the Cadets’ Directive of Space Patrol String Inviolability. “Can’t do it,” I said, “the communication lines are too precious to cut – and the knots will impede the flow of critical information.”
“No,” she patiently explained, “sound flows through the string better than through air because it is more dense than air. Knots in the string will be even more dense than the rest of the Space Patrol String, netting an improved signal integrity.”
Shaking my head, I knew I had to agree with this plan. Cadet Happy concurred. She knew her science all right.
After that, I never regretted having selected her as our crew’s Senior Technical Advisor over Mr. Wizard.
7:58:02 PM 
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