If you're happy and you know it ...

``Comb your pants.''

That's sure what it sounded like was playing on the young-children's-clothes-and-toys-and-stuff store, on the standard mall store speaker with adults pretending to be children singing loudly. I know it can't be, though; that just doesn't make any sense. It has to have been ``clap your hands.'' But I listened, closely once I decoded the sounds that way, and got a bottle of root beer so I could listen longer without seeming to be lingering around a young children's clothes-and-toys-and-stuff store. I tried mighty hard to get the vowels to something plausible and the consonants attached to the right words.

And every time I heard it it sounded like ``If you're happy and you know it comb your pants.''

A Toys R Us seemed to be playing the Mystery Science Theater 3000 tune ``We're A Danger To Ourselves And Others,'' but I must have misunderstood it. I did find some Space Adventure toys including a handsome Saturn V, Apollo Command/Service Module and Lunar Module, Lunar Rover, Space Shuttle Generic, Hubble Telescope, and Mir Space Station toys. They're not accurate in detail, but are quite cheap, fine toys, and how many Soyuz capsules or lunar rovers do you have?

I can't have heard those songs right.

Trivia: During Gemini IV, commander Jim McDivitt lost two kilograms; spacewalker Ed White lost four. Source: On the Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini, Barton C Hacker and James M Grimwood, NASA SP-4203.

Currently Reading: Beyond the Quartic Equation, R Bruce King.