I’m a big fan of The Planetary Society, in particular the blog run by Emily Lakdawalla and the weekly radio show hosted by Mat Kaplan. I listen to the radio show religiously every week (on WREK and online) for their great interviews with various scientists and other hotshots in the world of planetary exploration. The Planetary Society has been around for 30 years, fighting the good fight in Washington DC trying to protect funding for real science at NASA and doing lots of really good science outreach. Most people know who Bill Nye The Science Guy is, but they probably don’t know that he has been deeply involved with The Planetary Society for many years and recently became the CEO of the organization.
At the end of every show they have a quick trivia contest every week and occasionally, if the prize is good, I’ll enter it but I’ve never won. They typically receive plenty of correct entries, and simply resort to chance (via the random.org random number generator) to determine who gets the prize.
I won! Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Nye is now on my cell phone voicemail greeting. Have a listen:
Pretty freaking great, huh?
The trivia question was to identify the song that begins with the lines, “We had a lot of luck on Venus / We always had a ball on Mars.” I spent way too much time as a young teenager listening to my cousin Stefan’s record collection to let that one pass — it’s Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin”. Here’s a live performance they did in 1973. Uncredited in this performance: cocaine.
You can listen to the whole radio show here, and at the 25 minute point you’ll hear how I cracked up the radio hosts with my smartass comments. Of course you should listen to the whole show for lots more info, including their great coverage of space exploration topics, in this case the massive new telescope array in Chile that started coming online last year. And they name-dropped WREK for me!
I got to provide the script, which I’ll note here:
Hello! This is Bill Nye the Science Guy, CEO of the Planetary Society, and you’ve reached the voicemail of Chris Campbell. Whether it’s evangelizing about electric vehicles, or proselytizing for planetary exploration, or simply building satellite communications systems, Chris is apparently too busy changing the world* to bother answering his own phone. Please leave a message and he’ll get back to you shortly!
(* “Let’s change the world” is Bill’s tagline — he uses it every time he speaks.)
It’s a major award!