Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

This is the moon.

Have I mentioned how much I adore the zoom on my camera?

It's Theme Thursday you see, and after last week's limp effort, I have been thinking about how I might redeem myself.

Then I clicked on the topic and discover that it was BUTTON.

We've been hearing a lot about the moon in the past couple of weeks. Apparently some fellas went up there and played golf and what-not forty-odd years ago. The desire to get to the moon, however, was not simply about enhancing opportunities for Meg and Mog titles and skirting local planning by-laws in the construction of new and innovative golf courses.

No, all of your Sputniks, "One small steps" and freeze dried ice cream was about one thing, and one thing only:

MAD

Now, I don't mean mad in terms of "bloke breaks record for number of scorpions he can get up his bum", no I mean MAD as in Mutual assured destruction.

When I was a young man you see, there was a lot of talk about the type of man that had his finger on the BUTTON. First it was Reagan and Brezhnev. Then it was Reagan and Andropov. He dropped off pretty quickly, and we started worrying about Reagan and Chernenko (for about five minutes) before the chubby bloke with the map of Africa in his head got in and we moved in a whole other direction.

Of course, Australians weren't important enough to have a BUTTON, so we relied on fearing a bloke previously best known for playing make-believe with a chimpanzee and a string of decrepit and dying Ruskies for our fear. [Times were 'ard, I know.]

MAD was an ingenious little idea whereby you build more and more and deadlier and deadlier and bigger and bigger and sneakier and sneakier nuclear bombs (remember them?) in the interests of PEACE.

MAD, you say?

You see, the theory rests on the notion if each side of the fence has enough bombs to destroy the other side, that either side, if attacked, would be able to retaliate with equal or greater force. The only possible outcome would be an immediate escalation that would resulting in both combatants' - and every other bugger and his dog - total and assured destruction.

GENIUS!

Build more bombs, get less war. That's how she went.

Then, seemingly all of the sudden, we stopped thinking about fingers on Buttons and started talking more about Michael Jackson, David Beckham's new haircut and something to do with a hotel in Paris.

Sometimes I miss the Cold War.