This headline is verbatim the greeting I used to give a friend of mine in San Jose.
I used to travel to the Bay Area for a week every month or so for about 8 years in my other job. The husband of a woman I worked with there worked at The Ames NASA research facility at Moffet field. His profession was an aluminum worker and model maker.
He had a solid aluminum model of the space shuttle that he built that was used in wind tunnel testing at Ames when they were designing the space shuttle. I coveted that model, but he would never give it to me. His wife would tell me she wanted it out of the house because she hated it and always kidded that she would slip it out the back door to me.
He took me on a couple of insider tours of the Ames facility including the wind tunnel and the DC-8 that NASA used for research. It was chock full of scientific apparatus and weird portals.
Anyway, back to FiS: One of the many times I went to their house for dinner he was showing me a habitat he had built for frogs that had gone on a space shuttle mission. They gave it to him after the mission. He proudly showed me the feeding apparatus, the cleaning apparatus, etc. Then we sat down and watched a video tape of weightless frogs on the shuttle in his habitat. He was so proud of it -- that's all he talked about at dinner and all evening. Though his exuberance and enthusiasm about that frog habitat was genuine, it was hilarious.
After that, every time I saw him, my greeting was "FROGS IN SPACE!" with my palm towards him and my fingers flexing like a weightless frog. It was a standard joke.
He died suddenly at work of heart failure a few years ago. His wife gave me that solid aluminum shuttle I always had my eye on. It sits in my library room at home. I also have a copy if the Frogs in Space video we watched that night.
Thanks for the flashback here, Zat
