I had a dream that there existed a thing called a “shaving satellite”. Common wisdom held that these things existed in the 1930s and that it was relatively easy to get access to one. But… what IS a shaving satellite? Conventional wisdom held that it was a satellite in orbit around Earth that helped you shave. You mean, you don’t have one? I mean, I don’t have one, but still…

Everybody thought they were common, but nobody seemed to have one themselves. When pressed, people were not even exactly clear on what they were or how they would help you shave. Did they deliver soap or water from outer space, for example?

Well, I was determined to find out, because if they were indeed so cheap and common, then maybe I could get in on the next shipment of them to space, but instead of a shaving satellite, I’d slip in a satellite with a camera and some cool communications equipment. That’d be hella tight. It’d be a lot easier to send this up than to send up a satellite in the normal way, which was highly expensive.

So I looked up shaving satellites on wikipedia. Huh. No entry. I looked it up on google. Huh. Nothing relevant. So I started asking around. “Hey, y’know shaving satellites,” I’d say to everybody I was acquainted with. “Yeah, of course,” they’d say. “What are they and how do you get one?” “Uh… I don’t know.”

Well, in point of fact, neither me nor anyone I knew could come up with any written record of shaving satellites at all. Not even a snopes article saying they didn’t exist.

I guess this is just one of life’s mysteries.

In “unrelated” news, I recently buzzed my hair off.