True, you really cannot tell he is singing "The Man of La Mancha" until you get quite close to him, as his cosmonaut helmet tends to muffle the sound very effectively. Cosmonauts, you see, wear expertly designed cosmonaut helmets costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each, and pursue years of specialized and highly technical cosmonaut training just so they can wear their helmets properly. And one feature of these helmets seems to be that they can almost entirely silence the sound of the cosmonaut within singing "The Man of La Mancha".

That is not an eventuality I would have thought our lads at the Cape Canaveral would have envisioned, but they are obviously on the ball. Had I been saddled with the awesome responsibility of designing our space helmets, the effective muffling of "The Man of La Mancha" is honestly not a feature that would have occurred to me to include. That's our tax dollars at work, and splendidly, too, I might add.

I would expect them to try and devise a helmet that would muffle the sounds of, say, the Vanity 6 or some other ubiquitous pop sensation, but to think that they had the foresight to ensure against even show tunes of the general era of "The Man of La Mancha" is really quite astounding. See, that is where the mathematics comes in, and if you want to be a cosmonaut you have to have loads of mathematics. They can, today, mathematically plot a direct path from the Vanity 6 to show tunes of the general era of "The Man of La Mancha", and they use huge great supercomputers plotting away, day and night, to ensure against these possibilities. That's for the interest of public safety, and you can't fault them for that. I wouldn't be at all surprised that if the cosmonaut in my garden were to suddenly stop singing "The Man of La Mancha" and switch to a slower, more introspective number like "Send In the Clowns", I wouldn't be at all surprised to find him still just as muffled. That's likely to be a huge growth industry in the coming years, the muffling of cosmonauts.

If, someday, I should procreate (should I? I really don't know) I will tell my progeny as they sit upon my bouncing knee, asking for fatherly guidance, I shall tell them "Cosmonaut muffling. There's a sound career choice for you. A talented cosmonaut muffler will always be in great demand."
S1a(5)