Misfits 7th grade

Today as I was driving home from my student teaching (I teach and observe a 7th grade ELA class at Murchison two days a week), the Misfits song "I Turned Into a Martian" came on the ol' shuffle. As I was listening to the song's main chorus line, "I turned into a martian/whoa oh oh/I can't even recall my name," I made an interesting connection to a Ray Bradbury story the kids were reading on Monday titled "Their Eyes Were Dark but Shining."

It's a short little story of a family that moves to Mars in the future. Apparently they are a part of a colonization project, as only several hundred earthlings have made the trip. The father seems reticent to stay on Mars permanently, what with the dust and the sight of looming, ancient ghost towns of Martians past bothering him, but is calmed by the fact that he can, at a whim's notice, hitch a rocket back to Earth. Then suddenly news hits the town that NYC has been destroyed by nuclear bombs, and that they are now all stranded on Mars for a very long time.

Eventually the father awakes at night speaking a weird word. He calls his local anthropologist (random) and asks him what it means. "It's Martian for 'Earth','' the anthropologist says. Then the father's son Dan wants to be called Lyrrtl or something. As you can expect the town slowly becomes Martians, and they move away from the Earth colony and rename all the physical features of Mars Martian names instead of the old American names they adopted such as Roosevelt Mountains, and Rockefeller Plauteau. In the end, all traces of their former human lives are gone, and the Earthlings don't even notice that such a change has occurred. The story ends with some soldiers coming to Mars from Earth on a rescue mission. They find the Earth town empty, and figure Martians killed all the settlers.

Danzig sure is a nerd.