IGY explained

If you weren't keeping up to date with My Weekly Reader back in 1958, you may have been puzzled by Donald Fagen's 1982 hit "I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)".  Fagen's first post-Steely Dan solo album, "The Nightfly",  also featured a song about a party in a fallout shelter.  You shouldn't be surprised to learn that "The Nightfly" is still played frequently here at South of 5 and 20.

Greg Sullivan relates 1982's "I.G.Y." to a look back at 2010 New Year's predictions.   He hits the shot from NBA territory:

The IGY was the International Geophysical Year, a kind of nebulous, let's all be scientific together exercise from 1957 to 1958. It hoped that if we assembled all the guys who operated slide rules (then) like we text-message with our thumbs (now), it would function as an “apolitical, non-nationalistic, scientifically oriented entity,” and make a great leap forward in our understanding of the earth and its atmosphere.

Oh well. We’ve gone off the graphite and glitter rails over the earth and its atmosphere since then, but I sleep better knowing that after eighteen months of the scientific and diplomatic version of a college dorm room bull session, the governments of Argentina, Australia Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the USSR, Great Britain and the United States of America solemnly declared they wouldn't put nuclear weapons in Antarctica. Along those lines, I’ve also promised my wife not to get a job giving bikini waxes at the Playboy mansion.

Of course Donald Fagen didn’t mention that before the 90 minutes of undersea rail time, there’d be an additional 90 minutes of groping by a TSA employee holding the same credentials as a sanitation worker and wearing the same rubber gloves they used to frisk a leper ten minutes before. Likewise, Fagen must be forgiven for incorrectly envisioning the ascendance of a kind of robot to make all the big decisions for us. After all, Al Gore only lost the election by a few votes.

You should read Greg's entire post at at Right Network.  

Greg's experiences while supporting his family in rural Maine will sound familiar to anyone living in this area, so go visit his personal blog:  Sippican Cottage.