All Change!

The Navy has named a Littoral Combat Ship after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Appropriately, given her anti-gun beliefs, the ship's main provision for breaking things and killing people seems to be through the use of missiles, rather than guns.

Also, I love that the targetting radar on this type of ship is called "Sea Giraffe".

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Guy caught stealing gold coins by hiding them up his butt is sentenced by... Judge Doody!

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Monday, HM the Queen will have reigned for 65 years, and will celebrate her Sapphire Jubilee. Only Victoria came even close to that.

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I bought a new reading lamp for use in bed. It's a black, very practical and old-fashioned 1950s-style gooseneck design that replaces the stylish Italian modern python^1 that I've used for some years now. When I picked it out at the store, I got this huge surge of nostalgia - it resembles my first reading lamp, which was a similar black gooseneck that my mother handed down to me when she replaced it with a newer one. I was perhaps seven or eight at the time, and well-begun in the general family tradition of reading in bed.

Prior to that, I think I'd used a little nightstand lamp, but I really don't recall much about it. The gooseneck is distinct in my memory, though. There's something deeply affecting about being safely tucked-in, awake in this little pool of light with one's book, and the room fading out into darkness beyond. I'm finding of late as well that there's something evocative about a paper book as well. I still like my Kindle books, but I'm buying paper ones once more.

^1 The python's switch is giving out. I'm prolly going to replace it, and keep on using the lamp in some capacity, as I just plain like the way it looks.

The Wendy Bird

Oh, yes! Someone else was deeply impressed by "Peter and Wendy".

“When you play at it by day with the chairs and tablecloth, it is not in the least alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very nearly real.”

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Victorian and Edwardian children's literature ^1 has always spoken to me, in ways that other genres just can't. Sometimes horrifying, sometimes unfathomably weird, often disturbing in ways that were difficult for a child to analyze (and that your mind just kept coming back to to pick at like a scab), and almost always (even in the silliest moments) emotionally impactful and sincere in ways that modern works just aren't.

I recall as a child the school librarian so earnestly trying interest us all in socially-realistic novels about inner-city kids from dysfunctional families getting addicted to drugs, etc, but I was always more interested in Edith Nesbit or George McDonald.

^1 I generally treat the label as including CS Lewis, for all that he's one of the very late (and one of the most powerful) exemplars of that sensibility.