GIP! and irrelevant mental image thing.

commodorified made me this lovely icon featuring Archie and Bush and Horatio, and clearly I am going to have to post - lots - about Hornblower so that I will have the maximum number of excuses to use it. You understand, I'm sure.

And on a completely unrelated note, last night in between fiddling around getting "Passing" ready to post, I wound up adding a bunch of tracks to my playlist, including - quite innocently! not thinking of the ramifications! - "I Got You" by the Split Enz. It had probably been literally years since I had listened to the song. And yet--there I was, lying in bed, when it came up, and I remembered, much too late, that this song is inextricably linked to my mental image of Aral Vorkosigan singing it, drunk and barefoot and quite possibly standing on a table. The guitar he's playing sort of wavers in and out in my mind's eye. So it's been, like, six years, and it was a throwaway comment to begin with, but thanks, norabombay, thanks loads. *g*

This is what happens when you have your cultural experiences backward.

...I've just realized that watching Hornblower is making me nostalgic for--making me actively consider hunting down and rereading--David Feintuch's Midshipman's Hope.

I've gotten to the point of telling myself the first one wasn't so bad, it was just the cumulative effect of five books' worth of...

Everything goes wrong.
Hero saves the day.
Hero blames himself for everything that went wrong.
Hero thinks he's going to hell.
Lather.
Rinse.
Repeat.

...that compelled my seventeen-year-old, critical-judgement-free self to give up on the books so entirely as to sell them off.