The dump turned out to be slightly disappointing. Apart from the faintly creepy, exciting aura of death and typhus surrounding the goods it was pretty much like any old op shop, and even those elements were not as foreign to the second-hand process as one might wish.
Spotlight, on the other hand, was as exciting as any place is when one has a gift card to spend in it. I ended up buying several hmm-that-should-be-enough quantities of tulle, chocolate brown pinstriped fabric and slippery cream-coloured stuff in order to construct a semi-steampunk skirt and petticoat combo. It’ll be a sort of rockabilly-Victorian-hints-of-gothic-Lolita crossover object… I will be very interested in the result.
Helpdesk Man is off work for a few days and home due to a cancelled conference, so today we dropped the snortlepig off with his sister, who happens to be pregnant, and went out for lunch. I think we may have put said sister-in-law off parenthood for life: the pig apparently spent most of the visit wailing until she fell asleep on SIL’s knee, and when we came to pick her up SIL was pacing the driveway with the pig in a sling, waiting for us. Oops.
So anyway, do any of my Gentle Readers have a handle on the articles of war? ‘Cause I was pondering tonight with Helpdesk Man the ethics of assassinating Hitler - back in the day, obviously - and it came up. Is it considered kosher for a civilian to kill a non-civilian in a time of war? Say, if one were a good English Mrs Miniver type and Hitler turned up at your door wanting bacon and eggs: would it be considered your civic duty to clobber him with a frying pan, or would you be arrested (however half-heartedly) for murder if you did? I understand that military folk killing civilians is frowned on, obviously, but the other way round? It seems vaguely like terrorism to have non-military people killing military ones, but then, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad thing, innit. At least not in the case of Hitler. But then there are a lot of things which only seem to become ethical when applied to Hitler, and that is perhaps problematic. And what if it wasn’t Hitler himself, but a fresh-faced wet-behind-the-ears German soldier? Should he go into battle expecting housewives or farmers to shoot at him unexpectedly from behind mangold-wurzels?
Tricky thing, war. Still, a lot of very good songs came out of it.
Miriam Says: