As I understand it, the ancestors of whales had first crack at coming up out of the ocean but took a look around and went back in the water. "Support your own weight? Suckers!" I thought of that the other day as I was leaning on a bookcase way out over our stairs and felt a rib sort of crack. I was replacing the light fixture over the stairs, and it looks nice, so I guess there's trade-offs in everything. I may have broken a rib replacing a light fixture, but the whale would have been electrocuted.
Speaking of stairs, I just reread the terrifying Nancy Drew mystery, The Hidden Staircase. It was the original 1930 version, which, based on the summary has very little to do with the dumbed down 1959 version. I'm not sure which I read originally back in about 1962, but I can report it's a lot less terrifying if you don't have an older sister spookily whispering, "hidden staircase," every time you go down in the dark unfinished basement to fetch a can of corn.
That was about the time that John Glenn first went into space. He went up again in 1998 at age 77. The most memorable thing about the second trip is his quote that I just made up, "I've gone up and I can't fall down."
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