God job young David was able to confirm CHar's answer before having to suffer hospital again
Now here is a doozy of a trivia question, plus some ambling so please bear with me for a while.
Whilst playing the Reno DVD I thought I detected a confusion in Gord's rendering of his lyrics for my most preferred Gordsong,which it has been for 8 years now,(so it almost ranks as my all-time favo(u)rite), the highly evocative "Restless"
To my mind the lyrics have a pair of brilliant images
borrowing the images used by Tom in his vidstory interpretation
An Old engine
An old schooner:And I love the idea of one flying down a sky .. but see below!!
and even its scrimshaw
(actually of the USS Constitution)as used in Tom's fantastic vidstory
USS Constitution in Boston Harbo(ur) last August
and the varying lines (that differ from verse to verse) that Gord wrote to illustrate those images are of course priceless
__________________________________________________ ___________________________
Ok here is the question . to answer it initially do NOT either play the recording or google or consult a lyrics page.
In the song which wordor words does Gord associate with the two main images
- the train and its road
- the old schooner and its flight....
choose from
- ironcast
- ironclad
- overcast
OK once you have decided go to either
http://www.lightfoot.ca/restless.htm or
http://gordonlightfoot.com/Lyrics/Restless.txt
and if like me you might find that the correct answers just might surprise you
Whilst on this tack (note a nautical theme begorrah!)
I have a sneeking suspicion that Gord also confused a "schooner" with a "clipper"
m evidence:-
pre War Pan Am Clipper Flying Cloud a Boeing 307, now preserved in washington DC,together with the prototype Boeing 707 known as "dash-80" that once looped the loop:-
all subsequent Pan Am airliners
were christened ""Clippers"
but not this early Boeing 314
flying boat.. ah now we're getting somewhere
The Yankee Clipper inaugurated the world's first scheduled transatlantic service before the war
followed post war by the mighty Boeing 377 Stratocruiser tht was derived from the B29 that dropped the first two atomic
bombs dontcha know
one of Pan Am's 29 Stratocruisers over Tower Bridge London one of the 29 was "Clipper Flying Cloud"
Clipper Flying Cloud being maintained in Miami
and one of their Boeing 747 "jumbos"
all named after a real "flying ship"
pan am names info mostly from a great site:-
http://www.panamair.org/aircraft/clippernames.htm
Poor old Pan Am they never really recovered from the Lockerbie disaster did they?
and the original waterborne boat
as the latter is I submit much more likely to be seen flying down anywhere whether iron-cast or -clad!!!!
To complete this disertation I found on the inevitable wiki at:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Cloud
details of the early 1851 voyage by the original ship
"In the early days of the California Gold Rush, it took more than 200 days for a ship to travel from New York to San
Francisco, a voyage of more than 16,000 miles. The Flying Cloud's more-than-halving that time (only 89 days) was a headline-
grabbing world record that the ship itself beat three years later, setting a record that lasted for 136 years"
I trust that if you read all this that you learnt something now for comments on Restless's lyrics
Dr Sir John FOwles Bt