Reach For The Sky - Part Two

This is a follow up to the Mixed Meters post Reach For The Sky where I documented a magnificent local steeple - or is it a spire. Either way I started collecting more pictures of long thin things which point upwards - on churches, public buildings and private homes.




Most of these pictures were taken in Pasadena, although Altadena and Marina del Rey California are represented too.

The final photo was taken by my friends Jim, Marilynn and Robert Hildebrandt in London, England. They wondered what this amazing gilded spire or steeple might really be.

The correct answer, provided by the genuine Irishman Spike Milligan, comedian, Python-inspirer and supposed author of the supposed World's Funniest Joke, is "a rocket ship to the moon".

Click here to hear the Goon Show entitled The First Albert Memorial to the Moon. (This is a temporary link.) Click here to read a transcription of the script.

The Goon Shows were English radio comedies of the 1950s, written by Milligan and acted by him with the assistance of actor Peter Sellers, singer Harry Secombe, singer/pianist Ray Ellington, harmonica-ist Max Geldray plus a cast of one or two more. Silly and nonsensical when first broadcast, the subsequent fifty years have added a patina of insouciant surrealism which will make anyone, especially an American, scratch their head and grab a thin thing with lumps on.

All the pictures enlarge when clicked.

Inspiring Tags: steeple. . . spire. . . architecture. . . Spike Milligan. . . Goon Show. . . Albert Memorial