The Lonely Pelican

You know how I have books just thrown strategically all around the house so I can pick them up wherever I am and fill my noggin with the interesting thoughts that make me so special. So yesterday I read parts of two different books, one a... oh, let's call it an "impressionisitic literary collage"... and the other a crime thriller. And they both mentioned Gogol! You can imagine how I ran around the house waving my hands in the air. Imagine it, I said! But I don't care when a book has Gogol in it. I only care when a book has an owl in it. And you'll say this is cheating, but while reading about Mary Sidney in that Million Dollar Book Club selection, I grew interested in how she translated the Psalms into rhymed English poetry, finishing a project begun by her famous brother Philip Sidney, who had died when... oh, I can't remember. I think he forgot to put armor on his knees when he went into battle? Don't quote me on that! You can look it up and tell me how wrong I am. So, as I say, you'll call it cheating, because I went in knowing that the one psalm I love to babble about all the time has an owl in it. The one that in my King James Bible goes "I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert." Well! In the Sidney version it goes "And so I bray and howl,/ As use to howl and bray/ The lonely pelican and desert owl,/ Like whom I languish long the day."