Finally, my summer of smutty reading paid off. Pre-driving/being old enough to get a real job I spent the bulk of my summers babysitting. One such gig sired a particularly -- shall we say: steamy -- summer...
The kid was spoiled and the mom said that it was a-okay for her to spend her days watching Nickelodeon if that's what she wanted to do.
"Feel free to read any of these while you're sitting around," the mom said -- kicking a cardboard box. (Thereafter referred to as: the box of sin.)
Now, we aren't talking 50 shades of anything... not even like 10 shades of anything... Just a bunch of ridiculous "historic" romances (that, for the record, made the days go fast).
One of the books was The Key to Rebecca -- about espionage and the use of codes during WWII.
The other day after knitting, our favorite teacher asked if we had read the articles that had been in The Times about the carrier pigeon from WWII whose remains had been found in a chimney -- with a code still attached to his wee skeleton leg! Everything about this was so up the kids' respective alleys. We've read I-don't-know-how-much about the carrier pigeons, about the medals given to animals during the war (we even visited the memorial that's in London), etc. I mean -- the combination of animals (birds even!) with war history -- is right up there with peanut butter and chocolate.
She told us that there are two articles -- there had to be a followup because the code cannot be decrypted -- they think it might be one of those used during the war that required having a "key." And HERE is where my thorough background knowledge on such keys kicked in. If you're wondering what it feels like to tout yourself as an expert based on knowledge gained from a romance novel, I can tell you: kind of awesome. Kind of in the same way that the mom in So I Married an Axe Murderer is awesome when she refers to The Weekly World News as "the paper." That's a fact.
So today we read the two articles (here and here) -- from an actual paper -- and while the kiddos wrote up little summaries I used the BFG to create a code and write a note to them. They had to work together to figure out how to crack the code, and then I explained (because remember -- I'm an expert) how it was only possible because they knew the exact book -- the exact edition of the book -- to use.
Goes to show: no knowledge gained is ever wasted.
