There’s been a really cool image floating around various places on the InterWebs the last couple of days… I’ve seen it on Facebook and Tumblr, and when it turned up on one of my essential daily blog reads,  Space: 1970, I decided to share it here as well. And here it is:

Ah, yes, that’s my girl… the Starship Enterprise, the original Enterprise from the classic 1960s television series… no bloody A, B, C, D, or Abrams-Trek versions, to paraphrase the irascible Mr. Scott. I managed to backtrace this photo to its original source here, a collection of photos from a holiday light parade held in East Peoria, Illinois, a year ago. The album highlights a number of other really cool entries — what would you even call these things? They’re not exactly “floats,” are they? — including an X-wing, a space shuttle, and a ‘57 Chevy, but I think this one is the most realistically evocative of what it’s supposed to be.

Incidentally, if you’ve never been to one of these light parades, they’re really a lot of fun… magical, in their way. And this is coming from someone who’s grown really sour on traditional daylight parades in his curmudgeonly years. One of these days, I ought to scan some old snapshots I’ve got of my ’63 Ford Galaxie dressed up as the RMS Titanic, festooned with lights in her “rigging,” cruising through a light parade in Layton, Utah. Now that’s quite a story…