Chapter 1: Section 1: Page 3: Line 8

When the ship reached cruising altitude, those features left behind on the ground having now dwindled to all but microscopic size, Randolph St. Cosmo, the ship commander, announced, "Now secure the Special Sky Detail," and the boys, each dressed neatly in the summer uniform of red-and-white-striped blazer and trousers of sky blue, spiritedly complied.

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There was a time when I would dissect a character's name until there was nothing left but useless, bloody, unrecognizable parts. But that was before I began reading Thomas Pynchon novels (okay, fine. I still did it after reading The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon but I definitely stopped a few months ago after reading Gravity's Rainbow). Pynchon comes up with some crazy names, right?! Not that I think he doesn't put any thought into those names; I just began to see the benefit of letting the names live and breathe instead of chopping them into mince meat. Take the name Randolph St. Cosmo! Maybe it's a puzzle to be solved but even if I'm incapable of solving that puzzle (or any puzzle, really. Games magazine won't be advertising that I subscribed to their magazine for years as teenager), it still tells a story. It's grandiose! It's majestic! It's the kind of name the leader of a celebrated kids' club would have! A kid with a name like that would be the kid I'd want to make friends with at lunch! After the other kids were done beating him up and taking his lunch money, of course. I wouldn't want to get caught up in the back blast of his "I'm a total nerd" aura. "Don't stand out" was my total personality in elementary school!

Once in the sky, everything on the ground has shrunk to microscopic size. That either means it's beyond notice now and everything important is happening on the ship. Or it could mean that the best way to scrutinize and examine the every day life of every day people is from on high. Sometimes you get conflicting messages from the subtext! It might be helpful if I knew what the "Special Sky Detail" was but it remains a mystery at this time.

What could the Special Sky Detail mean?! Is it a banner? Or an experiment? Is it a task that they all trained to undergo while in the sky? Probably so they don't crash! It's possible it's just some standard ship lingo that doesn't mean anything even though every word is capitalized and it begins with "Special."

If you didn't get the message that these boys were a patriotic lot from the previous sentence that described the bunting as patriotic (I mean, did you immediately fall asleep after you began reading this book? We're not even ten sentences in yet!), you might notice the Chums of Chance summer uniforms here and think, "Hey! Those are the same colors as the Norwegian flag!" If you did think that, you're both smarter and dumber than I am!

I imagine they all look like Stripesy from DC Comics except with short pants (being that it's the summer uniform!).