Why are these tiny ships defying gravity?
Because they were on a shelf in my son Nathan’s room. He went away to college and left the little Mayflower and the Cutty Sark on the shelf with a lollypop that had a real scorpion imbedded inside. 
The lollypop melted (it must be global warming) and formed a bond so strong that the folks at NASA might want to take note. Freed from its sucrose cell, the actual scorpion corpse (visible just off the starboard side of the Cutty Sark) remained intact.
Ordinarily, I would have just let it sit there gathering dust for another decade or so, but Lewis and Nathan were switching rooms and that meant that the shelves had to come down, the walls had to be spackled and painted, the furniture needed to be dismantled and schlepped back and forth across the hallway, the closets had to be cleaned out and all scorpions were evicted. I brought the shelf with the gravity-defying vessels out to the curb and in 10 minutes a car pulled up and a guy jumped out and put the shelves, the model ships and the scorpion into his car. Maybe he was from NASA.
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