01 August 2009August 2, 2009
A gaggle of birds
You can’t really call them a “flock.”
Hanging out at the top of the tree down the hill.
Click on the photo for a closer look!
August 1, 2009
July 30, 2009
Tugs helping APL container ship into port this AM.
The engine(s) don’t seem to be working. Tugs are guiding the ship into the Port of Oakland.
July 21, 2009
Rachel Maddow: "we regret the errors"
If you don’t watch Rachel Maddow, at least occasionally, you should. I watch her whenever I’m in a hotel that carries MSNBC and I watch her over the Web. (Our dirt-cheap cable subscription does not include MSNBC.)
Last week Maddow and Pat Buchanan got into a brouhaha over Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court and affirmative action, which Maddow supports but Buchanan does not.
Here is a snippet where Maddow corrects some of the “facts” presented by Buchanan during the debate.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
The original debate is here:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
July 18, 2009
Adiós, Cuauhtémoc
We heard the horn blast from our spots at the dining table where we were reading the Saturday paper. We heard another and then a third. What idiot was in the way and not moving?
We opened the doors facing the water and saw the Jeremiah O’Brien and the fireboats and sailboats and a scull and some kayaks. … And then we saw the big attraction (and where the horn blasts had originated). The tugs were helping maneuver the Cuauhtémoc out of her berth as she headed out for further adventures.
I dashed up the stairs with my camera and shot, oh, fifty or sixty shots of the sailing ship, the old WW2 ship, and the sailboats from the deck.
Note the lines of young sailors at the top of the sails. No automated sail setting on the Cuauhtémoc, just young sailors with no fear of heights, awaiting the Captain’s orders.
……………………………
The Bay is filled with boats of all sorts and sizes today from the Cuauhtémoc to the one-person kayaks. The fireboats are shooting their water cannon. The sun is shining and hark! there’s fog up there in the north toward Vallejo.
Lovely.
July 13, 2009
July 10, 2009
one out of every three cigarettes in the world is smoked in China
I’d made a note a year or so ago to check an interesting factoid I’d come across. Was it true?
[SFC 26 Jun 2008] article by Tamara Straus:
one out of every three cigarettes in the world is smoked in China
Really?
Well.
Yes!
Here are WHO/Western Pacific Region-Smoking Statistics from 2002.
Among the other stats given:
# Smoking will kill about a third of all young Chinese men alive (under 30 years).
# About 3,000 people die every day in China due to smoking.
# There are more than 300 million Chinese smokers – more than the entire US population. They consume an estimated 1.7 trillion cigarettes per year – or 3 million cigarettes every minute.
WHO. Trusted source. More health-related information available on the site.
I’ve never had a problem with drugs, only with policemen.
Keith Richards.
Jessica Pallington West has a book out, What Would Keith Richards Do? Daily Affirmations From a Rock and Roll Survivor, from whence the title gem came.
Amazon info but no free reads inside the book. Alas.
Plimsoll – trivia for the day
Are plimsoll shoes related to the Plimsoll line on a commercial ship?
Yes, indeedy.
A plimsoll shoe or simply plimsoll is a type of athletic shoe with a canvas upper and rubber sole, developed as beachwear in the 1830s by the Liverpool Rubber Company (later to become Dunlop). The shoe was originally, and often still is in parts of the UK, called a ‘sand shoe’ and acquired the nickname ‘plimsoll’ in the 1870s. This name derived, according to Nicholette Jones’ book “The Plimsoll Sensation” because the colored horizontal band joining the upper to the sole resembled the Plimsoll line on a ship’s hull, or because, just like the Plimsoll line on a ship, if water got above the line of the rubber sole, the wearer would get wet.
We’d been looking at an incoming container ship and I was wondering if the plimsoll shoe got its name because of the resemblance of the demarcation between the shoe’s rubber sole and canvas upper and the Plimsoll line on the ship.
The Web is a wonder.