For you Krazy Kat fans out there, a few online files of complete Krazy Kat cartoons at an overly didactic academic site devoted to “comic strip theory.” Skip th’ didacticism and head straight t’ th’ cartoons: “The clocks of the universe are chiming the hour of now…” — The telephone comes to Krazy Kat’s house in Coconino County — Krazy Kat finds himself under a sombrero
And a selection of color and B&W pages at Coconino world (click on “gallery”).
On my afternoon walk today, I decided to head out and cross the harbor via Pope’s Island. Just as I got in sight of the swing bridge, it began to close: the gates came down, and pretty soon the bridge started to turn so some boat could pass. I looked to see what boat it was. It was a fair-sized ship, about a hundred yards long, helped along by a tugboat. I kept walking towards the bridge, until I could read her name in white letters on the green bow: Green Spring, a ship in the Green Reefers line; you could see “Green Reefers” in big white letters on her side, and the rakish “GR” painted on her smokestack. The black and white tugboat accompanying her through the bridge, and tied to her stern, was named Jaguar. Jaguar’s skipper gave two short toots as they went through the bridge.
Once Green Spring got through the bridge, you could see Jaguar’s propellors churning up the water, stopping Green Spring’s forward motion, starting to swing the big ship’s stern over towards the Maritime Terminal dock. Jaguar tooted her whistle now and then; presumably to signal what she was going to do next, though I thought that he two ships must have communicated mostly by radio. Once Green Spring’s forward momentum was stopped, Jaguar untied from her stern and maneuvered over to her starboard side, about a third of the way up from her stern. From there, Jaguar began to nudge Green Spring’s stern around Fish Island and towards Maritime Terminal. Tiny little Jaguar pulled her, nudged her, pushed her gently back, and back, and back. Every now and then you could see the wash from Green Spring’s propellors helping Jaguar pull her backwards towards her berth.
It was more than twenty minutes from the time Green Spring passed through the bridge until she approached the dock; I stood in the sun, watching her slow stately progress over that short distance; watching Jaguar nudge and pull and ease her into her berth. A fellow walked up, unshaven, knapsack on his back, coat open, and stood beside me, also watching. He kept up an intermittent commentary, so softly I had to keep asking him to repeat himself; I think he was talking more to himself than to me. He said something about, what if she broke away and hit the bridge we were standing on? Where we stood was a little lower than Green Spring’s after deck; I had already thought briefly about what would happen if she hit us. “You know it’s gotta happen,” said the unshaven man. He went on to say something about aircraft carriers. “What’s that?” I said. “I don’t know what the Nimitz would be doing here though,” he said.
Another man, walking purposefully, paused a little ways away, watched for a few minutes. The bright late afternoon sun shone down. The longshoremen caught the heaving line, and hauled the first stern rope up onto the wharf. Once it was looped over the massive cleat on the dock, the crew of Green Spring, clad in blaze-orange jumpsuits and white hard hats, turned on the winch and pulled the slack up out of the water. The unshaven man gave up and walked away; I didn’t see the other man leave but after awhile I noticed he was gone; I stayed to watch a little longer.
Jaguar pulled her stern out a little, swinging the bow in. After two abortive tries, the longshoremen threw the heaving line back up to the crew, who sent two more stern ropes to them. Watching this, I missed them getting the first bow line tied off to the dock. By now, I had been standing there for a good forty minutes. The sun was sinking ever lower, the cold was starting to seep in. The crew started to winch the bow in towards the dock. Good: I’d seen enough; as far as I was concerned, Green Spring was safely berthed.
On my way back a half an hour later, I saw that the gangplank ran up to Green Spring’s deck, that no crewmembers stood on her deck any longer. I imagined that one or two of the ship’s officers were up at the U.S. Customs House a block from our apartment, taking care of whatever paperwork had to be taken care of; I imagined most of the crew wandering New Bedford, maybe finding a friendly bar; I imagined one crew member, unlikely as it seems, visiting the Whaling Museum to find out how mariners of the past once fared. Tomorrow, the crew will be back on deck; the semi trucks will be backed up to the loading dock next to the Maritime Terminal building, the crew will be at the ship’s cranes swinging cargo onto the dock, the forklifts driven by longshoremen will be whizzing back and forth, they will be loading the reefer trucks and one by one sending them on their various ways.
For a picture of tugboat Jaguar, visit this tugboat fan page, and scroll down almost to the bottom of the page.
Two freighters are in port today: Green Spring at the Martime International Terminal, and Sophie at the State Pier. I was walking past the vehicle exit of the State Pier, after going to look at the schooner Ernestina in the snow, when a beat-up blue van pulled up.
“Hey,” said the man driving the van, “You from that ship there?” cocking his head in the direction of Sophie.
I laughed and said, “Nope, not me.”
“Oh,” he said. He was about 60, with friendly blue eyes, and wearing a blue parka with that faintly greasy black patina that comes with hard work and long wear. “If you was from one of those ships, I was going to ask you what she’s carrying there. I used to be in the Merchant Marine, and I got curious. But now they got that up,” and he pointed to the chain link fence with the barbed wire at the top that encircles that part of the State Pier where the freight ships dock. “It’s prob’bly because of the longshoremen, they’ll steal you blind.”
He proceeded to tell me a few stories: one about longshoremen who stole from him (he showed me his state peddler’s license, which lets him sell watches and such things out of his van); another story about seeing a state cop stealing whiskey from a container that the longshoremen has broken open, “I saw him, taking it out. If I only had a camera! –I would have caught that #$%@! right there”; and then he told me one last story, saying, “You’re going to laugh your @#%$ off when you hear this.”
There used to be a Coast Guard base in New Bedford. Once in a while, at lunch time, he would stop by the Coast Guard cutters. The crews of the cutters would come out to buy their lunches from the lunch truck. “Then they would come over and buy watches and stuff off me.”
One day he pulled in and noticed there were a number of state police cars parked near the Coast Guard cutters, but he didn’t think anything of it. What he didn’t know was that there was a ship offshore dumping bales of marijuana into the ocean, and letting it drift into the harbor. The state police and the Coast Guard were watching and waiting to see who would run out and try to pick up those bales of marijuana floating out there. So he pulled up in his van, not knowing this was going on. He opened the back doors of the van, and shouted, “Hey, get your hot stuff here!”
“All of a sudden I had about a hundred guns pointed at me,” he said. “I went like this,” –he sinks down into his greasy blue parka and puts his hands up– “and I said, Whoa, whoa! They came over and a couple of them went through the whole van and saw that all I had was some things to sell, you know, all legal. When they got done I asked a trooper, What’s going on? He said, There’s this ship offshore dumping marijuana and letting it drift into the harbor. Another cop says to me, Next time, I guess you won’t say ‘Hot stuff to sell,’ will you? Jeez, I’m telling you….” He shook his head remembering it.
“The next time I came in to sell stuff to the guys in the Coast Guard, they all came out and started laughing at me,” he went on. “One of them says, ‘Ya got any hot stuff to sell?’ I said, no, no.”
Just then, the light turned green (for the third time). He put the van in gear, “Hey, nice talking with you. Take care, OK?” I told him to stay warm, and he drove off.
My partner, Carol, is a freelance writer who has specialized in issues of ecological pollution prevention, particularly issues relating to water and wastewater. Which is my roundabout introduction before I tell people that her second book is titled Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine To Grow Plants. The process of Carol writing that book proved very interesting for me; I learned more about urine than I thought I wanted to know; and we now own an Internet urinal, a female urinal, prints of old toilets, and other artifacts relating to urine. So it is that I cannot help but let you know about an upcoming cultural event here in the greater New Bedford area:
Urinetown: The Musical. The UMass Dartmouth Theatre Company presents the New England collegiate premiere of the Tony-Winning 2001 musical hit. Directed and choregraphed by Terry Berliner. On the stage of the Main Auditorium, main campus of UMass Dartmouth (patrons may park in Lots 4 & 5). December 15-18, 2005, with performances on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8pm; Sunday matinee at 2pm. Tickets are available at the UMass Pass office, at Café Arpeggio in Downtown New Bedford, and by calling (508) 999-8167.
Be there. Aloha.
I don’t usually do politics on this blog, but the war in Iraq is so much a part of all our lives that you really can’t avoid it; it’s a part of our culture now, like it or not. I have not been impressed with the shrill exchanges between the Democrats and the Republicans regarding the war, but I was impressed by Gen. Wesley Clark’s recent op-ed piece in the New York Times. Clark disagrees with both President Bush and the Democrats positions on the war:
While the Bush administration and its critics escalated the debate last week over how long our troops should stay in Iraq, I was able to see the issue through the eyes of America’s friends in the Persian Gulf region. The Arab states agree on one thing: Iran is emerging as the big winner of the American invasion, and both President Bush’s new strategy and the Democratic responses to it dangerously miss the point. It’s a devastating critique. And, unfortunately, it is correct.
The complete piece is posted on the Securing America blog, along with questions for Clark, and Clark’s responses to those questions.
There’s a cultural point in all this, too: it feels to me as if Americans of all political persuasions are increasingly isolating themselves from how other countries perceive America. I cannot think that’s a good thing. I believe Gen. Clark offers us a useful new, non-isolationist, direction for American discussions of our place in the world.
I also note in passing that religious liberals have a long history of a bias towards taking an international perspective, which is part of our religious understanding that all human beings are linked beyond the narrow confines of national identity. We used to call it “world brotherhood”; now we call it “the interconnected web.”
Thanks to first cousin once removed Abbie for the link to Securing America.
Yesterday, the three of us who work in the church office got to talking. “It’s going to snow tomorrow.” “How much do you think we’ll get?” “It’s supposed to be a big storm, maybe 7 to 10 inches.” Then Linda, who has lived around here most of her life, said to me, “There’s one thing you’ll find out about this little corner of the world. Half the time, the snow misses us.” Claudette, who has also lived around here pretty much all her life, nodded sagely. Linda went on, “Like Lakeville will get clobbered, and we’ll get nothing.” Lakeville is the town just north of New Bedford.
This morning when I got up, the sky was dark grey and it was snowing madly. By the time I got dressed and got out the door, the snow had mostly stopped. When I walked home for lunch, there was perhaps two or three inches of snow on the ground; the sky was blue, the sun was out.
As I noted on November 9, Seth Goodin is my favorite marketing guru at the moment, and now I’ve started reading his blog. In a post from November 30 titled “Welcome to the Hobby Economy,” Goodin tells us why he keeps a blog:
Economists don’t know what to do about it.
It’s hard to measure, hard to quantify and a little odd to explain.
More and more people are spending more and more time (and money) on pursuits that have no payoff other than satisfaction.
“Why should you have a blog?” they ask. “How are you going to make any money?”…
Of course, economists don’t really worry about this. They understand perfectly well that economics is able to easily explain that human beings pursue things that satisfy them.
“Hobby economy” sounds a little pejorative. Still, I think it’s a good concept that could also be applied to religion. Most human beings pursue religion because it satisfies them. You don’t have to make money at it. I happen to make money doing religion (although if I went back to sales, I could make a lot more money than I do now), but I do things like keep this blog, which brings in no money at all.
When we think about marketing religion, all too often we only think about hiring an ad agency and developing a major media campaign. That’s thinking of religion in terms of the business model of marketing. If we start thinking about religion in terms of the hobby economy, how would we do marketing? We’d invite people to join the regular meetings of our hobby group. We’d do things like keep a blog to promote our hobby, or have conferences to entice new people into our hobby. Any time anyone asked about our hobby we’d talk about it with passion and enthusiasm.
Not that we should abandon the ad agencies and the major media campaigns. Not that religion really fits into the “hobby economy” model. But it’s getting me thinking about marketing in new ways….
It’s “Holiday Shops Days” in downtown New Bedford this weekend, with an antique fire engine carrying Santa Claus, rides in horse-drawn carriage, tree-lighting in front of the Public Library, people singing carols outside our building, marching bands going up and down the downtown streets, sleigh bells jingling.
I’ve been sitting here in our apartment enjoying the festive sounds outside our windoww while I’m paying bills. I just opened up the year-end appeal from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and found the enclosed:
Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act of 2005
As a point of information to donors considering philanthropic gifts to humanitarian agencies and other organizations… you may be interested in knowing about a recent tax relief act that affects philanthropic giving.
President Bush has signed into law a measure that allows donors to deduct qualified charitable gifts in amounts up to 100% of their Adjusted Gross Income. This temporarily suspends the current limitation of 50% of Adjusted Gross Income….
OK, I doubt that many readers of this blog are able to donate 100% of their adjusted gross income to charities providing services to Gulf Coast relief. But if there are such people reading this blog, I just wanted to let you know that you might want to talk with your financial advisors about whether you’re able to benefit from increased giving this year. There is still a great need for Gulf Coast Relief. Remember, too, that if you want to donate to the Gulf Coast Relief Fund of the Unitarian Universalist Association, a minimum of 95% of those donations will go directly to services (i.e., the fund has very low administrative costs).
Even those of us who can’t give 100% of your adjusted gross income in charitable donations should consider giving a gift to Gulf Coast Relief. There are lots of people along the Gulf Coast who could still use that kind of Christmas gift. Carol and I are planning our year-end giving right now, and we plan to give generously to Gulf Coast Relief.
Update, Feb. 11, 2006: This post continues to get a fair number of hits. Until Spicy Lime gets their own Web site, here’s some basic info:
Located at 522 Pleasant Streeet in downtown New Bedford — Head south on Route 18, at the second set of lights after I-195 turn right onto Union St. (across from ferry terminal), turn left at the fourth traffic light onto Sixth St., then first left, and first left again onto one-way Pleasant St. Spicy Lime is on your left, and parking is usually very easy.
Their phone number is 508-992-3330. Hours: Mon-Fri 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., every day for dinner, 5:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
The original post, below, has info about the menu….
When we first moved to downtown New Bedford, I felt it was missing something important. Downtown Geneva, Illinois, where we lived last year had a good cheap Thai restaurant. And the Rock Ridge neighborhood of Oakland, where we lived the year before, had a good cheap sushi restaurant within walking distance. When we eat out, we tend to prefer good cheap Asian food. When we moved here, downtown New Bedford had only one Chinese restaurant, which friends warned us away from: friends don’t let friends eat bad greasy MSG-laden Asian food.
Downtown New Bedford now has Spicy Lime Thai restaurant, which opened a couple of weeks ago at 522 Pleasant St., near Union St. It’s relatively cheap, with a $5.95 lunch special and most dinner dishes priced at $8.95. And it’s pretty good. What more could I ask?
For dinner tonight, we started with spring rolls: taro root, some kind of dark mushroom, and bean thread in a yummy deep-fried roll. Carol had basil seafood soup, with shrimp, fish, and mussels in a light broth swimming with basil leaves, lemongrass, other spices (the only turnoff for me was that they put tomato in it). I had pad se-ew; I almost always have pad se-ew at Thai resturants; this is the third time I’ve had Spicy Lime’s pad se-ew, and the waitress even said, “You had that last time, didn’t you?” Good thick stir-fried rice noodles, not too greasy, with broccoli, zucchini, and carrots; not exactly Asian vegetables, but good nonetheless.
It’s not fancy, but we liked what we ate. The ingredients were fresh, the cook has a nice way with the herbs and spices. The tables are crowded together in a small room with minimal decor, but it feels friendly. The staff is still working on their timing (be sure you order an appetizer because chances are you will wait a while for your meal), but they’re getting better.
I think Spicy Lime fills a void in the downtown resturant scene at dinner time. The other bars and restaurants have their niches. The waterfront bars get the people who just want to drink, Minerva’s pizza gets people who want fast food, Freestone’s draws the white yup-scale crowd, The Main Event seems to draw the hip Portugese yup-scale crowd, Cafe Arpeggio the academics and scruffy singer-songwriters; but Spicy Lime seems to be the place for the cultural creatives: gallery owners, artists, downtown residents, students from the art school.
