In protest of the ongoing lack of puppy pictures / videos from Mr. Cole, here’s a wooden duck:
As with the wooden barracuda I posted last night, I had a hand in making this folk art; a friend carved it, and I painted it.
The wooden duck is much older than the wooden barracuda: I was a teenager when I painted the fowl. The dude who carved it and I produced wooden ducks as a commercial enterprise. We painted many types of ducks, including canvasbacks, buffleheads, pintails, etc.
I gave the one pictured to my mom as a present, and she kept it for many years. Now it’s mine again.
Last night, some of y’all inquired about the story behind the barracuda encounter commemorated with the fish carving, so here it is: My husband had never been to the Keys before our honeymoon, but my father is a big fisherman and diver, so I went every summer as a kid.
I was therefore familiar with barracudas, and my dad always told me not to be afraid and not to act like frightened prey around them but rather to respect them and move purposefully on if I saw one.
During our honeymoon trip to the Keys, the mister and I went on a snorkeling excursion. Hubby is from Buffalo, so barracudas were not a part of his childhood. On the boat to the reef, I told him what my father told me about how to act around them — they look scary, but attacks are rare, no need to panic, move slowly and purposefully, etc.
So there we were, snorkeling along hand-in-hand among the channels in a beautiful reef, delighting in a profusion of colorful tropical fish, etc., when we rounded a corner, and BOOM, we were suddenly face-to-face with a phalanx of barracudas — four huge ones.
The way the mister tells it, he remained perfectly calm as instructed while I almost crushed his fingers, emitted panicked squeals through my snorkel and practically walked on water back to the boat. I don’t remember it that way.
But the next morning while reading the paper over breakfast, we learned that a woman had been attacked by a barracuda very near the spot where we encountered ours. A fish behavior expert speculated that it had been attracted by some jewelry she was wearing. Hubby and I considered our shiny new wedding rings and thanked our lucky stars.
Anyway, that’s my barracuda story. Anything exciting going on today?
Tommy
Sorry for this long rant, but I felt the need after making the mistake of watching part of Rand Pauls rebut to the State of the Union.
One part of it (OK all of it) pissed me off. Paul said he was from a town that us liberals just flyover. The Federal government and liberals like me don’t care about “them.”
Nothing could be further from the truth!
I live in a flyover state and in a small rural town that people from my state couldn’t even find on a map. It wasn’t that long ago we got our first stoplight and even a sign on the major highway 1.5 miles away noting there were restaurants and gas stations in my town. Why don’t you stop by.
In a town where our state Senator was running for POTUS (I think you might know who he is) we voted 57% for McCain. Not a liberal town. None of our elected officials even do their elected jobs full-time. But about 15 years ago we did something smart, we hired a professional city manager. It seems our town almost changed from the second he was hired.
We have the lowest taxes in the area, but run a surplus in our budget so large we find it hard to figure out how to spend it all. With the surplus from last year we just decided to upgrade our electrical grid. We just drove poles into the ground all around town and pulled new wires. The things look like something out of a sci-fi movie they are so high-tech.
But what the City Manager did, and really my point given what Paul said, is he knows how to fill out paperwork for grants, loans, and how to petition our government for funds.
Just some things he has done ….
I now have a rail line 2.5 miles from my house. A bus that will pick me up two blocks from where I type this. I have a new $60M high school and a new $20M primary school (being built as we speak). I have a freaking billion dollar airport in my town. Let me say that again, I have a billion dollar airport in my town of well under 10,000 people in rural Illinois. That airport made the “Fleecing of America” on the CBS Nightly News twice. Nobody here thinks we “fleeced” America, just we figured out how to lobby our elected officials and fill out paperwork.
And I keep coming back to that darn paperwork (looking at you New Jersey!).
When the government passed The Recovery Act we got on filling out some paperwork again. We received $750,000 from the Feds. To those in a large metro area that might seem like just a rounding error in your budget, but not for us. My town has two main roads. Main Street and 6th Street, they form an X. Every school, government building, almost all businesses are on one of these two streets.
So we took that $750,000, added in a little of our own money, and laid fiber down both roads and put fiber directly into every government building (of course, including the schools). And since we were going to tear up the streets/sidewalks anyway, I guess it just made sense for us to put in all new fire hydrants while we were at it. So we did.
In fact we are now gearing up to fight Verizon, Charter Communications, and Frontier (the three major ISPs in the area) in court because we have plans, for the city, to bring fiber first into all businesses and then our homes for a fraction of what the ISPs charge at about ten times the speed. Oh and the ultimate goal is to offer free Wifi city wide by the end of this year.
I should also note, in the last year both Boeing (at the airport) and Monsanto (not two of my favorite companies BTW) set-up shop here. We gave Boeing a little tax break for 10 years to move here, if they used the money to upgrade the facility they were moving into. I kid you not one of the upgrades required for the deal was to put a bathroom into the facility for women. Somehow the place only had one bathroom, for men (not sure how that happened).
We gave Monsanto nothing. Almost 300 jobs created between the two.
So fuck you Rand. Maybe my town looks to government programs for help, but alas we do in fact pay taxes and it doesn’t seem strange to anybody I know, Republicans included, that we might try to benefit our community with said programs. If the yahoos in your hometown stopped fighting the government and tried to work with, and not against the Feds, maybe you could have a little of what I have.
And what I currently have is kind of nice. I wish other people had it as well, including people in your hometown Rand!
BTW: The local community college, which is where the rail line is for me, they got matching funds from the Federal government to start putting in covered car ports in their huge parking lot. You might ask yourself, WTF, why do that. Well the top of them have solar panels. The college hopes to get 20+% of their power via solar by 2020. Their stated goal, and I believe them, is for the money they save in utility costs is to lower tuition. Also, in addition to the 20 parking spots they currently have, where you can plug your car into charge, all the ports will have that option as well.
kindness
Ever seen those videos of people feeding barracudas in the wild? While diving they take a sack of fish out and hand feed ’em. I read one from someone who lived by the area who said they got to ‘know’ certain fish and they’d act like big dogs. Still with all those teeth I’d have second thoughts about any stray fingers in front of a feeding fish like that.
Baud
@Tommy:
Sounds unlawful not to have a women’s bathroom.
And Rand is appealing to tribalism, pure and simple. Ironic, since in a libertarian paradise, we would never have the type of federal investments in rural areas that currently allow them to maintain a decent and comparable standard of living.
Baud
The duck is sublime, Betty.
Mustang Bobby
@Tommy: Just to add a nod of agreement, Tommy. I work all day in grants. The money is out there if you know how to apply for it. People think it’s “free money.” Actually what it is is agencies hiring you to spend their money for them, doing the things like building the schools, paying for the after-school programs, getting professional development training for the teachers. It’s not the government “throwing money;” it’s turning it over to the people who know best how to spend it.
And boy howdy are they held accountable for it; doing reports for the agencies is a big part of running a grant. Yeah, we grumble about the paperwork, but then again, don’t you want to know how it’s being spent? (BTW, three years without an audit finding here.)
Either Rand Paul knows how grants work and he’s playing to the fear and ignorance of his audience, or he doesn’t know shit about them. Either way, he’s a douche with cheese.
PurpleGirl
BC: The duck is beautiful. Thank you for showing it to us and for telling us the honeymoon story.
Tommy
@Mustang Bobby: When the community college got money from the Feds and also matching money from the state for the car ports, the local paper, which doesn’t lean right, it is far right, couldn’t find anything to bitch about. And they bitch often on the op-ed page climate change isn’t happening.
The reporter asked what I am sure he thought was a “gotcha” question. What will they do with the cost savings? The response was to lower tuition costs across the board to let more people attend. I don’t know what he thought they were going to do, embezzle money or something.
But he found it hard to argue with lower tuition costs ….
currants
@Tommy: Agreed. Cheers to people who know what they’re doing! (And here’s to the hypocrites like Paul getting what they so richly deserve.)
Derelict
‘Cudas are one of my favorite fish to catch! They fight hard, but know when to give up (before they’re completely exhausted) so you can release them without worrying that they’ve spent themselves beyond recovery.
And they’re beautiful, too!
@Tommy: You’re probably one of only a handful of people not working for a news organization who watched the Rand’s retort. It’s not good for your health!
Elizabelle
Psycho ‘Cudas: Barracuda Behaving Badly
From an online diving website. Says you can get a nasty cut, but not fatal. Fish may behave aggressively during their spawning season.
Elizabelle
Last July, a teenage boy from Port Orange, FL was bitten badly on the arm by a barracuda that leaped into his fishing boat. Per the Orlando Sentinel:
Elizabelle
@Derelict: Didn’t know much about barracudas going in. They sound fascinating.
raven
Via Duck?
raven
Lord
Love a Duck!
One of my all time favorite movies.
Elizabelle
Beautiful painted duck, Ms. Cracker. And it reminds you of your mom too.
Maybe CrackerBrau can feature a duck on its label; a barracuda on another brew.
Barbara
You did a beautiful job on that duck.
One thing I’ve noticed in my advancing years is that one often gets back the presents one has given one’s parents.
I was still just starting out when my mom died, and inherited the home-made birthday cards I’d made her (I was an art major so they were on the elaborate side); in contrast, my older sister got back some very nice pottery. My MIL just more into a continuum of care type-place and now I have the brass tray my husband brought back for her from his teen trip to Israel (thankfully he had better taste than his brother, who got back a really ugly painting he’d purchased during his teen trip).
The moral of this story: Give your mother nice gifts! They very well end up in your house one day.
raven
This scene with Tuesday Weld and cashmere sweaters has been described as one of the most disturbing ever filmed!
Tommy
@currants:
Right on, right on. A few years ago it came out (nobody is sure how) that our City Manager was a raging liberal. Somehow the Mayor and City Council found a reason to fire him soon afterwards. The town, and again this isn’t a liberal town, but we got an emergency ballot in place for us to be able to recall any elected official. It passed with almost 80% of the vote.
The meaning was clear, rehire the City Manager or we are coming for you.
He was rehired! If that isn’t Democracy in action I don’t know what is.
Elizabelle
@Tommy:
That’s cool. And even if tuition doesn’t come down — perhaps because the CC is now serving more students (hello free 2 years via ObamaCollege), they’re going green. Maybe this is a demonstration project?
FWIW, it’s easier for the wingnuts to flap their mouths than reason out how government can be their ally.
danielx
Had a somewhat similar experience at Bahia Honda, snorkeling along amongst all the tropical fishies and then looking up to see this ominous torpedo shape just sort of hovering a little way off…the difference being that we were warned specifically to remove any shiny objects before we got in the water. Aside from that, it’s an experience I would recommend to anybody. Kind of like swimming in an aquarium with a zillion different varieties of fish.
The other thing I noticed at that location was that there appeared to be a sort of unofficial division in activities; the Gulf side was the family side and the Atlantic side was the, um, adult side.
Debbie(aussie)
I must reiterate how much I love this blog and tell you how much I care about the people who post and comment here. It is a virtual extended family (only a little dysfunctional). Even though I don’t comment often, more to do with time difference than anything else, I read everything. You have all contributed to my education in so many things. US politics, being one such, it seems that I must be the biggest know it all in the antipodes. Thanks for the great writing, interesting topics, barrel loads of snark, beautiful pictures and last, but never least, pet pictures, the puppies and the kittens. Especially them, as I lost my pup 17 1/2)in November and four weeks later just before Christmas my cat(8). It creeps up on you sometimes, like when I see the mark Fry has left on the frame of the toilet door from where he rubbed his cheeks. Like Tunch, he was a beautiful big fat bastard. What cats!
Tommy
@Elizabelle: Not sure if it is a test project. I also should have noted in my long rant that my local 12 term Congresscritter (didn’t run for reelection 4 years ago) is somebody nobody here has/had every heard of. In fact I’ve never seen him on MSMBC/CNN once, but he was always listed as one of the ten most powerful Congress members. His ability to bring pork to my district, therefore also my town, was legendary.
His wife runs the community college, so it has that going for it :)!
beth
@Tommy: After hearing Rand Paul’s comments about flyover liberals and seeing Mike Huckabee on The Daily Show talking about liberal bubbles vs. Bubbaland, I wonder how the hell we let the right wing get away with saying Obama is divisive. I’ve never heard the president refer to one section of the country as better than another or sneer at one segment of our society the way the right does. It drives me crazy. At least Jon Stewart pushed back at Huckabee on this. I never see a member of the liberal media questioning this at all.
danielx
@Mustang Bobby:
I’d have said he’s a prick with ears, but your designation works just as well.
Betty Cracker
@Debbie(aussie): Aw, sorry about the loss of your critters. One of the most unjust things in an unfair universe is the relatively short lifespans of cats and dogs.
Betty Cracker
@danielx: He’s an aggrieved, entitled ambulatory hairpiece to boot, and one of the most loathsome politicians ever to slither through the nepotism rat hole into the US Senate. Having survived the Bush years, I’m pretty sure I could bear a Rand Paul presidency without fleeing the country, should such an unlikely abomination come to pass (FSM forbid!).
But damn if I wouldn’t be tempted to jam chopsticks through my eardrums to escape his horrible whiny voice. For some reason, it grates on me even worse than W’s ever did, and his voice made me want to wash a pound of rat poison down with a quart of Drano.
Aside from the orders of magnitude saner policies, one thing I’ve relished most about the Obama years is the absence of the urge to hurl shoes through the TV screen or commit self-harm when the president speaks.
Tommy
@beth: It pisses me off to no end as well. There is another active person here that lives just south of me in rural Illinois as well. We both had lived in large metro areas (DC for me) and choose to move back to a small rural town in the midwest.
Obama knows my town, and towns like it, he campaigned here when running for the Senate. He knows my community isn’t backwards. We are not hicks. We might be in “flyover” country but I don’t think we are forgotten in the leasdt.
Heck when I talk about all the things my town has done, people here have commented that they live in what the “media” says is a super “progressive” town and my town sound more progressive.
I recall in 2004 I was at a City Council meeting, they were listening to residents talk about a bill to raise business taxes by a small percentage. The goal with the money was to buy up a number of rundown buildings in the town, mostly on Main Street, tear them down and in one place build a food pantry and in the others, just parks (I’d call them Green Zones — but that is too hippie liberal for my town).
People were bitching about it. The City Manager got up and said something I will NEVER forget. He said “people like nice things, nice things cost money. We need money.” They passed the tax increase, no businesses left, and I am proud to admit it is hard for me to walk a few blocks in any direction and not encounter a park.
TomG
Sheldon Silver (D-NY state Assembly Speaker) has been arrested on federal corruption charges!! It’s about friggin’ time. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy. That slimeball has helped make NY’s Assembly a laughingstock.
Buddy H
Here is a letter to the editor that appeared in my hometown paper:
What can be bad? Well, too many cars on the road most of the time, not enough parking in the downtown area, not enough green space and the roads are too narrow in most areas. You can’t park on both sides of some roads, the traffic lights are too old for the new influx of autos — the list goes on and on. I am sure the city government knows this and hopefully they are looking at ways to fix most of the problems before the situation becomes impossible. We do live in a great city. Let’s make it better if we can.
Now I guess what I take issue with is the author complaining about too many cars on the road, but then wanting more parking and wider roads. I’m sorry, but won’t this increase the number of cars on the road? I like our narrow little streets, our pedestrian-friendly neighborhood. Do we have to tear everything up for parking lots and four lane roads, while at the same time complaining “there are too many cars”??
debbie
Anyone else wondering how pissed off the nutjobs will be about this revelation?
http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/01/20/erin-pkg-moos-fake-baby-american-sniper-uproar.cnn
Debbie(aussie)
@debbie: really weird. If not a real baby a ‘real baby doll’ surely. Even if the movie is good I can imagine bursting into laughter when this scene came up. Come on, Clint.
Tommy
@Buddy H: Oh I so understand. People around me were mad that our local Metro system just built out a bike/walking/running path along the rail line. They even put in pedestrian bridges in a few places so people didn’t have to try to cross a four-lane highway to get to a bus/rail stop. Many people I know were livid they spent the money.
I was like dude get a clue. I am the person, having lived in DC before moving back here, learned public transportation was my friend. I use it all the time, you don’t. Heaven forbid the government spends some money to benefit things that I use, that matter to me.
The government spends my taxes to do a lot of things I could care less about, but that benefits your way of life. You don’t hear me running around bitching about that do you?
Could I please get a little of that from you …..
Lurker
Can you pressure JC to post puppehs’ pictures / videos?
Buddy H
@Tommy: Heaven forbid the government spends some money to benefit things that I use, that matter to me.
The car people (who want a drive-thru world and acres of parking and six lane highways and bridges on top of bridges) don’t complain when the government spends money for road paving, rock salt, highway repair, etc.)
Betty Cracker
@Debbie(aussie): Wow! It is so obviously fake! I’m astonished they couldn’t come up with a real baby — aren’t there scads of wannabe stage moms in LA just waiting for such a break? Or else re-shoot the scene later when an actual infant was available. Lame.
Mustang Bobby
Betty, your duck is beautiful. There’s a rather vibrant market for hand-carved decoys; my dad used to collect them and our house had a number of them when I was a kid. His favorite was one he got on a hunting trip to James Bay in 1970. It was carved by a native guide using only an axe and a jackknife. It looked as good as anything from Gokey’s.
Tommy
@Buddy H: Exactly. Look I get in my lifetime people are not going to get rid of their cars. I recall when I first walked from my house in this rural town to the 7/11 like store 1.5 blocks away, a neighbor stopped her car and asked if I need a ride to it. I know people that will drive a block on a 72 degree perfect day. Sad!
I tried to explain to her that when I lived on Capital Hill in DC at times I parked my car further away from my house then this walk to the store. She seemed confused.
As I say in another comment I came to learn public transportation was my friend in DC. Like close to my best friend. I use it all the time now. The system I have now just rocks. Clean. On time. Cheap. I can get a pass for an entire day, both bus and rail for $7. Unlimited use. Let me say that again, $7.
Just One More Canuck
@Mustang Bobby: @danielx: Douches and pricks both have their uses.
Rand, not so much
jibeaux
My barracuda story is that years ago on our honeymoon in Mexico, we went for a day trip on this boat to an island, and on the way the guys caught barracuda and then grilled them at the island and served them with other freshly cooked side dishes and ice cold Coronas. Helluva lot better than the sandwiches and coke you would expect from most any American day trip outfit.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
Last night, I heard that “Baby #1” had a fever and “Baby #2” was a no-show, so Eastwood went with a doll. So much for standards of quality.
geg6
On a dive in Mexico, the dive master briefed us on the way out and said we were going to a place known as Barracuda Reef. That it exaggerated the number of actual barracuda there and just to take the usual precautions around the ones we might come upon. So no worries, right?
Well, technically, there were no worries to be had, I guess. But by the time we got to 25-30 feet, the shadows I was seeing against the reef started to come into focus as an entire school of barracuda, literally hundreds of them. All around us. I sucked up a whole tank of air in about 20 minutes. Just wasn’t expecting that and it freaked me out. I wasn’t the only one pissed at the dive master for not being completely honest and for, later, thinking it was sort of funny. If I’d been more prepared for what I was going into, I wouldn’t have had that reaction. I sat out the second dive that day because I was so mad. My ex had to buddy with the asshole dive master.
rikyrah
The Director of Selma Posted this to her instagram:
Mustang Bobby
@Tommy: That’s the going daily rate here in Miami for the Metro Rail, and it includes the free Metro Mover, which runs in a couple of loops around the downtown districts, including one outside my office.
I would use it except for the fact that I live five miles from the nearest Park & Ride, and with the parking fee, it’s about the same as driving. The Miami-Dade train is one of those unfinished wonders. They built a great system from the southern part of town to downtown, but that’s it. The plans for extending it to the north and out to Miami Beach were halted by the Reagan administration. The most recent addition was a link to Miami International Airport, but that’s all she wrote for the foreseeable future.
Amir Khalid
@debbie:
Clint’s directorial rep is that he always brings the picture in on time and under budget. He’s famous for using the first good take. I guess when the babies didn’t show, impatience to get on with the shoot led him to send a runner out to Toys’R’Us with a few bucks from petty cash.
rikyrah
Wednesday, Jan 21, 2015 04:59 PM CST
Maureen Dowd’s clueless white gaze: What’s really behind the “Selma” backlash
NY Times columnist is the latest critic of “Selma” for its depiction of LBJ. Here’s why a new racial lens is needed
Brittney Cooper
New York Times critic Maureen Dowd saw “Selma” last week “in a theater of full of black teenagers.” Her ethnographic impressions of the “stunned” emotional responses that these D.C. teenagers had to seeing four little girls blown up in an Alabama church basement and watching civil rights leaders viciously clubbed during a march in Selma reek of the kind of voyeuristic and clueless white gaze often used to devalue and pathologize urban youth. They become fascinating objects of study to those who don’t get to spend a lot of time with them.
And it is precisely these kinds of impressions from white people, the inability to make sense of genuine black emotion, the inability to recognize what filmic representations that respect the interior lives of black people actually might look like, that have contributed to the disingenuous backlash against the Selma film.
This magnificent and powerful film has, at this point, been endlessly derided by white and black critics alike who say it fails to get the story just right. Among white critics, its cardinal sin is failure to pay proper homage to Lyndon B. Johnson for being a champion of black voting rights. He’s represented in the film as a reluctant ally in the civil rights struggle, as one whose racial views evolve over time.
Dowd rips what she calls Ava’s DuVernay’s “artful falsehood,” for having the potentially and apparently regrettable result of making the “young moviegoers [now] see L.B.J.’s role in civil rights through DuVernay’s lens.”
“Artful falsehood,” Dowd tells us, “is more dangerous than artless falsehood, because fewer people see through it.”
But the truth is, a new racial lens is exactly what America needs. In “Selma,” we learn what films look like when directors and cinematographers who love and respect black people turn their gaze on us. “Selma” artfully displaces a white gaze, and it is this unnamed and unsettling anxiety that sits at the heart of so many of the critiques of the film.
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/21/maureen_dowds_clueless_white_gaze_whats_really_behind_the_selma_backlash/
Cervantes
@Debbie(aussie):
Always good to hear from you, too.
Sorry to hear about your recent losses. Have a Beckett:
And going on, rest your feet against ours any time.
Ben Cisco
@Tommy: I’m late to the party on this, but outstanding rant.
Neo-Confederates routinely accuse President Obama of being divisive, but as usual, they lie and engage in the very behavior they accuse him of. You’ve stated often here that your community is not liberal and yet seems to function. It seems to me that that is because they actually WANT a functional community. Rand and his ilk would rather rule in hell, and the party faithful are, at best, indifferent to the idea so long as the right people get hurt.
Cervantes
@rikyrah:
I read the article, thanks.
But for the author to say that critics are being “disingenuous” when they criticize the film for its “failure to pay proper homage” to LBJ — that’s pretty rich.
Paying “proper homage” and not setting out to give a false impression — are these the same thing?
Betty Cracker
@rikyrah: What a great story!
ET
Here is my protest link over lack of pictures from our overlord – Smithsonian pics of red pandas.
shelley
Shut down my computer early last night, in full confidence I’ll come back this morning to puppy pictures. DENIED! Somebody contact Cole’s mother, STAT!
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker:
The duck is pretty. I bet you’re happy to have it (back).
And below the Lipton book, that looks like Julia Child. I knew her well.
Betty Cracker
@Cervantes: Did you really know Julie Child? Wow! Always loved her show. I saw her once around 1990-ish at Mount Auburn Hospital (I think) near Boston. I was visiting a friend who had just had a baby, and JC was in the waiting room. I thought it was her, and when she spoke, I knew it was. She was really tall. What was she like?
Elizabelle
Yeah, I was loving that the duck is two books above “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” Thinking there might be a very good a l’Orange recipe in there.
Hard Times for the duck; exaltation for us (if cooked well).
Elizabelle
@Cervantes: I have to read the article, but saw Selma, which I enjoyed, and do think it was rough on LBJ. Possibly for dramatic reasons — he did redeem himself at the end — but it was a full audience, which hissed at a few mid-movie LBJ scenes. They never hissed at George Wallace.
I think Duvernay and her screenwriter missed an opportunity to really spell out that LBJ did not want to get way out ahead of public support. She made him more into a personal opponent, and I don’t think the record will bear that out. (That he didn’t want to get pushed around by MLK, maybe, but it’s a simplistic depiction of what was likely much more complicated.)
Because being more fair to LBJ would not have required that many scenes, and might have allowed students and others to think about parallels today.
Think on how the firebaggers and others think Obama is magic. How frustrated many are with him and yes — maybe the public is ahead of him on some issues (justice for banksters too, etc.) And then they don’t vote. Politicians pay attention to that.
JR in WV
We lived in Key West when we were first married, thanks to the USN who stationed me there on a sub tender. There was nowhere to drive to for adventure, so we would rent small boats from the EM club and go snorkling on coral heads. After a while a friend needed to raise some cash money quick, and sold me his scuba diving rig, which nade it even better.
Anyway, once an experienced friend, Chris, and I went out to the reef. We swam east, into a huge school of barracuda, so we turned south. After a little bit we found a big school of barracuda, so we turned west. Darned if after just a little bit there was a school of barracuda! You get the picture, now, I’m sure, they were everywhere!
So we got back into the boat and went over into the gulf. Come to find out later on that barracuda only school during their mating season, which was then. They certainly weren’t interested in us, as we were as big as they were and were acting calm as if we belonged there. Not cute in barracuda terms, either!
Then I was away from the Keys in Pascagoula, MS, where my ship was being overhauled. A year later I returned to Key West, where I reconnected with Chris.
He told me of taking friends and relatives from up north out to John Pennecamp State Park to dive, the only completely underwater state park I know of. He gave them the same “don’t fear the barracuda” talk you mention, Betty, stay calm, move smoothly, no jewelry, etc.
But one of the party freaked out, and went into attack mode with a shark billy [ which is a lttle wooden handle with nails in it to hold against the nose of a shark so they can’t get any closer to bite you, not an offensive thing at all]. All that jerky motion attracted the wrong kind of attention, and he was pretty severly cut up. They wound up calling for help. The Coast Guard helicoptered him to a trauma center, and he lived, but no fun was had by all.
I never really had any trouble with aggressive fish or active underwater life. I got into a bit of fire coral, which burns where you touch it. Mostly it was a wonderful experience, like being able to fly in wonderland. Tropical fish, colored canyons into the coral reef. We once saw a giant ray leap into the air quite near out boat, it seemed as wide as the boat was long!
The best part of living in the Keys was meeting the ocean on its own terms. You just have to listen and learn from the people around you with experience. One of life’s rules that always applies to everything, no matter what, is “Stay Calm!”
Betty Cracker
@JR in WV: Great stories! I love Pennekamp too — it’s one of my favorite places. We always joke about the Jesus statue there, that he’s saying, “I caught a fish THIS big!” On the same snorkeling trip where we saw the barracudas, we also saw a massive eagle ray, which swam right under us, very close. It was unbelievably beautiful and majestic.
Cervantes
@JR in WV:
Thanks for sharing those recollections.
There are a number of them in California. Let me know if you want a list.
Words to live by.
JR in WV
@Elizabelle:
I find it hard to believe that a movie could portray LBJ as more hissable than George Wallace!!
And I’ve read the Caro biographies of LBJ (and hoping that he lives long enough to finish the series!) published so far. Lots to hate about President Johson, but lots to respect too.
About the only thing to respect about Walace is that nearing the end of his life he realized that hating people because of their skin color was way wrong, and repented of his behavior in his early political life. Small beans compared to LBJ’s accomplishments.
Cervantes
@JR in WV:
I know people who swear he knew it was wrong all along, never really hated people because of their skin color but pretended that he did, and repented later.
I am not sure.
Pseudonym
Mallard.
Tehanu
I love An Exaltation of Larks! What a wonderful book! I knew we had a lot in common. Haven’t looked at the book for a while, so … does it have a word for a bunch of ducks? What about barracudas?
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker:
Can’t stop now to respond properly but it would be a small pleasure for me, so do feel free to ask again over the week-end or next week.