Yachtful thinking

If I owned a yacht I would sail away to Zanzibar. Zanzibar has always seemed a most mysterious and wonderful place, tropical and eastern and ancient. In fact Zanzibar is made up of two islands in the Indian Ocean, and these two islands both belong to Tanzania. On one of them cloves are still grown in an economically significant way, one of only two places in the world where this is true. I would like to watch cloves grow.

No I wouldn't. Good God, what was I thinking?

If I owned a yacht I would fit it out for deep sea research. I am particularly interested in the communications between squid (squids?), which use bio-luminesence to create amazing light displays that clearly have communication as a goal. I would like to learn what they talk about. Maybe mess with their heads a little bit... They do have heads, don't they?

I'd sing to them old sea shanties from Newfoundland like "Squid Jiggin' Grounds" to see what sort of reaction I'd get. I'd listen to see what sea shanties squids sing so bio-luminescently. What jokes do squid enjoy? How do they insult one another? What is the squid equivalent of "Huzza, huzza?" What do they pray for, and to whom?

If I had a yacht I would install a huge stereo and steer into the wind to Ride of the Valkyries, run before it to Bolero, tack across it to Carmina Burana, and run aground to Brick in the Wall. I have a confession to make - I put a submarine aground once. We kept it our little secret, but there we were, up on the mud right in front of a swanky hotel on the Carribean island of St.Thomas. Swacked tourists were toasting us from the bar with great hilarity while we churned, full speed astern both engines, and dragged ourselved slowly off the shore.

It was... It was a bad start for a brand new navigator. I misjudged the current while trying to come alongside the jetty there... I made my teetery way up to the bar and that's all I remember from that day.

If I had a yacht I would sell it and blow the money on a 5 star hotel vacation for 2 for as many days and nights as the money lasted. The last time I was in China a 5 star hotel in Beijing was $90/night. Unfortunately this is no longer the case. Too bad, it was fabulous, just down the road from Tiananmen Square. It had a glass front and was set to open just before the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. A tank passing by the day before the massacre machined-gunned the glass front (apparently out of nothing more than a sense of mischief) and destroyed $500 million worth of glass in just a few bursts. No injuries. It was the China World Hotel, and that same room now, about five years after my visit, is $290 a night. If you have a moment, check out the link to the hotel and compare it to the photo of the yachts at the top of the blog. And if you clicked on the link tell me honestly - if you were a young punk kid on important government business and you had a machine gun and you knew you'd get away with it - wouldn't you like to break those windows too? Just to say you did it?

The sort of yacht I had in mind when I started this blog goes for about $3,000,000 plus $10 for a license, so despite the grotesquely inflated prices that would still pay for over 10,000 nights at the China World Hotel - a little over 28 years.

How do people get yachts? And what do they do with them when they aren't communicating with squid?

Twenty eight years in a Shangri-La hotel in Beijing. A yacht.

It is so hard to choose.

Thoughtful thinking

The word "thought" generates 412 million hits, taking 22 hundredths of a second to accomplish the task. That gives you something to think about.

"Think" gets 741 million, in only 6 hundredths of a second. The longer word "thinking" gets a third that number of hits, but still takes only 6 hundredths of a second.

What takes "thought" so long? Like, does it think I have all to day to wait?

Deadly thinking

According to deathclock.com I have somewhere just over 276 million seconds to live. (This authoritative, sublimely confident number of seconds was apparently derived from my birthdate, BMI [standing for Beautiful Male Insouciance,] gender and smoking habits.) That's another 8.75 years, gaze on it ye mighty and despair.

Absent from the calculations were my country of residence (a long-lived one), proximity to landmines (not very proximal to the best of my knowledge), drinking habits (a serious omission on deathclock.com's part) and marital status (M, if it matters. But but very, very M.)

I never feared death until I had children, at which point I feared their deaths and they, as they got old enough to consider it, feared not their own deaths but mine.

Death is to be treated very very lightly unless it's someone else's death.

It's gonna be a great 276 million seconds. And then some.

Latitudinal thinking

I was a navigator once. I know the word latitude and the word longitude and I know which is which. Left and right have always blurred together in my mind but I was never tested on them for my navigation certificate. Remembering my latitude from my longitude was far from instinctive.

Here's what I came up with: Latitude-Flatitude. (No relation to flatulence.)

Latitude lines lie flat like the slats (get it?) of the blinds above. Longditude lines go up and down. (I tried mneumonics like Longitude-Flongditude but they made no sense and I only needed the flatitude one, and then longitude was the other one.) When the position of a place on the Earth is given using "Lat'nLong" as we navigators like to call them, latitude is the first one, always. They come in alphabetical order, la before lo like in the dictionary. So the first number tells you how far north or south of the equator the place is, the second tells you how far around the globe it is from Greenwich, England, which apparently is the starting place for going around the globe.

This is what's tricky: lines of latitude, which are flat (as in horizontal) tell how far up or down the place is. (Go to the third slat up the blinds.) Lines of longitude, which go up and down (as in vertical) tell you how far the place is measured left to right.(Go to the leftmost window of the building you can see through the blinds.) That was very confusing for a while.

There are, believe it or not... I'm only showing off now so if I just taught you lat from long and you're celebrating this newfound knowledge, stop reading at this point because the rest will make you queasy... there are in fact six different ways to measure latitude just on the planet Earth, seven if you have broader horizons. They are...

Never mind, it doesn't matter. But my favorite of all times is called rectifying latitude (like it needed rectifying) and the reason it is my all-time favorite is because of this charmingly casual coment in the excellent Wikipedia article that I'm plagiarizing from, "... Unfortunately it requires elliptical integration..."

I had a girl friend once who was like that. She pretty much ended my fascination with elliptical integration.

Call me square.

Sibling thinking

I love sibling rivalry. It always worked for me, never against me. My older sister, in an unsual move (very typical of her) decided to take the role of rebel, independant thinker, the baddy, despite the fact that she was the oldest child.

This left the role of goodie-goodie to me, and I exploited it fully. Most second children are forced into the baddy role by virtue of the fact that goodie-goodie was sewn up long before they came along. Not me.

My oldest sister became an artist, of course. Got divorced, if you can believe that. Then she became an aeronautical engineer and an early roboticist so her fall from grace was as permanent as it was catastrophic. Now she lives in Mexico and is an artist again. (You can see her work on the mafonga glassworks link to the right of my blog.)

The picture here is of my three children. The oldest is to the right looking hopeful. The second child is to the front, looking confident. The youngest is on the left looking like she's enjoying herself.

When they were young they had sibling rivalry issues. I always tried to play them off one against the other seeking maximum advantage for myself. At some point they figured it out and wound up best friends, and that's just wrong.

Princess thinking

Ta Daaaa!

Chippy thinking

I was just in Vancouver, Canada. (Not Washington State.)

Vancouver got hammered by a major winsdtorm a couple of weeks back and millions of dollars worth of trees were blown over. I don't know how many trees that is. In Stanley Park they - I'm not sure who they are - are working flat-out to remove the debris and make the park look un-devastated.

So there is a huge pile of wood chips filling much of a parking lot. When I took a picture of it my children all rolled their eyes and said, as one, "Chippy thinking..." They are the majority of my blog readership and I can't let them down.

In North America, I was surprised to discover, chippy is a word used to describe women of low repute, as it were. Probably came out of New Orleans, possibly because of a supposed similarity between the little noises made by women of low repute and those of chipping sparrows.

Chipping sparrows? And those noises? Okay. I have been hanging around with the wrong kinds of sparrows. Thank god.

In the UK the word chippy refers to a fish-and-chips shop, possibly because of a supposed similarity between the little noises fish-and-chips shops make and those of chipping sparrows.

The urban dictionary (available on-line) also uses the word to describe hockey games that get a little out of hand, and it is in this context that I first heard the word. It is this meaning that I prefer - a little attitude, a little je ne sais quoi that winds up as a high-sticking penalty and no front teeth. Cocky, cheeky, a little rude.

There is a similarity between the sounds made by teeth falling to the ice and those made by chipping sparrows.

It all comes back to those damned sparrows.