I recently read (on Steve Bodio’s recommendation) Michael Gruber’s Tropic of Night, a supernatural thriller revolving around African Voodoo, with a rich, blond, and beautiful anthropologist heroine named Jane Doe.
Among Jane’s possessions, the reader encounters a Red Nine, a 9mm Parabellum version of the Model 1896 “Broomhandle” Mauser pistol, commissioned by the Imperial German Army in 1916 to supplement its insufficient supply of Model 1908 Luger pistols.
Jane also sails a Pinky Schooner, which I felt obliged to look up.
Pinky schooners were a common type of New England fishing vessel that sailed out of local Cape Ann harbors from the early eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. In 1839, there were 64 registered pinky schooners out of the Cape Ann and its district. Pinkies were generally smaller vessels from which men fished over the side but they were also known for their seaworthiness. These vessels were so distinctive in their look and common that a careful study of many marine paintings from the era will have a pinky or two in the background. Many of the paintings of the internationally renowned artist Fitz Henry Lane, including those in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. usually have pinkies in the background of the painting. “Pinky” means that the stern is “pinked” or pinched together which indicates a pointed stern and may originally be a Dutch word.
It is believed that the pinkies developed from Chebacco boats. A good many of them were built at Essex. These vessels were built to a very high standard and some lasted a very long time. The original MAINE was built in 1845 and sailed until 1926.
Here is Tiger, a 57′ Pinky Schooner, built in 1993 in Port Townsend, Washington, sailing out to Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. That certainly looks like fun. Looking around the web, I find you can buy one of these for as little as $100,000-150,000.
Amit Agarwal, the Indian WSJ’s personal technology columnist offers 101 useful websites, each of which does something useful very well, and all of which are easy to remember.
I can add one more.
102 tineye.com reverse image source, can often identify where that unlabeled picture came from.
Mark Steyn puts Sandra Fluke’s speech to the DNC into perspective, identifying exactly which plimsoll mark Fluke represents as civilization sinks beneath the liberal waves. He also rather amusingly compares her to Lola Montez.
Sandra Fluke… completed her education a few weeks ago – at the age of 31, or Grade 25. Before going to Georgetown, she warmed up with a little light BS in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Cornell. She then studied law at one of the most prestigious institutions in the nation, where tuition costs 50 grand a year. The average starting salary for a Georgetown Law graduate is $160,000 per annum – first job, first paycheck.
So this is America’s best and brightest – or, at any rate, most expensively credentialed. Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite education, and, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is entirely incapable of making a coherent argument. She has enjoyed the leisurely decade-long varsity once reserved for the minor sons of Mitteleuropean grand dukes, and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception of 30-year-old children. She says the choice facing America is whether to be “a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom, or one where that freedom doesn’t apply to our bodies and our voices” – and, even as the words fall leaden from her lips, she doesn’t seem to comprehend that Catholic institutions think their “voices” ought to have freedom, too, or that Obamacare seizes jurisdiction over “our bodies” and has 16,000 new IRS agents ready to fine us for not making arrangements for “our” pancreases and “our” bladders that meet the approval of the commissars. Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she’ll be fined. …
Any space aliens prowling through the rubble of our civilization and stumbling upon a recording of the convention compatible with Planet Zongo DVD players will surely marvel at the valuable peak airtime allotted to Sandra Fluke. It was weird to see her up there among the governors and senators – as weird as Bavarians thought it was when King Ludwig decided to make his principal adviser Lola Montez, the Irish-born “Spanish dancer” and legendary grande horizontale. I hasten to add I’m not saying Miss Fluke is King Barack’s courtesan. For one thing, it’s a striking feature of the Age of Perfected Liberalism that modern liberals talk about sex 24/7 while simultaneously giving off the persistent whiff that the whole thing’s a bit of a chore. Hence, the need for government subsidy. And, in fairness to Miss Montez, she used sex to argue for liberalized government, whereas Miss Fluke uses liberalism to argue for sexualized government.
But those distinctions aside, like Miss Fluke, Miss Montez briefly wielded an influence entirely disproportionate to her talents. Like Miss Fluke, she was a passionate liberal activist who sought to diminish what she regarded as the malign influence of the Catholic Church. Taking up with Lola cost King Ludwig his throne in the revolutions of 1848. We’ll see in a couple of months whether taking up with Sandra works out for King Barack.
David Frum departs from his usual beat to imagine (rather accurately, I thought) what a typical ordinary GOP convention delegate would think about criticisms of his party’s lack of diversity.
The polls tell me that something like 100% of black Americans will vote for Barack Obama. Are they bigots because they rally to their guy? So why are we supposed to be bigots because maybe 60% of us rally to our guy?
Like all white Americans, I’m a mutt: a little English, a little Irish, a little German. Probably got some Cherokee up there too, but you don’t hear me making a big whoop out of it for an affirmative action board, unlike some Democrats I can mention. My wife’s half-Italian. My son’s married to a Chinese girl, and my grandkids will be half Chinese. Doesn’t bother me. I just want us all to be Americans.
But let’s face it: this president has no idea what it means to be American, and I don’t care whether he was born in Hawaii or Kenya or Indonesia or Uzbeky-beky-beky-stan. To be an American means to work for everything you get. When’s he ever worked for anything? It was all handed to him! And now he wants to hand my work over to somebody else.
Ann Coulter at a Catskills vacation place we used to own.
Where Democrat National Conventions are concerned, I definitely subscribe to the Alice Longworth Roosevelt school of thought: “If you can’t say anything nice, come sit here next to me.”
I discovered via an indignant HuffPo posting that Ann Coulter had been in rare form on Twitter last night, commenting upon the democrat convention, and I really need to quote several of her best lines.
18 hours ago: Bill Clinton just impregnated Sandra Fluke backstage…
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17 hours ago: To get Bill Clinton to speak at the convention, Obama had to agree to carry his bags.
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17 hours ago: They’re spicing things up with a live abortion on stage!
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17 hours ago: If I were the RNC, I would put a tape of the D’s God vote on a commercial and broadcast it nonstop for the next two months.
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16 hours ago: Sandra Fluke wants speech class paid for by taxpayers.
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16 hours ago: Sandra Fluke: Republicans would redefine rape. Later that night, shakes hands with Bill Clinton and cannot get smell off her.
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16 hours ago: Sandra wants taxpayers to pay for her tanning appointments.
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Ann Coulter retweets Jim Treacher16 hours ago: I think it’s a good idea to put Bill Clinton in front of a blue background with white stuff on it.
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15 hours ago: There’s not a chick in that audience that Bill wants in kneepads. That’s ugly.
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15 hours ago: Monica Lewinsky somewhere, sobbing, clutching stained dress and eating Haagen Das by the Tv light… Four cats yawning.
The democrats came up with an unfortunately memorable line in this video from last night’s convention.
Referring to “belonging to” the Government provokes in libertarians like myself a kneejerk reaction of antipathy to being classified as a serf. Of course, our democrat friends did not really mean to imply that we belong to the Government, in the sense that the Government owns us and we are its slaves.
No, they meant to describe us as belonging to the Government in the way one belongs to a club or to one’s parish church, as a nice, positive communitarian sort of thing.
The problem is that clubs and even churches are voluntary associations. If I get fed up with the BPOE, if I decided that I’m not getting enough of a benefit from my annual dues to the Shenandoah Fish & Game Club or the Yale Club of New York City, I can resign. I can quit attending St. George’s Lithuanian Roman Catholic Church any time I feel like, and join the Primitive Baptists or simply stay home and sleep in on Sunday as I please.
Belonging to the Government obviously does not work that way. Back in 1969, when I received a letter headed with Greetings, and signed by Richard Nixon, I did not really have the option to leave the club. If I didn’t show up for the meeting being held at 5:30 AM at the Draft Induction Center in Mahanoy City, they would have come looking for me. It’s the same way with club dues. Americans are not able to send the IRS a letter on April 15th informing them that we’ve decided to resign our membership this year and won’t be paying any dues.
Democrats seem to differ fundamentally from the rest of us in how they look at things. Myself, I find it impossible to feel very positively about any club that conscripts me into membership whether I like it or not, and which collects its dues at bayonet point. One might paraphrase the late Groucho Marx, and say: “I don’t particularly want to be a member of any club which forces me to join and which will not allow me to skip meetings or resign.”
Atherton and Palo Alto receive regular visits from mountain lions who travel down the dry arroyos from the nearby mountains, and similar haute bourgeois suburbs of Bombay have leopards from a nearby wildlife refuge dropping by.
The website of Royal Palms Estate says that the township is your ‘world in a village’. Located in Mumbai’s Goregaon suburb, this ‘village’ is a 240-acre settlement that has five-star hotels, recreation clubs, lakes, swimming pools, a golf course, bungalows, villas, row houses and marble statues, apart from a little hill as part of its natural landscape. It even has the Sanjay Gandhi National Park as its neighbour.
It is a world apart, in many ways. Literally so, at some points. The past ten days have seen large grilled fences, at least 15 feet high, come up around the backyard of row house No 3. A large tree nearby has its trunk entwined in a creeper of barbed wire. And it’s not just this compound. Row houses No 4 and 5 are fortified too.
What warrants such self-encagement? An unwelcome guest, it turns out.
East or west, there is a good deal of inadvertent comedy in the inability of deracinated Homo affluentus urbanicus to cope effectively with his own oblivious proximity to Nature in its most potent and primordial forms.
In Palo Alto, the locals protest and build shrines with flowers and candles to the memory of invading pumas who get shot by the police when found lurking in tree branches near suburban elementary schools.
