Tag Archives: seablogger

Road salt

So what could have caused the collapse of that highway bridge in Minnesota? Try salt, says the Seablogger, who used to live up there in the land of the looong winter. Makes sense to me.

UPDATE More from James Lileks, via Instapundit. And: it could also happen to you!

Nice wet May

About 7 inches of rain fell at the airport and another 7 inches at Camp Mabry last month (the official Austin raincounter sites of the National Weather Service), about 2 inches more than normal for a May, which is usually wet. Seablogger says the rains have already come to droughty Florida, although TS Barry isn’t due ashore (near Tampa) before tomorrow morning. Its huge circulation is well ahead of its core. Two named storms already this year. Makes you wonder if it really will be as rough as forecast, or a bust like last year. Texans often are in the embarrassing position of having to wish for rain from tropical storms or hurricanes (knowing someone on the coast will have to get blasted first) but not this year. We’re flush with wet. Probably a tipoff that we’re headed for more. Feast or famine is the weather rule in Texas.

Ghost boats

Alan Sullivan, the Seablogger, who lives aboard a cruiser in Florida, has a built-in interest in the modern Mary Celeste found near the coast of Australia. He thinks the crew of three men went swimming, possibly in a flat calm, and the wind came up and blew their 40-foot catamaran motor-sailer away from them. The skipper’s family says it was a kidnapping. The police have ruled out foul play. Alan’s theory is plausible–"cats are fast…a mere puff could have borne it out of reach"–so is some kind of fight between the three. Otherwise the Kaz II will go down as another Mary Celeste, a ghost ship found adrift in the Atlantic in 1872 with no sign of the ten passengers or crew.

Messing with the “A” key

I.e., don’t, as in do not. Alan Sullivan, the Seablogger, did, trying to retrieve a sesame seed and:

"When I tried to pry off the key cap, the whole delicate underpinning scattered in a shower of miniscule parts…There were three tiny interlocking bits of plastic under the cap. Four nubbets on the underside of the cap were supposed to fit into microscopic openings at the ends of a rectangular pad that was held in place by two harness-arms. These in turn slotted into almost invisible mounting fixtures on the laptop chassis."

A true-life horror story at Fresh Bilge. 

Attacking modernity

Why the double bombing on Mustansiriyah University in Baghdad that killed scores of women students? Simple, says Alan Sullivan, the seablogger:

"If the women get ideas about liberty, they might change the Dark Age culture of honor, shame, and female bondage that blights the Islamic world."

The Jihadis only like women when they’re covered from head to toe, speak only to family and submit to daily beatings.

But even Israeli Arabs are not immune. A teenage girl in Ramle, near Tel Aviv, is dead in what police are calling an "honor killing" for not hewing to the dress code.

UPDATE  Mohammed at Iraq the Model has a memorial for the dead students:

"A policeman says: the cell phones didn’t stop ringing in their pockets and purses but there was no one to answer…they were gone. The ringing will keep me awake tonight, angels of Iraq."

Metric measures

Texas, as far as I know, has managed to avoid this so far: the imposition of the metric system in Florida health care without regard for patients discovered by the seablogger at Fresh Bilge:

"In Florida clinics I’ve visited recently, weight was measured in kilograms, temperature in celsius. The staff couldn’t even provide translation, and the only vital sign I understood was blood pressure."

He sees it as a manifestion of pushy, European-style globalism. Also unAmerican, if you ask me.

Say a prayer

Give a thought and a prayer for Alan Sullivan, the seablogger at Fresh Bilge, who is struggling to win a second remission from cancer. Meanwhile, stop by and read his eclectic thoughts between bouts of applying fresh varnish to his oceangoing home.