NOLA Pyrate Week

Had fun last weekend at the opening of NOLA Pyrate Week. Hung out for three hours or so with a group of pirates who had descended on the Pirates Cafe, met a lot of the freebooter folk.

Sadly, the camera was acting up so we didn't get a lot of pics. Here are a few we did get.

 

Me, with what I regret is the only picture that worked of Seika 'Hellbound,' right, quartermaster   of NOLA Pyrate Week. Sunday she officiated at a pirate wedding of Cherokee Jenny Dubs & Master Edward ‘Doc’ Lawless. At least, also with his back to the camera, is Charles Duffy, who heads up the NOLA Krewe of Pirates. We affectionately refer to him as Max's "drunken bastard uncle Chuck."

 Do not know these three, but they seemed very nice. And you've gotta love the guy's leatherwork.

Also do not know this fella's name, but he was a great guy, reminded me of several other pirates I esteem, and shared with me both a drink from his gigantic flask and his recipe for what he called brandywine.

Amon and Merlot, a pair of fancy freebooters originally from Colorado. Funny story, she assured me we'd met before, in 2004 (or 2006, I don't recall) in San Diego at a pirate festival. I told her that wasn't likely, since I haven't been to San Diego since 1979. She was sure the Pirate Guys, the guys who'd invented Talk Like a Pirate Day were there. I asked, "Were they collecting money for anything?" She said yeah, as near as she could recall they'd been selling something. Bloody pirates!

 

 The wind didn't cooperate in fluttering this rather large pirate pennant, but it was a dandy. And look closely at the guy's garb and gear. Most of it is made from junk! Including his shoulder pads, made from old speakers. Very cool. Nice work!

Pirates in Popeye’s – A Curious Coda

I thought I was done writing about Talk Like a Pirate Day for the year. The holiday was a week and a half ago, and I thought my last column was the cap. As usual, I was wrong.

Friday afternoon was busy. At 2:30 I left the house to pick up the kids (Max and his girlfriend Lauren, who practically lives at our house) from high school. Then we had to drive 20 minutes in the opposite direction through heavy traffic to where Tori had been subbing most of the week in a first-grade class and pick her up. Because Max's high school had a football game that night and he and Lauren are in the band, they had to be back at school by 5:30. So we decided to just grab some chicken on the way home. We stopped at Popeye's.

I had placed the order and was waiting when Tori came in and handed me the phone. "It's New Zealand," she said.

The previous weekend I had missed connections with the last of this year's phone interviews, a children's morning radio show in Dunedin, New Zealand, called "Space Station Kiwi." Time zone differences had buggered us. Saturday morning in New Zealand was Friday afternoon here, but we hadn't figured out precisely when. I had written it off. He apparently had not, and now, a week later. he tried again and got through.

So there I was standing in the middle of Popeye's chicken (Louisiana fresh!) growling into the phone. With the heavy traffic passing by, taking the phone outside was out of the question, so I moved to the corner of the dining area.

Heads of the eight to a dozen diners jerked up in surprise. The cook heard me bellow "Aarrr! Ahoy thar!" and came out and asked Tori if he should call the paramedics. Really.

I sat in the corner and did the live interview. It was actually fun. "Captain Cornflake," as the show's host calls himself, did all these space sound effects – whooshes and beeps and clanks – with nothing more than his mouth. If I were a Kiwi kid, I'd make a point of listening in. Because it was a kids show the questions were a little off the usual path. I ended up warning the kids about the dangers of scurvy and why they need to eat their fruits and vegetables.

The dozen or so diners were staring, not sure whether to be worried or amused. From time to time I looked up, smiled non-threateningly, and shrugged, as if to say, "Hey, what can I do?"

Meanwhile Tori was standing nearby, trying not to laugh at me, and Max and Lauren (who is fascinated by us) tried to look like they didn't know me and were not in fact really there.

Teenagers.

In all, it took about ten minutes, maybe twelve. By this time Tori had our order in hand. I finished, stood, smiled and apologized to the room of bemused diners. "It was an interview, New Zealand. You know how they are." And we left.

The kids made it to their game on time, and their school won 75-0. The EJHS team is apparently pretty good.

Tori had checked out a movie from the library to show the first graders, and we watched it Saturday night. "Muppet Treasure Island." It's not a "serious" pirate movie, but who wants pirate movies to be serious? It's silly, Tim Curry is a great Long John Silver, the kid playing Jim Hawkins wasn't terribly annoying, at least not more than most kids playing Hawkins.

"Muppet Treasure Island" is a fun and funny movie.

It is, as Tim Curry says in my favorite number, "When You're a Professional Pirate," "a festival of conviviality!"

And that, I think, is probably the last word on the holiday for the year.

But I'm usually wrong about that.

A Writer on Writing

I have been reading this terrific book on writing. It’s called “Bird by Bird,” and it’s by Ann Lamott. It’s not the best or the most useful writing book I’ve ever read, although it’s awfully good. The reason I like it is, first, it’s very funny. The funniest book on writing I’ve ever read. And it’s so true. She writes about writing as if it’s a mental illness, which it sort of is.

Lamott doesn’t come out and say, “By the way, all writers are crazy.” But she makes it pretty clear she and all the writers she knows are at least mildly crazy, paranoid, obsessive, with no sense of perspective. All the students in her writing classes are also crazy, she implies. They also mostly seem to want their money back. But that’s between Lamott and the students, I guess.

Anyway, buried in among all the very funny stuff about the ways in which writers’ minds works to keep them unhappy and worried that everyone including their immediate family is talking about them behind their backs – are some really excellent nuggets of advise, including allowing yourself to fail, not sitting down to "write a novel" but giving yourself small, manageable assignments each day that add up to a novel in the end, and my favorite – write a shitty first draft. It may be shitty, but you can’t fix it if you don’t write it down. Perfectionism, she observes, is the voice of the oppressor.

I came across the book, by the way, through our daughter Alex. She’s taking classes at UVI and one of them is a creative writing class and this is one of the texts. Unlike her other textbooks, this is one she won’t be selling back at the end of the semester. If she doesn’t want it, I’m taking it. So there's the island connection for this blog.

Seriously, if you’re at all interested in writers or writing or you just like a good read and enjoy a laugh, pick up “Bird by Bird.” Good book.

Kind of Cool

There is still no storm activity in the Atlantic basin. With the hurricane season down to its last six weeks, it's been unbelievably mild. Not that we're complaining.

We've had a couple of alerts. This time of year - basically June through November but mostly August and September you keep one eye always on the Atlantic, and try to keep plenty of hurricane stores on hand. We even got a small generator this year.

But so far, nothing. Nothing at all. between the wind shear coming off South America, the heavy Saharan dust and dry air, no big storms have formed up and come marauding into the Caribbean, despite the warm surface temperatures of the ocean.

But this is kind of cool (since it's about a hundred miles away. Otherwise it might be anything from worrisome to terrifying.) The volcano on Montserrat has started erupting again. This is a photo taken by the International Space Station (where they sometimes talk like pirates!) The picture is from the NASA Web site.

To help orient yourself - the ash plume is drifting west, the narrow end of the island points almost due north. Montserrat is south of St. Kitts & Nevis, and Nevis is about a hundred miles due east of us here on St. Croix - where we're still keeping an eye on the Atlantic Basin.

There'll Always Be An England

SPORTS UPDATE: You will be relieved, no doubt, to learn that England has regained its cricket form and now beaten the West Indies team twice in a row after losing the opener of the series, which I wrote about here.

Or, as the AP has it, "Swann helped dismiss the home team for 285 in reply to the visitor's first innings of 566-9." Actually, the more I think about it, the more comprehensible that becomes. Quick! Must stop thinking!

No stunning yorkers or nudging to second slip in the AP report, but I was delighted to read that "the seamers did such a good job with the reverse swing ..." I imagine you're delighted, too.

Just thought you should know.

Today's physics lesson and what it means

"As entropy increases, order decreases."

That's physics. Some rule or something. I heard it in college a gazillion years ago, although what I was doing in a class where someone was talking about physics I can't now recall. There must have been a reason.

But that little kernel of information remains with me, one of a small handful of facts that I have unaccountably retained over the years, stubbornly clinging to the inside of my head like a sodden Wheaties flake that dried on the table and now can't be scraped off. What it means, if I remember rightly and that's almost certainly not the case, is that entropy is a measure of order or organization, the lower the entropy the higher the organization. A heavy element, with it's cloud of electrons and it's massive nucleus has more order than a hydrogen atom. A molecule represents more order than an atom. A galaxy has more order than a diffuse cloud of gas. (I'm almost certain I'm getting this wrong, because I don’t think I understood it completely in college and that was a long time ago.)

And, in this universe we live in, the tendency is for entropy to increase. Order is always breaking down, big things slowly devolving into their constituent parts until someday (hopefully not soon but you never know) the entire universe (including all of us) will be one evenly spaced field of sub-atomic particles a tiny flicker of a degree above absolute zero.

Something like that.

And what in the world am I writing this for? Even if I'm right, and that seems highly unlikely, what could possibly be the point of wasting blog space on it?

Another way of stating that law - As entropy increases, order decreases – would be this simpler statement: Stuff breaks. A new law of physics! Call it Baur's Universal Constant.

That seems particularly apropos today. As I've noted, we had car trouble the last couple of months. We've had water problems. And those problems have redoubled this week. The water went out Wednesday, here it is Friday and we still don't have running water in the house. The plumber (nice guy, moved here four months ago from Texas) is here again and has tracked down three leaks in the supply line that feeds from the cistern to the pump. It doesn't mean water's leaking out, it means air is leaking in, the pump can't hold the prime and I can't take a shower. And I really need a shower by now. Three days without running water. I think I've told you the process I have to go through to flush the toilet, I won't belabor the point.

What's weird is (and here's where the physics lesson comes in,) nothing happened to suddenly cause these leaks. It's not like I ran over the pipe with the car, or a meteor hit or something. Tuesday everything worked fine. Wednesday, not. I can only think it has to do with a sudden, localized burst of entropy.

Bertha (our car) is similar. We bought her from a guy moving back to the states, so it's not like he was dumping a lemon. She's been a good rig for us. Until the ignition problem started in December. Then a brake problem in January. And a tiny leak in the cooling system the mechanic couldn't find, but he told us to keep an eye on the radiator level and carry a jug of coolant with us at all times. That's how it is with cars, they run great, but once a problem starts, there's a cascade effect.

Tori was driving to school yesterday morning with Max and Millie in the car. They had just turned off the highway (the island's only four-lane road) and were heading up East Airport Road when there was a tremendous crashing/grinding sound, as if they'd been hit. Tori pulled over and looked. No damage. She got back in and started driving - and immediately the car started shaking violently. It was barely controllable. She pulled into the gas station just up the road and looked underneath. The rear torsion bar had snapped like a twig. Had it happened 10 minutes earlier, when she was driving 60 on the highway, it's horrifying to think what might have happened.

As luck would have it, the gas station she pulled in at was not more than 200 yards from an auto repair place. She VERY slowly drove to it, then called school and got someone to come out and pick them up.

The guys at Unique Auto Repair were able to fix it at a fraction of what I thought it would cost. There was no replacement part on the island (that's often the case) but a torsion bar isn't a big, complicated thing - it's a bar that essentially holds the rear wheels in place while you drive. No big deal. They welded it back together, reinforced it, and charged us very little. When school was over she was able to get back out there, pick it up and drive home, rattled but otherwise safe and sound.

So that story has a happy ending. Considering how it could have ended, we'll take it.

But it's just another warning to be on the lookout for entropy in your life. I've got a birthday coming up, and ever since I turned 50 I've felt my personal entropy rising exponentially. Here on St. Croix, it's even more so. This is a high-entropy part of the universe. So perhaps for my birthday I'm going to see if anybody sells an entropy meter. Probably Radio Shack. Or Kmart. Or Mr. Dollar - one of our favorite stores on the island. He sells everything, and like the sign out front says, "If we don't have it, you don't need it." Since I need a personal entropy meter, it stands to reason that he must have it. Although I recall vaguely from another college class (Logic) that "universal affirmatives can be only partly converted" - whatever that means - so I should probably call ahead first and ask.

But that'd be a really useful tool to have. It wouldn't stop entropy from increasing, but at least it'd give me a warning. That's all I ask. Although, given local entropic conditions, the meter would be the next thing to break.

Waiting for the Plumber

Here's the thing about water on St. Croix and most Caribbean islands - There isn't any.

Oh sure, we're surrounded by water - we're on an island, after all, and from almost any vantage point we get views of some of the most spectacularly blue waters on Earth. But it's like in the Coleridge poem:

Water, water everywhere,
and all the boards did shrink.
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

(Yes, I know most people think it's "but not a drop to drink." Tell them to look it up.)

But all that water is, of course, salt water. You can't drink it. St. Croix doesn't have any huge freshwater aquifer to drill for, no rolling rivers or reservoirs to draw from. We've got -

The rain. Virtually all the drinking water on St,. Croix falls from the sky, runs down your roof and is funneled into a cistern below the house. Then it's pumped up by your water pump and that's your water supply. So rain from time to time is a very good thing. (And by the way, rainwater doesn't have any minerals in it, so residents are advised to take a vitamin supplement with minerals. Just thought that was interesting.)

So fresh water is a pretty valuable commodity, and a Crucian takes pride and/or comfort in a large, brimming reservoir the way friends of mine back in Oregon take comfort and pride in a huge wood pile for the stove or fireplace.

This all comes to mind because there's something wrong with our pump today. We actually have two cisterns - one under the front porch and another under the kitchen, with pipes and valves to switch from one to the other. Between them we can probably store around 10,000 to 12,000 gallons of water. But the back one is empty, and the front one is kinda low. But more to the point, the pump is not drawing water out of the cistern (yes, I've checked, the valves are set for the front cistern, but thanks for the suggestion.)

To flush the toilets while waiting for the plumber (due in about another hour) I have to open the cistern (the concrete lid of the thing is heavy, maybe 80 pounds or more,) drop a bucket down on a rope to pull up a couple of gallons to pour into the tanks. Same for washing dishes last night.

It doesn't pay to look too closely into the reservoir. A big concrete space, and when they're empty a kind of creepy nothing. They are not particularly clean. The water is clear, but there's "stuff" in there. That's why we have a filter on the kitchen tap, and buy bottled water for drinking. Showers are short - Navy showers, where you get wet, turn off the water, soap up, turn on the water and rinse off. And you don't flush for just anything. In fact, there are actually restaurants down here with this little jingle posted on the walls:

In this land of fun and sun
We never flush for Number One.

Just to keep the poetic theme going.

I also suspect our gutters may be plugged, which would explain why the cisterns don't seem to charge the way I'd expect despite the fact that we've had a couple of good rainfalls. But that's a different problem for a different day and a different blog post.

Right now I'm just waiting for the plumber, because I tried everything I know and there's still no water running in the house.

jb

Good Freaking Morning!

Usually we get woken up in the morning by roosters. Yes, actual roosters. Cockadoodle doo! Yes!

Seriously, there are chickens and roosters all over the island, thousands of them, and from about 6 a.m. on there's this cacophony of crowing. The poultry don't belong to anyone, heck it's a rare day when there aren't a half a dozen of them in our yard. There are a couple of hens out back clucking right now. And the roosters don't just crow when the sun rises, they crow all damn day and sometimes at 2 in the morning.

But the roosters weren't the culprit this morning. Oh no. I wish it had been roosters. The roosters are nothing. We got woken this morning about 6:30 by the loudest music I've ever heard. And I've been to a few stadium rock concerts back in the day.

Think the loudest pickup truck stereo you've ever heard going Boom-da-da-Boom-da-da-BOOM!-da-da-BOOM!!! Now imagine someone parked that truck in your bedroom.

Turns out this morning was J'ourvert, part of Festival. Every Caribbean Island has its own festival, and St. Croix's is in the weeks before and just after Christmas. We're in the last week of Festival right now.

J'ouvert is the morning tramp - a tramp being when they put a band or a DJ on the back of a truck and drive slowly down the street with people dancing and bouncing in its wake all the way into town. They do several of them during Festival. And J'ouvert is the one they do in the morning. I don't know why, but there you go.

Now, understand that this Jouver't was forming up THREE BLOCKS from our house, and that tells you how loud the music was. It was fucking LOUD. About 8 million decibels, I'm thinking. Louder than a jet plane, that's for sure. I know this because a jet plane actually flew over our house while this was going on, altitude no more than a thousand feet as it descended towards the airport, and I didn't hear a damn thing. THAT'S how loud J'ouvert was. And it went on for about an hour before the truck got moving and they finally faded from our range of hearing.

And the good news is, they started late. They were supposed to start at 5 a.m., according to the schedule. Thank goodness for island time. Nothing starts at the advertised time, unless you're running late and then it's early.

And all that noise didn't wake the kids up.

I'm looking forward to (seriously, I'm looking forward to it) the Saturday Festival parade. It starts about five blocks from here, and it's sort of a super tramp (for those who like their '70s references musical. Get it? Super tramp, Super Tramp? Never mind.) Bands on trucks. People dancing down the street behind them. The winner is the band that gets the most people following its truck. They toss out T-shirts and CDs to get people following them. I've seen photos, and the street is just a mass of swaying, writhing bouncing dancingcelebratingfunhaving humanity. But it starts at the relatively decent hour of 10 a.m. And we'll be there, dancing.

In the Caribbean - you don't WATCH a parade. That's for wimps. You dance it.

UPDATE: A story on Tuesday's J'ouvert, including a photo that really gives a feeling for the event (click on the photo to make it big enough to see anything), is online at The St. Croix Source Web site. The Source is the online newspaper (a paper with no paper) that I work for. Judging from Bill's story, I must have several of the details wrong. I don't care. It looks like fun!

Omar III

Landlord came back with more plywood and we're all buttoned down now. Then he headed off to take care of his own home. He mentioned that this house was built about 1964, so it's been through Hugo and others. "This is built right, not like the stuff they're building now," he snorted.

Virtually all the houses in the Caribbean are built of cement and/or cinderblock. You know what you call a stick-built house in a hurricane? Toothpicks. You know what you call a mobile home in a hurricane? A box kite.

In laying in supplies, we thought far enough ahead to include a case of Heineken. Gotta keep your fluids up! This seems like the wrong place to mention, but I'll mention it anyway, that I've been very surprised to discover that people here think Coors Lite is beer. There are a few local beers, and the brewpub in Christiansted does a dark ale called Blackbeard's Ale. It's good, but it's no Dead Guy Ale. And Coors Lite is the top selling beer on the island. I can't fathom it.

We're just hoping that the power stays on long enough to let us see the presidential debate. That ought to be entertaining. But the latest look at the Wunderground (weather underground) maps show Omar making straight for us, I mean like we're the head pin in a bowling alley and Mother Nature is trying for a strike. So we may not get to watch the fun.

Tori's midly disappointed that she couldn't go snorkeling today. When school was cancelled yesterday, first thing she did was wake Alex and take her down to the beach for a swim with the fish. She's gotten hooked on it, and she's been swimming with rays, squid, sea turtles, octopi and lots more. But the swell is up today, the water's choppy and looks turbid. Not even Tori is THAT fanatical to try swimming in this. It'll be a couple of days, and that'll be the first time since August (when we moved into this house) that she's gone more than three days without hitting the sea.

Speaking of which, I wonder how the vacation house we stayed in when we first got here will fare. It's on the north side of the island so might be okay, but it's right on the water, and there's an awful lot of glass.

But that's not for us to worry about today. Today we're hunkered down and staying so for the near future.

Still raining, but not much wind yet. That'll change, I'm sure, as we get closer to nightfall – and landfall.

jb

No news is good news

Just in case anyone was wondering or worrying about us, there is still no trouble from hurricanes here on St. Croix. As I write this, Ike is 340 miles almost due north of the island, heading west. We're told there might be some sea surge, maybe a little extra rain, but that's about it. I can honestly say I Like Ike, because it's not coming here.

A few days ago we had another pretty good lightning storm over the water, and some torrential rains that evening. But it wasn't enough to knock out the power, and on this island it doesn't take much to do that. That was the very edge of Hannah brushing past on its way northwest.

It's all a matter of perspective. While the TV was full of Gustav about to touch down, that was old news here. Gustav had passed a week earlier. When Hannah started filling the news, we were already looking at Ike and Josephine. Now Ike is safely past us and Josephine (as of now) appears to be a non-factor, angling out into the Atlantic basin, we're tentatively breathing easier. Of course, there's still plenty of time in the season for a K storm, an L, M, N and maybe an O. But they're not actually on the ocean's surface yet.

It's a little like being a bowling pin You know a bowling ball is going to come hurtling down the lane. you're just sitting there, watching and wondering exactly where it'll hit, and there's nothing you can do but get ready. We're preparing for the worst and hoping it won't come to that. But I sure never thought The Weather Cannel would become one of my favorite TV stations.

jb