Fenced in Ice

 

 

The drive in to work was a little different this morning. Sleet hissed on the tin roof all night, then rain. Then it all froze.

Nice that the roads stayed clear.

Tonight, dense fog.

More sleet and snow and freezing rain coming by morning. One to three inches.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dog Walker

 

direct video link 

 

Snow expected by morning, followed by ice.

Took a walk through the back field in a light mist. Deer hunters are out.

The old dog is almost deaf, and can’t see me if I’m more than twenty feet away; but his nose still works, and he enjoys it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yankee Point ~ Video

 

direct video link

 

Sailing season is all but over here, for this year. This morning there was ice covering the puddles. Fourth day in a row this week. We’ve had the wood stove on high since Thanksgiving, and have not ventured far from it.

It’s nice now to have the clips from this trip to work with, and relive it a bit.

Looking back through my files, I see there are several trips that never got posted – been a busy year. Looks like I’ll have material to carry well into winter, when clips of hot summer days on the water will be very welcome.

 

 

 

Commercial Success

Speaking of video, my animator/filmmaker friend Jonah Tobias is currently moving steadily up the ranks of a video-mercial contest. He and a handful of local photographer, under-employed actor, and writer friends threw this together in a mad caffeinated marathon of movie-making over a few days. He wanted Terri to be an extra in it, but she couldn’t take time away from a mad dash to a deadline of her own. (More of which, later.)

Jonah’s first break into the almost-big-time was doing all the animation for the independent documentary Supersize Me (link to trailer). The film won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, and was nominated for an Academy Award.

He does the stage and A/V graphics for many of the TED events, and for several years has done all the concert animation graphics for Tim McGraw’s live shows.

These projects are the tropical islands between which he must swim, like all freelancers, through a barren ocean of no-work. Life jackets and bits of flotsam that keep you afloat take the form of commercial work, things you hang onto just to keep from going under. He has an impressive list of clients for everything from pharmaceutical info-graphics to environmental advocacy.

Anyway, this new adrenaline project is a crowd-sourced commercial contest for Doritos (interesting junk-food connection we’ll let slide). The top couple of winners get their commercial aired during the upcoming Super Bowl. Oh, and that’s Jonah in the commercial as the mad scientist:

 

 

If you are so inclined, give it a view and a rating. Send the link to friends. If he wins, he gets to go the big game. I don’t think he cares for football, so that will be an entertaining twist. Almost torture for him, entertaining for me.

 

 

Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

As someone inured and enamored with words, I have followed John Koenig’s blog Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows since it’s early days.

He just posted his first video “definition” and it’s really, really well done.

If you’re a word person, enjoy:

 

Sonder | The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows from John Koenig on Vimeo.

 

 

Yankee Point

Almost exactly one year ago, to the day.

 

The Corrotoman juts off the north shore of the Rappahannock, a mile or so upriver from the White Stone Bridge.

When I was a boy the bridge scared me. Even my dog was afraid of the bridge, and would cower in the floor of the back seat when she saw the big steel trusses approaching.

Not just because it is very high for a bridge – when it was built post Pearl Harbor, the Navy wanted to use the deep Rappahannock as a hurricane hole and disperse the fleet from Norfolk quickly, and be able to get upriver and back even if a storm (or Japanese planes) knocked out the power, so a low, drawbridge type wouldn’t do – but, more significantly, because it was so high a few people had gone over the edge to their deaths. Driving across you could see scars in the guardrails where they swerved and bounced over. Grandfather never failed to point them out. I could imagine too clearly the bumping crunch, the long silence of the drop, and the explosive splash at the end.

Continue reading “Yankee Point”

180,000 Whales

My first real job was with the Virginia Department of Conservation. I ran the Chesapeake Bay Youth Conservation Corps. It was a great job. I got to give away money, which is a good job to have, even though I made very little money myself. I learned a lot in those years about how different people – and groups of people – have an effect upon resources in the public domain.

I grew up around Watermen. They were independent people who almost always worked alone, hard, and for long hours. And except for a few exceptional situations – unusual circumstances outside their control, or some new technology at their disposal that tipped the scales unexpectedly, or a technique that proved more destructive than productive – they rarely had a lasting impact on the fisheries. As independent fishermen, the system was brutally but effectively self-regulating. If there were not enough fish to catch, using only the limited crude methods at their disposal, most of them would lose everything and look for work elsewhere. Only the most determined and those willing to live on the most modest means survived to fish another day.

Nobody got rich fishing anymore. Those days were long gone.

But, like many things, that whole equation changes when corporations take over the business of fishing. With vast capital resources at their disposal, and hard science and technology at their fingertips, the equation gets skewed. It’s like a few men with chain saws and teams of horses logging sustainably for generations, because they can’t do otherwise given their tools, compared to heavy equipment hydraulic tree harvesters and helicopters airlifting clear-cut forests out of the mountains to railroads specifically built for hauling logs. It’s a whole different ballgame.

My great uncle James was a cook on a Menhaden ship in a fleet that operated in the Chesapeake out of Reedville. He made an awesome Waldorf Salad. Once they started using airplanes to spot the scattered shoals of fish from the air, scooping up what was once an entire season’s catch of the diminishing fish in a few sets of the net, the whole situation changed from sustainable harvesting to endgame resource extraction. And he quit.

So this story really interests me. It’s a good story, even if you don’t have that background, because it follows parallels in so many areas; because human beings are remarkably consistent in our behavior. But it really speaks to the challenges facing any attempt to regulate any resource management that assumes self-regulation by the interested parties.

180,000 whales killed in the span of a few years. Not back in they heyday of whaling. No, this was when they were already endangered. Killed off the books, and illegally. By just one country’s fleet of three factory ships.

A good read. And worth keeping in mind whenever we discuss fishing quotas, resource management, and basics of human behavior:

The Most Senseless Environmental Crime of the 20th Century

180,000 whales. Gone in just five years.

Now imagine a coal or oil or gas industry making decisions in any way other than those that increase the short term value for shareholders. Or willingly harvesting less Menhaden, or Cod. It’s their job to obfuscate the facts if those facts are inconvenient, just as it’s the job of a horse trader to hide the real age of his mares. Imagine fur trappers leaving pelts for another day, and trusting each other to do the same. Or African ivory, or rhino tusks.

We cannot assume that they are not lying.