RETURN OF (O)CT(O)PUS

Last week, Octopus took time off to explore the western shores of the Florida peninsula and visit the sponge docks of Tarpon Springs, a quaint fishing village originally settled by Greek divers over a century ago.

The way Florida hangs off the contiguous 48 states makes one wonder why this land is considered “florid” when a more apt descriptor should be “flaccid.”

To traverse the state, most Flaccidians take Interstate 4 that connects Daytona on the east coast to Tampa on the west. However cephalopods are water-bound creatures and land routes are not an option. I took the seaward route around the southernmost tip where the infamous River of Crass flows into Flaccida Bay. There I found this:


Clean, spacious, stupidity-free, and ready to move-in, it appears to be a perfect place to start a family with plenty of room to raise 200,000+ octopod fries at one time … all destined to become liberal bloggers!

There are ships in bottles, but Blue Moon is a treasure-trove of empty bottles inside a ship … beer, wine, and gin discards in assorted colors and sizes. Empty bottles are important to Octopods because we prefer them to beds. Perhaps this is a throwback to our univalve days when we carried our abode everywhere.

All I need now is to find a calmly mimic octopus for a mate. Why a mimic octopus, you ask? Even among the most faithful of cephalopods, la diversité est le sel de la vie.

Home from the sea

After days of overcast skies, it was refreshing to be awoken by sunlight streaming through a porthole on a bright Sunday morning. It was hardly refreshing to watch the usual Sunday TV Godblathering over breakfast. The Something Or Other ministries was appealing for last minute funds to fight the coming national disaster: the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor, who would, because she is ethnic and her record notwithstanding, bias the court in favor of Hispanics in direct contradiction to God's will. It's nice to live in a country where such bigots get special tax status because they wave Bibles now and then, even if it's only to bludgeon people with.

We cast off and pulled out into the Intra-Coastal waterway just in time to wait 15 minutes for the Atlantic Avenue bridge to open and looking around the cloudless sky, I spotted something I haven't seen for a while - a skywriter. U + GOD was soon spread against the sky like an idiot screaming from a window.

An hour later. with an extra hundred gallons in the tanks and some $330 poorer; we were booming out of the Lake Worth inlet at 22 knots into the open and turquoise sea. It felt almost like an escape into a fresh, clean and fragrant world -- and not an easy one with all the small fishing boats who seem to think the middle of a shipping channel is a perfect place to spend the morning fishing. Switch on the radar, check the proper waypoints on the chart plotter and push the red button on the auto-pilot. Heading due North, the blue hull cuts through the swells and we're free of the land and its barbarism for a while.

If only it were as easy to escape the smell of religion, the reek of stupidity and the stench of bigotry.

Out of town musings

I'm not the least bit surprised at the Pew poll showing that only 6% of scientists are Republicans. Republicans, at least these days, are all about belief, whether it's in some magical beings and magical places and magical events or magical economic schemes that somehow never seem to be demonstrable. I was told some years ago of a Mensa study indicating that religiosity declined significantly in proportion to IQ, but I can't confirm it.

I was trying out the new digital TV spectrum on Blue Moon this morning. We're some 6o miles south of home port on the Florida coast. I was amazed at the proportion given over to bombastic preachers such as the one trying to "prove" with authoritarian proclamation and a bullying tone, that the first amendment really asserts a Christianist agenda and that secularists, scientists, intellectuals and of course "Liberals" are the enemies of freedom.

Is it just me, or do they sound just like Republicans arguing that they stand for small, cheap and almost impotent government?

Yes, digital broadcasting is a big improvement in terms of picture and number of channels available, but the price we pay is to suffer greater indignities against truth, reason, logic, history, justice and most of all -- freedom of religion. I have to wonder if the age of reason would ever have dawned, even as briefly as it did: i have to wonder if there would have been an American Revolution had the vast majority of militant, authoritarian dullards been able to have such means of expression as technology has given them.

Posted from the Delray Beach Yacht Club

Some Things Never Change!

After several very frustrating weeks, my home network is up and running again. It turned out to be a simple fix but difficult to find.

Many of you know that I work in real estate and so I frequently receive all sorts of professional advertising. I was astounded to find this in my email today.
Remember the Great Mortgage Meltdown that happened a while back… oops, my mistake; that would be the Great Mortgage Meltdown that is still plaguing the real estate market TODAY!?!
People being given mortgages they could barely afford with no money down (read: nothing to lose) and walking away leaving toxic assets all over the country?

Remember government leaders decrying the dastardly money lenders for unsound lending practices and the takeover over of several mortgage companies and banks, including Fannie Mae?

As I pondered the wisdom of a government entity such as the USDA making 102% loans, I could only shake my head and wonder - WTF!?!

No, Mr. Bond -- I expect you to lie

The only creativity coming out of the Republican tribe these days seems to center around new and ever more precious ways to denounce Barak Obama. Still sweating from the effort it took to convince themselves that Obama Supporters see him as the second coming, they're mocking him for not being a messiah.

Take Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) for instance. Hoping you won't remember George Bush's pathetic swoons about looking into Vladimir Putin's eyes and seeing a soul mate, Bond told reporters yesterday that The president's trip to Moscow was a huge pile of shit because nothing was accomplished but an agreement to reduce the huge pile of nukes. Obama should, says Bond, have stopped the repression of the Russian media and commanded them to sanction North Korea if he were a president worth his salt. Obama has simply failed, in one magical moment, to make Russia an obedient, American client state -- as John McCain and Sarah Palin surely would have done with a great flourish of bluster, threat and bravado - and at a lower cost. George Bush? Who?

Posted from Blue Moon,
Port Salerno, Florida

Glass houses

Maybe it's just me, but I have a hard time understanding the pervasive attitude toward the Chinese crackdown on rioting Muslim separatists in Xinjian - if indeed that's what is happening. Articles like this one at Newsweek.com stress the "spin" being put on the rioting and the government response to it and indeed the reasons behind the unrest. I don't pretend to have facts that would challenge any accounts of what's going on, but I do have some history that fairly screams hypocrisy.

How many countries, including our own, treat separatist, secessionist movements without violence? How many can claim fair treatment for ethnic minorities? After all we've taken the opposite side in Israel, we came down hard and violently against the rather small Black Separatist movement here in the 1960's and there can't be anybody who hasn't heard of the bloody suppression of a Southern separatist movement in the 1860's. And then there were the Indian wars. There was the brutal supression of the labor movement in tth 1930's, brutal supression of anti- Vietnam war protesters and enough more to suggest that we're living in a glass house.

We concoct stories of Mexican separatism to scare children and Republicans and to support arguments for ethnic cleansing, yet we allow freedom of speech protection to White Separatists and Alaskan Separatists. I could go on, but it's easier to ask what the US would do if Texas, Arizona and New Mexico were to ask to secede, taking all the mineral and oil resources with them for ethnic and religious reasons. I think you know the answer.

Are we going to tell ourselves we support the Uighurs while a good part of America writes me e-mails demanding that "we" throw the Muslims out of the US? While we won't accept Uighurs we've falsely accused and jailed and abused because we are afraid of them?

Sure, China is trying hard to suppress news coverage. Heard much first hand coverage from Afghanistan lately or from any of the provinces where we're bombing and killing civilians every day in Pakistan? Were you accused of being a terrorist supporter or accomplice for questioning the WMD idea or the destruction of a neutral country? Many of us were, yet here we are, China bashing with tarnished halos and blood on our wings.

This Sums it Up

Keeping with the theme of cartoons, here is a card from someecards.com that seems quite appropriate given the media's current obsession. Couldn't have said it better myself.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Octopus will be away for the next week. Volunteers are needed to keep the beach clean.

Passages:
My heartfelt condolences go to Lindsay for the loss of her grandmother, to Rocky for the loss of her cousin, and to Shaw for the loss of her sister.

Swash Zone Group Therapy:
May I prevail upon all Swash Zoners to dissuade Bloggingdino from feeling any guilt for the asteroid that trashed the planet 65 million years ago. It was sudden, unforeseen, and not his fault.

Global warming, however, is another matter. Those filthy, disgusting humans managed to dig up and burn over 350 million years of sequestered carbon ... in a mere 200 years ... making that asteroid seem puny in comparison. Creatures of the Earth, behold! It is time to hold those humans accountable and sequester THEIR carbon before it is too late!

Hot Florida nights, men in tights

Yes, despite the rain which delayed the fireworks, it was a great 4th of July in beautiful Stuart Florida. We watched the spectacle, sponsored by a local car dealer famous for bilking the elderly, aboard a friend's Hattaras and trying, as usual, to avoid talking about politics. As crazy as it was a year ago, it's crazier now that the last few decades of Republican policy and economic theory have been wilfully forgotten and new memories forged about the way we were.

In nearby West Palm Beach, not far from the homes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, politicians and propagandists were out working the crowds of tea flavoured idiots, some dressed in items of late 18th century attire.

"Yes, we do need change, you can start by giving me my money back!"

yelled Joyce Kaufman, of AM station 850-WFTL.

"I don't care which side of the aisle you're on, if you're taking money away from my children, you've got to go"

said GOP Congressional candidate Edward Lynch who lost the 2008 race to a Democrat. Of course he cares about little else, but who knows whether he really believes our current predicament derives from the expensive attempts of the current administration to keep our economy alive long enough to recover and not from the decades of "debt doesn't matter' and "upper bracket tax cuts boost the economy" and "freedom isn't free?"

"yes, I had doubts about George Bush, but this guy. . ." was a common theme, as though any of the people clinging to it actually did anything to question the years of borrowing, revenue cutting, removal of oversight, deregulation, expense bloating and war mongering, the newly legalized scams and frauds and schemes and practices that havecharacterized those on that "side of the aisle." In fact most of these people would have deported you, if they could have, simply for questioning the Right Wing Religion.

To me, it's like yelling about dental bills when you haven't brushed your teeth or seen a dentist for 20 years. It's like complaining about how the repair bills are putting you into debt when you let the Sex Pistols crash at your house for years and left your checkbook and credit cards and key to the liquor cabinet on the kitchen table. It's your own damn fault and many of us predicted this collapse years ago to a chorus of your jeers and accusations.

Sure the dentist may be too expensive or the contractor may not be the best, but when you let it all go to hell, when you wouldn't listen to any advice, it's your fault and wearing three-cornered hats, knee length pants and tights in the 90 degree heat isn't going to get "your" money back after you spent it on a useless war that cost nearly as much as WW II and on gifts to the richest men and corporations in the world.

HAVE A BLAST!

Or else the dog gets it!