Indulgence Sale!

Given the News Coming Out of NYC, I'll Share What I Keep by My Desk

Power's Back On, But the Candy's Gone. Sorry, Kids.

I, for One, Will Welcome Our New Overlords

Mysterious object from deep space has entered the solar system

Yeah, Try Having a Kale Bake Sale

After dishing out unsolicited opinions in recent years on turkey twizzlers, packed lunches, sugar and free school meals, all seemingly to the end of flogging books and new TV series, Jamie Oliver is at it again. This time he’s denouncing the humble school cake sale.

It May Be Time to Retire This Symbol

A Real Ohio Man Would Have Built His Own System Out of Duct Tape and WD 40

Feds Indict Ohio Man for Possession of Stolen Missile Warning System

Yep

Spare us a ‘Magnum PI’ Remake

Those of us who were around when the original first came on TV may have forgotten, and those who were not yet around don't know, that Magnum P.I. was the first network show to portray Vietnam veterans as anything other than mental cases and shell-shock victims waiting to explode in psychotic violence.

The three main characters, all vets, had responsible jobs and were active in their community.  When aspects of war would float into their consciousness and/or reality, they dealt with it in a manner familiar to those who had been in the real war: Through humor, duty, and a devotion to shared honor.

The episode "Did You Seen the Sunrise?" served as a riveting reminder of the tenacity of human conflict, mixed with Cold War realities and a nice homage to The Manchurian Candidate.  In the end, Magnum makes a choice that was consistent with post-modern Existentialism and the darkness that was always present under his deliberate beach boy persona.

That final scene is still my favorite of 1980's television.

An Almost 29 Foot Wave is Recorded...in Lake Superior

The link may be found here.  In reference to an earlier post: Yes, You Can Surf in Ohio

Masanao John Watanabe

[Originally posted in March of 2013]

Watanabe, second from right, next to Desmond Tutu

"When you eliminate all thoughts about life and death, you will be able to totally disregard your earthly life. This will also enable you to concentrate your attention on eradicating the enemy with unwavering determination, meanwhile reinforcing your excellence in flight skills."
                                                                                      - from the training manual for Kamikaze pilots.

When I was first ordained in the Episcopal Church, I worked in a diocese that was small and somewhat understaffed, even by the standards of the contemporary church.  Hence, there was ample opportunity to become involved in diocesan-level work.  My first full year of priesthood I served on the diocesan budget committee, the editorial board of the diocesan newspaper, the Board of Examining Chaplains [the group that supervises the education of clergy wannabees], and was elected to the Diocesan Council.  As I was also the "Bishop's Chaplain", which was a kind of junior assistant to the diocesan bishop [in other words, I was his driver and general dogsbody], I spent more time at the diocesan house than I did in my two parishes [yes, I ran two parishes at the same time].

This meant that I would be handed remarkable responsibilities from time to time, including being expected to pick up the bishop's dry cleaning, getting the tires on his wife's car rotated, and serving as his adult daughter's date to a wedding reception.  Yeah, seminary didn't cover any of these things.

But one of the more interesting duties was serving as the aide to Masanao John Watanabe, the Primate, or Presiding Bishop, of the Episcopal Church of Japan, who was visiting our diocese for a month as part of our companion relationship with the Nippon Sei Ko Kai [the official name of Japanese Anglicanism].  One evening, before an Evensong at which Bishop Watanabe was to be the preacher [his English was almost perfect], we had occasion to speak of vocation.

As I was a young man, he was curious about my pilgrimage into the ordained life.  I told him of it, admitting that it really wasn't much of a story, and that I was more interested in his journey, especially as Christianity was hardly a common religion in the Japanese society into which he was born.  If I thought my pilgrimage story was dull before, it was about the realize its nadir when the bishop told me of his.

Watanabe had been born into a Shinto family, that series of rituals and practices that even many of its members hesitate to call a religion.  He was accepted into the Japanese naval academy during World War II and was in the process of being trained to be a navy pilot.  As the war began going rather poorly for the Imperial forces, the Japanese Navy changed its tactical profile to include suicide, or "kamikaze", pilots.  Watanabe was selected to be among this group and trained accordingly.


"Nice knowin' ya."

All was going according to plan, the final result to be Watanabe's glorious death in combat, when August of 1945 interrupted all of the martial preparation.  I think I failed to mention that the kamikaze pilots were being trained near Hiroshima.

A few days after the second atomic bomb attack on Japan, Watanabe and the other midshipmen were pressed into duty to recover bodies, locate survivors, clear some rubble, and generally help in any way they could.  As they had already promised to die in combat, they seemed the most likely candidates to send into a radioactive wasteland.  It was during this time, realizing that the world had irrevocably changed into something more terrible than even six years of world war had known, that Watanabe observed the work of some Christian monks, working side by side with the midshipman and other volunteers; working where even the Buddhist monks refused to go.  The impression was such that, after the treaties were signed, the naval cadets sent back home,and with the MacArthur administration re-structuring Japanese life, Watanabe converted to Christianity, took the baptismal name of John, and studied for ordination.

He served in a variety of parishes, eventually becoming bishop of the Diocese of Hokkaido and later Presiding Bishop.  After being re-elected to multiple terms as primate, he "settled down" to spend a few years working as a missionary in the Episcopal/Anglican churches in Tanzania.  When Edmund Browning was elected Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States, he asked Watanabe, with whom he had worked as a missionary in Japan [Browning was fluent in Japanese], to serve as one of his presenters.

Bishop Watanabe died shortly before his 80th birthday of an unusual and aggressive form of cancer thought be to be related to his work in the ruins of Nagasaki.  At his funeral, bishops and other clergy from around the Anglican world came to pray and celebrate with one another, marking his extraordinary life.  Perhaps most telling was the presence of a dark, heavily bearded prelate from an area inside of Russia; an area once belonging to Japan that had been Watnabe's birthplace.  In a quiet moment at the end of the burial mass, the Russian Orthodox bishop offered this prayer:

O Christ our God, who on this all-perfect and saving Feast, art graciously pleased to accept propitiatory prayers for those who are imprisoned in hades, promising unto us who are held in bondage great hope of release from the vileness that doth hinder us and did hinder them: send down Thy consolation and establish their souls in the mansions of the Just; and graciously vouchsafe unto them peace and pardon; for not the dead shall praise thee, O Lord, neither shall they who are in Hell make bold to offer unto thee confession. But we who are living will bless thee, and will pray, and offer unto thee propitiatory prayers and sacrifices for their souls

It makes a rather nice counterpoint to the Kamikaze training manual, doesn't it?

This is...Annoying

Cops knew about Sandy Hook shooter's plot for years.

I was one of the responders.  The sights and sounds of that day still linger in my memory and always will.  The prattle of posturing politicians and virtue-signalling clergy, too. 

To think there was a chance it could have been prevented....  Ah, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

This is Not How It was Done in the Early Church

Unpopular Thoughts

No, Amazon, I don't want to give you money to plant a listening device in my home, even if you give it a woman's name.

Equally, I'm more likely to give an Ethiopian banker my bank account number and password over the internet than give your drivers a key to my house.

From Twitter, I've come to realize that contemporary reading comprehension is slightly better than a mollusk's.

If the term "sexual assault" now includes being touched by a nonagenarian with Parkinson's who's in a wheelchair, while surrounded by his family, then a whole new light is cast on my thirty-five years of nursing home visits.  I may be a much bigger victim than I thought.

This May Be Good News

Some of the music industry’s biggest players are betting that a new sound is ready to catch on. It’s called classic rock.

The genre is being reinvented by young musicians, some of whom are barely out of high school, who are channeling bands their mothers and fathers grew up with.

Yes, I Still Miss Australia

Australian cyclist invents magpie-proof bike helmet

A Sign of the Apocalypse

Stahlys VEGETARIAN Haggis

It's a Way for Atheists to Fill the 'God-Shaped Hole' in Their Lives

What is Mindfulness? Nobody Really Knows, and That’s a Problem

Some of Us Have Noticed This Since, Oh, the Clinton Administration

The Left-Wing Heroes Who Treat Women Like Garbage

Scenes From the Age of Atheism

Thousands of concerned citizens will take part in a new ritual of sorts: commemorating the anniversary of Donald Trump's election by screaming at the sky.

Yes, and Christians are the illogical, superstitious ones.

You Don't Say

Americans Agree More Than They Realize

The other day I listened to a colleague lament that some members of his congregation practiced politics that were not in line with those of the Episcopal Church.  Great, I thought.  Now there's a political litmus test for coming to the altar rail for the sacrament.  I thought we were supposed to be above this.

The fact that his observation went unchallenged and elicited several enthusiastic nods from others indicated the weltanschauung that is diminishing Protestantism.  The thing is, I can speak from experience when I note that a congregation can perform mighty works and also represent a variety of secular ideology within its community.  That's kind of the point of Christianity, really.

By the way, for those wondering, the "politics of The Episcopal Church", in this context, is that of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party:  Socialism, Sanders, single-payer insurance, government wage controls, government-defined marriage, government-permitted education, government-managed benefits and care, etc.

If it has the term "government" as its prefix, it's all 👍, man.  Kind of an ironic perspective for a church, isn't it?

No Offence, Millennial Dudes, but This is Socialism

IMF Says Venezuela's Inflation Rate May Rise Beyond 2,300% in 2018

Surprising Absolutely No One Sentient

'Victimhood narrative' taught in schools fuels anxiety in young women, academic claims

The problem is that it's become profitable for those who teach this.

Yes, You Can Surf in Ohio

One of my colleagues stated to me the other day that one cannot surf in Ohio.  Au contraire, shrieky lady, as one may see above.  This is one of the reasons the Great Lakes are great.

Of course, she informed me this photo wasn't of Ohio, even after I assured her it was.  Heck, I'M IN THE PHOTO!

Clergy have been intolerant of reality since Galileo.

Time For That Asteroid to Hit, I Think

A Natal Anniversary is Marked this Week

This means that I am away until Saturday or so.

Philosopher Albert Camus displaying the heart of Existentialism by cutting the rug some.

Some Unknown Literary-Ecclesial History

Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughter is on the road to sainthood.

Either Archaeological or Entertainment News

The Ark of the Covenant, which supposedly has contained the tablets with the Ten Commandments, is the subject of a new search

Thanks

Uranus Will Look Spectacular This Weekend

Harry Crosby

He had gifts that would have made him an explorer, a soldier of fortune, a revolutionist: they were qualities fatal to a poet. --Malcolm Cowley

You may be forgiven if you never read, nor heard of, the Outré Literary Quarterly.  It existed in and around the Coventry Road neighborhood of Cleveland's east side back in the very late 1970's and very early 1980's.  In its earliest days, it was printed on a mimeograph machine after hours in the main office of Cleveland Central High School or, again after hours, in the English Department office at John Carroll University.  

The Outré was, without question, a bit pretentious, in addition to sometimes being sophomoric, esoteric to the point of obscurity, and self-conscious.  Given that it was the creation of three guys in their twenties who enjoyed beat poetry, punk/new wave music, foreign films, and the CoEvolution Quarterly, that shouldn't come as a surprise.  However, that also meant that the poetry and prose found in the Outré was not what would be found in other periodicals.  Much of it was solicited from graduate students, street poets, songwriters, thwarted housewives, and bookstore or tea house owners. Anyone with a scintilla of literary ability could make a submission and, this was the important part, be taken seriously and graciously by the editors.  

Although the three editors were able to create a welcoming platform for artistic expression, including some pieces that were determinedly experimental, they weren't as adept at the business end of the enterprise.  The Outré Literary Quarterly lasted a glorious six issues.  [Yes, I was one of the three.] 

There was a publisher who served as the model for this literary madness, though, as he had done something similar fifty years before, although in Paris after World War I instead of Cleveland after Vietnam.  As this proto-publisher was dedicated to opening up the rather tight world of creative writing, he was so much on the mind of the three editors that his visage would appear in the upper left corner of every cover of the Outré.  When inevitably asked his identity and the reason for his prominence, the only explanation offered was, "That's Harry Crosby.  Not the singer."

Crosby was born in 1898 to wealth and privilege as the nephew of J.P. Morgan.  He was raised to be the quintessential Boston brahman, educated at St. Mark's School and Harvard, fully prepared to enter into whatever bank or business would have him, although it was unnecessary for him to actually earn a living.  Instead, a significant experience radically altered his world view.

There have been some marvelous stories and books about the ambulance drivers and crews of the American Field Service during The Great War, made all the more interesting as a number of those soldiers would become prominent in literary circles.  Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, ee cummings [that's how he spelled it, although most articles "correct" it to conventional forms of grammar], W. Somerset Maugham, and [my mother's cousin and Yukon poet] Robert Service all drove converted Ford Model T's to and from the battlefields, often at great risk and with no small amount of bravery on display.  Harry Crosby was one of that group and it was during those rather dark days of war that he met the acquaintances who would be a part of his social and professional life until his death.

 

   
While not participants in the same way as were the soldiers in the trenches, the AFS and other ambulance drivers still were privy to the horrors of war.  Their responsibility was to take the screaming, maimed, mad, and dying victims of battle away from the field, unable to help in any substantial manner other to serve as transportation, from one place of mayhem to another.  Namely, the crude battlefront hospitals.  Here they would witness more trauma and more death; nervous breakdowns and aberrant behaviors.  It would have its effect.

Hemingway would be wounded while fulfilling his duties, cummings would witness a gibbering madman eating the eyeballs out of corpses, Maugham would keep a tedious count the number of people he'd watched die, sometime in pieces.  While we nowadays recognize the particular realities of post-traumatic stress disorder, and have developed ways of treating its symptoms, there was no such thing in 1917-1918. 

So, it comes as no surprise that, during the remainder of his life, Hemingway became increasingly violent and dependent on alcohol.  cummings would be institutionalized for a period and, in his poetry [as well as his signature] reject things such as common punctuation or verse structure.  Maugham would write a cathartic novel about a veteran's disordered post-war life and the redemption he found through Eastern religion.  In their literary works and their life stories, one may see the echoes of what they witnessed.

Harry Crosby was no different.  Having been recruited at Harvard, he enthusiastically entered the war hoping to be of service to those in need. Without question, he worked with courage and forthrightness and earned medals in both the American and French armies for his bravery.  By the war's end, he was numb from the futility of it all and obsessed with his intangible, immortal partner in the AFS, so much so that one of his biographers would call him "The Man Who Was in Love with Death".

 

   
Crosby's return to Boston society was difficult.  That may be an understatement.  For the returning survivors of World War I, the United States seemed different and the old ideas no longer carried any merit.  Music would change, from the formal style of orchestras to the frenetic jazz of combos, financial speculation would increase so feverishly that it drove the wealth of the 1920's and, inevitably, the debilitating crash at the end of that decade, theater and literature would become experimental and somewhat racy.

Crosby, wealthy enough to be provided with work by his uncle, and driven by quiet demons, drifted from parties to social events to concerts to dances without any feeling of connection.  He had a Bartleby-like disinterest in the bank where he worked.  While this alarmed his family somewhat, he alarmed them further when, in seeking attachment to something other than his memories of war, he met, and began a notorious relationship with, a married woman who was a few years older and the mother of two children.  

Mary Phelps Jacobs, known as Polly, may have been the liberated woman of her era.  Not only was she, too, a member of the tightly-ruled Boston establishment, a descendant of some of the great families, but she had accomplished something that gave her both independence and her own considerable income.  In frustration with fitting into the new, European-style formal dresses, she updated her undergarments and invented the brassiere, even gaining an official U.S. patent for her invention.  

Honestly, of the people profiled in The Coracle, she may be the most accomplished, based only on her invention.

Feeling the wrath of Boston society for their uncommon, and openly sexual, relationship, and neither being bound to work or family, Crosby and Jacobs left the United States for a freer life in Paris and became founding members of what literary history labels "The Lost Generation".  [Jacobs would soon be divorced from her husband.  He had returned from WWI so traumatized that he enjoyed getting riotously drunk and watching buildings burn.  One could say she, by extension, was a victim of The Great War's horror, too.]

After much drama, including Crosby's relationships with other women [he was J.P. Morgan's nephew, after all] Crosby and Jacobs were married in 1922.  At his suggestion, and to augment their sense of personal change, Polly Jacobs changed her name to Caresse Crosby.  [As absurd as Caresse sounds, Crosby's original suggestion had been "Clytoris", so....]  Crosby then quit his job and dedicated his service and that of Caresse's to the burgeoning literary scene of post-war Paris, especially seeking out those whom he had met during the dark days of his ambulance service.

While originally intending to create a vanity press to publish only Crosby's poetry, given that Paris during that decade was filled with writers, poets, and artists, and as Crosby was fluent in French [it had been his major at Harvard], with Caresse he founded The Black Sun Press in 1928.  In addition to being devoted to finding new and original talent to present to the post-war world, in keeping with the taste instilled in him by his upbringing, Crosby made sure that the volumes he produced were of extremely fine and attractive binding, making them stand out in a field crowded by second-rate product.

Also, as Crosby's personal tastes were rather latitudinal, [he was notorious for hosting the wildest of wild parties among the expatriate community, occasions filled with alcohol, drugs, and the sorts of "interpersonal" exploration that one's mother and the Lord Almighty warn against], he and Caresse were not adverse to soliciting and publishing, without judgement, experimental, or even vulgar, writing.  

Of course, the standard for "vulgar" in the 1920's is tame compared to an evening's viewing of basic cable offerings in our era.  Many of those "vulgar" writers were, by the 1960's, commonly read in public high school curricula and awarded international prizes in the arts.

So, Black Sun Press became one of the first to publish works by James Joyce, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane [previously profiled in The Coracle], D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Archibald MacLeish, and Ernest Hemingway, among others.  With such talent in print, Black Sun was becoming the most successful publisher in Paris and was about to enter the American market in New York.  That's when things went, as the French say, comme un fagot.  [As it's slang, literally meaning "like a bundle", the expression indicates, in modern American idiom, everything going sideways.]

It was at this point, when his literary and business successes were about to become complete, that Crosby's un-processed war trauma, fascination with death, and wandering eye would collide.  Having met a young Bostonian woman, Josephine Rotch, in Paris as she was vacationing on the eve of her marriage, Crosby fell into an absurd affair with her, seemingly ending when she left Paris to return to the States for her marriage.

Crosby, now obsessed with his new love, returned to New York with Caresse three months later, ostensibly to celebrate the Yale-Harvard football game, and re-kindled his relationship with the former Miss Rotch, now Mrs. Bigelow.  Suffice it to say, their intense time together in New York was marked with the betrayal of their respective spouses, melodramatic nicknames [she was his "Fire Princess"] verse after verse of bad poetry written by the two of them to one another, and a remarkable amount of smoked opium. 

Sometime shortly after a party hosted for the Crosby's by Hart Crane, attended by many of Crosby's friends from his ambulance days and clients whom he had made known to the literary world through Black Sun, including e.e. cummings, Malcolm Cowley, William Carlos Williams, and Walker Evans [who, with James Agee, also profiled in The Coracle, would produce one of the great works of the 1930's]  Crosby and Bigelow were found dead in a lovers' hideaway in New York on December 10, 1929.  Crosby had shot Bigelow and them himself, their murder-suicide marked with verses left strewn about the room.  Naturally, the New York papers outdid themselves over the lurid quality of the scandal, with even the rather staid New York Times getting exercised about the details:

COUPLE SHOT DEAD IN ARTISTS' HOTEL; Suicide Compact Is Indicated Between Henry Grew Crosby and Harvard Man's Wife. BUT MOTIVE IS UNKNOWN He Was Socially Prominent in Boston--Bodies Found in Friend's Suite.  

Crosby's final verse, found among the mortal detritus, sums up his morbid philosophy: "One is not in love unless one desires to die with one's beloved. There is only one happiness it is to love and to be loved."  

Boston society was roiled by the deaths and would be divided like the Capulets and the Montagues until distracted a decade later by World War II.  As was unusual for the times, Crosby was cremated and his ashes surrendered to his mother and Caresse.  They never said what they did with them, although the rumor has always been that his ashes were scattered about Manhattan from an airplane, but that's always seemed apocryphal.

Josephine Noyes Rotch Bigelow is buried in Connecticut at the Duck River Cemetery in Old Lyme.  By happenstance, I came across her stone when searching for the burial site of Ezra Lee, America's first submariner.  Rotch-Bigelow's name is not included by the local historical society in the roster of the famous, or infamous, who are interred in the cemetery, making one wonder if the scandal still carries a scent after nearly a century.

With Crosby's death, coming as it did at the end of the Roaring Twenties and the beginning of The Great Depression, the Paris world of expatriate writers and artists began to dissipate, and with it much of the lingering residue of The Great War, as the next decade would produce another opportunity for the human race to practice self-slaughter.  Caresse would remain in Paris and continue The Black Sun Press for a few more years until she returned permanently to the United States.

While he was barely talented enough to be more than a secondary expatriate poet, Crosby's lasting contribution was in enabling the publication of poets and writers who, until that time, had been rejected by the more established houses.  Without his enthusiasm and acceptance of even the most outrageous of work, many of those who would define literature in the American Century would perhaps never have been discovered.  As Harry Crosby knew few, if any, limits in his own life, he brought the same expansiveness to The Black Sun Press' repertoire.

Those who haunt used book stores and auctions have discovered that, because of the quality and artistry of their binding, Black Sun Press books are currently highly prized and command some remarkable prices.  Crosby has been the subject of a serious biography, Black Sun by Geoffrey Wolfe, that attempts to put his brief life and considerable gifts in an historical context, and some of his recently discovered poetry was released in a new volume a few years ago.

What of Caresse, though?  Her life continued to be interesting and may be worth a future examination, itself.

When I Tell People of the Power of Spam in Hawaii, They Never Believe Me

Hawai'i 's Spam black market blamed for spate of crime

Little was in the Ancient World; They were More Interested in Survival than Trendiness

Neolithic Feasts at Stonehenge Were Not Vegan-Friendly

Half the World's Population Lives Within the Circle

No, They Really Aren't

At least not by sentient humans.

Adidas Pizza Shoes Are the Must-Have Accessory for Pepperoni-Loving Fashionistas

I Hope Those Bird-Eating Spiders Don't Develop a Taste for Them

Google drones will drop burritos into people's yards in Australia

As a Matter of Fact, I Did

Oh, I can hardly wait for artificial intelligence.  It'll be like talking to my gran.

Yeah, Maybe It's Time for That Asteroid to Hit Us

It’s a common complaint of modern life that people are so busy photographing or otherwise documenting their lives online that they forget how to behave in the real world. But when it comes to death, we need to talk. It’s astonishing that anyone needs reminding of this, but this is the world we live in: Don’t use your smartphone at a funeral!

We May Have Achieved the Puzzlewit Singularity

School district pulls 'To Kill A Mockingbird' from reading list; 'makes people uncomfortable,' official says

My Senator Gets Confused

“Trump” doesn’t pay insurers, Congress does. Congress didn’t. So Trump can’t. You’re a legislator. https://t.co/PEOTaNEng4

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) October 13, 2017

After Participating in a Good Friday Procession Through Times Square Once, I Realized That NYC is the Most Religiously Friendly City in Which I've Ever Worked

EVERY THURSDAY AND FRIDAY MORNING, Rabbi Moshe Tauber leaves his home in Rockland County, New York, at about 3:30 a.m. He arrives in Manhattan an hour later and drives the 20-mile length of a nearly invisible series of wires that surrounds most of the borough. He starts at 126th Street in Harlem and drives down, hugging the Hudson River most of the way, to Battery Park and back up along the East River, marking in a small notebook where he notices breaks in the line. Known as an eruv, the wire is a symbolic boundary that allows observant Jews to carry out a range of ordinary activities otherwise forbidden on the Shabbat.

I Thought There Were No Guns Allowed Past Wyatt Earp's Dead Line

Man wounded in shooting during fight in Tombstone saloon

What's It Like to Live in a Rectory?

Pretty much like it is in any old house in New England.

One Area of Parenting in Which I Cannot Be Made to Feel Guilty

Why Don’t Millennials Know How to Use a Tape Measure? Ask Their Parents

With a contractor, carpenter, home renovator, and DIY store groupie in the generation following mine, I'm confident that I passed the pleasure of carpentry to a fourth generation.  However, allow me sheepishly to admit that I often use a laser measure these days.

Yes, But the Celtic Surfing 🏄 is Primo

Hurricane Ophelia batters Ireland, trees and power lines down

(Update: Since this was posted, the news bureau changed both the headline and the tone of the story.  They also removed the photos of the Irish surfers.)

An Obituary of Note

Richard Wilbur, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, dead at 96

He May Need to Work on Them a Bit More

Georgia man claimed he was practicing ninja skills when breaking into store, cops say

Points for creativity, anyway.

Satire Works Best When It Rides the Razor's Edge of Reality

Morally Bankrupt Entertainment Industry Totally Baffled As To How Culture Became Morally Bankrupt

He's Got a Point, It Will Be Daunting

Biographers of @realDonaldTrump are going to have to catalog every Tweet, and every string of reactions...Pity his Robert Caro

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) October 13, 2017

KAUAI SURFER BITTEN BY 10-FOOT TIGER SHARK

"I was outside of the waves, just waiting for a set wave to come in,” Milan told Hawaii News Now,” “and all of a sudden, my worst nightmare. Any surfer’s worst nightmare.”

No, The Missionaries Did Not Ban Surfing

This is one of those falsehoods that confirms the adolescent dislike of Christianity ["Organized religion" is one of the most idiotic labels ever developed.  It's like saying something is an "organized system."  Is there such a thing as an un-organized system?] that is often held by youth, adults whose spiritual thinking ended in childhood, and university instructors.  It is a lie that has, through thoughtless repetition, taken on the veneer of truth.

In reality, as the Christian missionaries to the Sandwich Islands brought modern health treatments and medicine with them, they found an epidemic of venereal disease among the islanders.  One of the reasons traditional societies emphasized marriage and fidelity, other than the most obvious of providing a solid psychological foundation for progeny, was to reduce the spread of disease.  The "free love" practiced by the native population, while traditional and certainly popular with visiting sailors, also permitted the rampant spread of debilitating and fatal disease.

This had nothing to do with their prurience and had absolutely nothing to do with surfing.  I satisfied my curiosity about this last year in a visit with the scholars at The Bishop Museum in Honolulu, who showed me letters from Hiram Bingham's fellow missionaries, as well as Bingham himself, where the missionaries spoke admiringly of the practice of surfing and even mentioned participating in it.

Anyway, here's a collection of quotations from writings contemporary to the missinoary age in what became Hawaii:

Did the Missionaries really stop Surfing in Hawaiʻi, as we are most often led to believe?Invariably there are definitive statements that the missionaries “banned” and/or “abolished” surfing, hula, even speaking the Hawaiian language.However, in taking a closer look into the matter, most would likely come to a different conclusion.

John Fairfax and Sylvia Cook

"Because almost anybody with a little bit of know-how can sail. I'm after a battle with nature, primitive and raw." 

The British have a love of eccentric hobbies, a love that is ratified through organizations that indulge their unusual avocations. When I lived in the U.K, I was invited to join a group that collected matchbooks, one that studied the type of cobbles used in ancient walkways, and another that was dedicated to proving that the Earth was indeed flat. There is even a group dedicated to “drainspotting”; that is, taking photos of unusual manhole covers and posting them on the Internet. Disturbingly, the favored candidate for election as Britain’s prime minister is a member of that latter group.

Save for a rather standard interest in the poker club that met in the glorified closet that was the ski club room at Edinburgh’s Royal High School [my cousin was the team captain and had the key], I resisted these baubles.

However, there was rowing, a sport to which I account my rather broad shoulders and their upper-middle-aged tendency to snap, crackle, and pop when I first get up in the morning. I enjoyed those early mornings in a scull along the Water of Leith, but only to the point of mild eccentricity. When I met members of The Ocean Rowing Society at an ancient competition, I discovered the nexus between eccentricity and demented devotion. Not only did they promote, and continue to do so, the sport of casual rowing, but they also encourage the madness of crossing the oceans in rowboats.

There is eccentricity, but that has a certain splendor to it.

The “patron saints” of this pursuit are a couple of characters who are among the final members of that body of adventurous Brits whom I recall admiring during my formative years. These were people, now difficult to find, who desired not to recognize limits for human endeavor, but to strive in all things to discover what may be outside the margins of common existence.

John Fairfax was born in 1937 to an English father and a Bulgarian mother. Because of Fairfax elder’s work, they lived in Italy. It is here that I should warn the reader that, personally, I suspect much of Fairfax’s accounts of his youth require the ingestion of a rather large amount of sodium. Without comment as to their veracity, he would tell people that he was kicked out of the Italian Boy Scouts for firing a pistol at members of another troop, that he would move to Argentina with his mother and live off the land like a jungle boy, that he would join a band of smugglers and pirates, etc. I really haven’t the energy to log all of this bosh.

Two bits of information that I don’t doubt are 1.) He was inspired by the account of two Norwegians who, in 1896, managed to row across the Atlantic Ocean and 2.) Was equally inspired by the rowboat crossing of John Ridgway and Chay Blyth in 1966.  [If the reader follows the link, he or she may see what those two got up to a couple of years later.]

Ridgway and Blyth were very much in the news during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.  They were, along with Sir Francis Chichester, considered to be the eminent watermen of the period, especially as they both rowed across the Atlantic and participated among the few competitors in the first sailboat race of solo circumnavigators. While Fairfax gave many vague reasons for his interest in crossing the Atlantic, I can’t help but think that attention and publicity had something to do with it. This is not a criticism, by the way, as I find that much of human achievement, especially in the broad realm of “adventure”, is encouraged by these twin desires.

So, in London by his early thirties, and not having very much money or any sort of career to speak of, Fairfax trusted his luck and managed to find housing, a small income through legal gambling, and enough leisure to begin training to satisfy what was then a rather singular desire to be the first person to row solo across the Atlantic. Whereas these days there would be all sorts of high technical training devices and strategies, Fairfax made do with daily outings in a rented rowboat on The Serpentine, the lake in Hyde Park that is mostly used by couples floating about with picnic baskets and children sailing small, model ships. The days he favored for training were those when the weather was so bad that he’d be the only one in the water.

Also, through the circumstance of a bold introduction, he made the acquaintance of Uffa Fox, the sailing buddy of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and the designer of many of the sailing craft familiar even in our day. Fox was intrigued by Fairfax’s passion and plans, even if they did seem a tad naive, and was willing to design a rowboat of singular qualities for the journey. He was not, however, impressed by Fairfax's budget, which was nil, so considerable negotiation was necessary, especially in the solicitation of sponsors for the journey. Eventually, enough were found that Fox presented him with the 22-foot, mahogany, self-righting, self-bailing, technological marvel that would be christened “Britannia”. 

However, it wasn’t just donations that were gained through Fairfax’s series of classified newspaper inquiries. An avocational rower, with a dull job, no money, and a fresh divorce, found the ads intriguing and responded. Sylvia Cook would become an indispensable addition to the team and, eventually, to a subsequent adventure.

Other negotiations were necessary as Cook, who, while enamored of the romance of the odyssey, was also a bit alarmed at the off-handedness of the planning and nudged Fairfax into studying celestial navigation, soliciting the donation of a proper radio, and finding ways to store enough food to keep a man healthy enough to do nothing but row a boat for several months. He also consulted with a company that provided food for mountaineers that, while virtually taste-free, would provide enough daily calories to keep rowing. Still, compared with the equipment and supplies that contemporary ocean rowers use, Fairfax was practically paleolithic.

Since Fairfax was British by birth, he did carry with him an impressive supply of brandy on the rowboat, too.

Fairfax, along with Cook, traveled to Spain’s Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa, and launched Britannia on January 20, 1969 to no fanfare whatsoever. It’s just as well, since Fairfax discovered quickly that rowing in the Atlantic was different than rowing The Serpentine. His departure was not so much of an epic poem by Byron than a short comedy by The Three Stooges. Still, for better or worse, he was off.

Fairfax made it from the harbor and out into the open ocean where he would live by his physical ability and wits on brandy, food bars, sharks and other fish that he caught, and whatever donations that he could encourage from passing ships. From time to time, he would even go aboard freighters to enjoy a shower.

One hundred and eighty days later, much thinner and having laced the edges of madness born from loneliness and fatigue, Fairfax encountered some American good old boys, out bombing around the coast of Florida ostensibly looking for fish to catch, who had sighted the Britannia and gave Fairfax the good news that he was almost at his journey’s end. Refusing a tow, determined by row to the beach under his own power, Fairfax crunched the sand in Hollywood, Florida on July 19th. Waiting there for him was Sylvia Cook. Oh, and some members of the press and a pleasant note from the crew of Apollo 11 who had, just the day before, been the first humans to walk on the Moon.

I would mention that, had he been just eight days slower, the record for the first solo rowboat crossing of the Atlantic would have fallen to Tom McClean, also of Britain, who had left Newfoundland in April and, because he was actually a life-long rower who had planned a smarter route, made it to Ireland in just two months.

Naturally, Fairfax had made his point and was determined not to do anything so “bloody stupid” ever again. Just as naturally, two years later, he would begin to row across the Pacific, this time with the companionship of Sylvia Cook.

A note for younger readers: It was considered a bit scandalous for these two to have been cohabiting without benefit of marriage. While common today, in the late sixties and early seventies it was an outré notion. In those days, marriage licenses often had to be presented by younger couples when checking into a motel or hotel to prove their status. Apartments expected the same and in certain municipalities it was illegal for a man and woman to live together without the imprimatur of court or church.

This lent an exotic quality to the Fairfax/Cook adventures, which intoxicated the media, but also placed them in an awkward position. In order not to be accused of supporting a questionable lifestyle, they were forced by convention to present Fairfax and Cook as a pair of platonic adventurers, however with subtle innuendo about what the two might be doing during idle hours in the Pacific.

On April 26, 1971, Fairfax and Cook left San Francisco in the next version of Uffa Fox’s product, the Britannia II, to be the first people to row across the Pacific Ocean. The entire journey would take them almost a year.

Having driven for ten hours in heavy traffic and bad weather in a car with my wife, I can only imagine the stresses on their relationship that would have been caused by such an ordeal. Also, having myself sailed from Seattle to Sydney, the Pacific is larger than one can imagine and, during my three and one-half week voyage, when not near a port, I think we ever only saw one other ship. As impressive as was Fairfax’s solo crossing of the Atlantic, the tandem crossing with Cook is Herculean.

Cook recalled some of the daunting moments in an interview of some years ago:

The lowest point of the trip came, she recalls, towards the end when a shark bit a chunk out of Fairfax’s arm as he was fishing for food. She produces a graphic picture of the open wound. “It was too big to stitch, so I just bound it up. There was this triangle of flesh dangling down and I couldn’t decide whether to leave it or cut it off. Johnny was ashen and I did begin to think – what if he dies? What will I do with the body? If I threw it overboard, everyone would think I’d bumped him off.”

With Fairfax still ailing, they were caught up for five days in Cyclone Emily: “It was like being on the South Downs, but they were all moving.” When it finally passed, they were still 700 miles off the coast of Australia and Fairfax could no longer do his share of the rowing. I have to deduce this: Cook wasn’t going to draw it to my attention. “I did what I could,” she says and shrugs. “I didn’t do it all in a day.” Without her, though, the adventure would have ended in failure.

Landing on Hayman Island off of the coast of Queensland, Australia, Fairfax and Cook became the first people to row across the Pacific. I should say, too, the first people to row across the Pacific and still have a relationship once they hit the beach.

The lives of the two voyagers would eventually un-wind, though, with Fairfax moving to the United States, eventually to the Las Vegas area, to live the rest of his life as a professional gambler. He would even go so far as to list “adventurer” as his occupation on his passport. He would live the life of his choosing until his death in 2012 at the age of 74.

Sylvia Cook, the much more British of the two, would return to England, have a child [although, again, without benefit of sacrament] and work at a variety of jobs as a teacher, clerk, and, these days at nearly eighty years of age, an upholstery tutor at the English version of a Home Depot. Most of those with whom she’s worked have not known of her earlier adventurous and independent life.

Their achievements, however, still serve to inspire ocean rowers well into this century. In 2014, a collection of ocean rowers, thinking of Fairfax and Cook, participated in The Great Pacific Race from Monterey to Honolulu. Despite more modern and technologically advanced craft, despite contemporary training methods, and despite the fact that California to Hawaii isn’t even half the journey as is California to Queensland, only seven of the thirteen crews made it to the race’s end, with several having to be rescued and number of the boats proving unworthy of the effort.

When one of the finishers was asked about how it must have been for Fairfax and Cook, forty years earlier in a comparatively crude boat stocked with, among other things, cigarettes and brandy, to complete a crossing of the entire Pacific Ocean, he confessed that it was, and is, a staggering mystery.

Such is the power of a transient desire, I suppose, as it has powered more human achievement than any amount of planning or training. Or, as Cook noted when reminiscing about her days with Fairfax, “I never knew if I was in love with him or his life. Or if there was a difference. He was a bit of a dreamer, but if you don’t dream you don’t achieve.”

The Britannia, now on display at the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall

Today's Roger Scruton Quotation

"The experience of the sacred is the sudden encounter with freedom" - from The Philosopher on Dover Beach

Okay, This Guy was Hilarious Yesterday. Sorry, Kickball Fans.

There are 2 kinds of countries in the world: those who care about soccer, and those who have landed on the Moon

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) October 11, 2017

Archaeological News

Ancient Board Games in Biblical Gath

Yes, I Still Miss Australia

Magpie struggles to attack motorcyclist on Australian road

and

Deadly snake mistaken for toy at Australian cafe

A Sociological Observation

[I think this is where I have to issue a disclaimer about my politics.  If you love or hate Trump, Clinton, Sanders, or any of these other products of gormless vanity, that's on you.  I find that politicians and I share an indifference towards one another for which I'm grateful.]

A number of months ago, the current vice-president stirred elements of the loyal opposition when he spoke of the agreement that he and his wife had concerning his activities and comportment while in political office.  He would not, for example, dine alone with a woman not his wife.  Given the sexual antics of his colleagues, this seems a safe, healthy, and prudent mutual understanding.

A number of our more emotionally compromised actors, pols, and media luvvies [entertainment, politics, and news are now so intertwined that it's essentially a mighty wad] went a tad ape over it all, accusing the vice-president of all sorts of heinous motivation behind something practiced by two people as part of their marital covenant.  Mostly, he was called "sexist" and this was seen as a warning that he harbored nasty thoughts about women.

I had to laugh at ordained colleagues in the Episcopal Church who also reacted with a canine-esque hydrophobia to this news, as we have the same rule as part of the mandated "safe church" protocol.
The only difference is that our version of this practice is forced upon us by our diocesan authority due to the rather libertine manner in which some of our clergy regard the sacrament of Holy Matrimony, while the Pence's came to their mutual agreement voluntarily.

This whole business now has a certain grimy luster to it in light of the revelations about a Hollywooder's grotesque piggery and its enthusiastic enabling; something that I would think absurdly exaggerated if it were from a plot in one of their violent and smutty products.  This rather undercuts their preferred societal role as the keepers of the moral high-ground, doesn't it?

So, It's a Library That Isn't a...Library

Obama's Presidential Library Won't Actually Have Library Materials

 To quote Basil Fawlty, "Yes, very modern...very socialist."

Needlehooks

I occasionally come across quotations that snag my attention like a needle-hook to yarn. I may or may not agree with the writer's perspective, but the quotation represents something that stirs my thinking and, sometimes, imagination. From time to time, I'll share them and their source, but caveat emptor.

The contempt is not always that explicit, but it's ever present. Increasingly in America all the real divisions seem less like political differences - left/right, progressive/conservative, big government/small government - and more like class indicators: Those Who Matter vs Not Our Kind Of People. Poor Hispanics give Nancy Pelosi a warm fluffy sense of her own virtue and moral superiority (as long as they keep their distance, and we ramp up security next time those Dreamers try to rush the stage), whereas poor whites are just a bunch of yahoos. A touch of #BlackLivesMatter in an awards-show dance routine is edgy and radical (as long as the actual BLM types are on the far horizon torching some other guy's neighborhood), whereas upcountry losers ODing on oxycontin and heroin is hicky and depressing. Transgender bathrooms is a modish boutique issue with an appealing exotic frisson, whereas Christian florists ...whoa, who the hell would trust evangelicals with your centerpiece anyway? What's up with that?..

Amid the condescension, there are contradictions. So a century-old statue of someone dead a hundred and fifty years who does not conform to the identity-group pieties of 2017 must be torn down - whereas an actual flesh-and-blood human being who does not conform to the identity-group pieties of 2017 can stagger around Hollywood and New York and London and Rome treating women like garbage.

Hollywood as a Symptom of a Greater Cultural Disease

The Human Stain: It goes much deeper than one big creep.

Was This in Question?

Yes, You Get Wiser with Age

They're Much Quieter in the Fall and Winter, Too. The Cities, That is, Not the Kids.

Five Great Cities To Take Your Kids To Learn American History

The State of the Media in the 21st Century

To Be Fair, It Can Be

Majority Of Nation’s Christians Believe ‘Theology’ Deadly Disease, Study Finds

There's a Scientific Reason for Every Sensory Phenomena

There’s a Scientific Explanation for Why Fires Are So Romantic

I've Been Saying This for Years

An India Pale Ale, IPA for short, is a strong, hoppy beer that basically gives your tongue a wedgie, noogie and purple-nurple all at the same time, while making your taste buds scream, “Uncle!” And when your little buds do scream, the IPA calls them a wuss. That’s right: IPAs are the bullies of beers, and Americans are falling all over themselves pretending they are delicious.

Terry Tracy and Kathy Kohner

"Some people have Alcoholics Anonymous, Starbucks, church, I was retreating, trying to get away from high school and boys and movies on Saturday night ... I had Malibu." - Kohner

History marks rare moments when people meet for the first time and find some energizing kinship that is intellectual, spiritual, or experiential; a kinship that alters their world and sometimes ours. Often the place of their meeting takes on the luster of the collaboration, too.  

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald met in Paris and compared notes on the style of the 20th century American novel; Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Alexander Woollcott met for lunch as often as possible at New York's Algonquin Hotel and re-invented journalism and criticism; J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis met at an Oxford pub and created between them Narnia and Middle Earth; Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg met in Greenwich Village and created the philosophy of the Beat Generation; John Lennon and Paul McCartney met at a church fair in Liverpool and...well, you know what happened with them.

Terry Tracy and Kathy Kohner never became as famous or influential as those listed above, they were not artists or writers or musicians or philosophers or Oxford dons.  But, for a small portion of misfits in our culture, their meeting changed the manner in which society came to regard them.  Likewise, the place of their meeting, Malibu Beach in Los Angeles County, thus gained a mythic status in fiction, film, and music.

That first meeting came about in 1956 when both were in need of something the other had.  The fifteen-year-old Kohner wanted to borrow a surfboard as she did not have one of her own; Tracy was simply hungry.  Tracy had a couple of balsa wood boards leaning against his driftwood and palm frond beach shack, Kohner had a couple of peanut butter-and-radish sandwiches wrapped in wax paper.  The rest became a story only Hollywood could ruin.  

As nicknames were important in the nascent surf culture, and in testimony to how important Tracy was to the Malibu scene, he became the bearer of two nicknames.  As he had once worked at a nearby hot dog stand, and was known to be a show-off in the water and on the beach [in other words, a hotdog], he was called "Tubesteak" by the surfers his own age.  However, because of the size and strength of his physical being and personality, he was generally known by the younger surfers as "The Big Kahuna."

The Malibu surf gang, with The Big Kahuna waving.

Over time, Kohner was taught to surf, earned her own surfboard, and became the protected surrogate little sister of the tribe.  As she was the only girl and, at 5' tall and 95 pounds, physically slight, the surfers began calling her "the girl midget".  The Big Kahuna shortened it.

He called her "Gidget".

So, every day after school, Gidget would head down to Malibu Beach to surf with The Big Kahuna and the others.  Each evening at dinner she would describe to her father the stories that she heard from the surfers and the adventures they would share in Paradise Cove.  Given that Gidget's father was an author and screenwriter, it was natural that her stories would appear in print and, eventually, on film.

The novel, a mildly fictionalized account of Gidget's summer of 1956, would be published the next year and sell more copies than even Gidget's father, Frederick Kohner, could have hoped.  So many that he spent the rest of his writing career producing sequels to the original and adapting screenplays for the inevitable series of movies.  It became one of those perfect summer beach books, and exposed what was then the small, and still charming, world of southern California surfers.

The first film, Gidget, would star Sandra Dee as the titular character and, remarkably, Cliff Robertson as The Big Kahuna.  [The character would be played by Martin Milner on the 1960's TV show, which starred Sally Field as the girl midget.] The Gidget novels would be written until Gidget Goes New York in 1968, and the films and television versions would continue through various actresses in the leading role until the cancellation of The New Gidget in 1988.  Not bad for an off-hand novel designed to serve as an alternate source of income until Gidget's father received his next screenwriting assignment.

Kohner would step away from her fictional self, however, and would enjoy a life that was far more ordinary than what was presented in the novels, movies, and TV shows.  In fact, she would marry an English professor who had never even heard of Gidget.

Kohner, now Kohner-Zuckerman, will appear, however, each year at a surfing event that benefits a cancer charity.  In 2011, she was inducted into the Surfing Walk of Fame in Huntington Beach, California and is listed as #7 in Surfer Magazine's "25 Most Influential People in Surfing".

But what of The Big Kahuna, Terry "Tubesteak" Tracy?  Portrayed by an Oscar and Emmy-winning actor on screen and by yet another on television, and the dominant personality of Malibu Beach, one would have thought that his name and fame in greater culture would have been notable, too.  In what is a Zen paradox, common in surfing, while Tracy is nowhere as well-known as Gidget, he was far more influential in what became the developing culture.

Tracy was a college drop-out and office drudge, working in a dreary insurance office in Los Angeles when, one day at lunch, he went out for a walk and never came back.  He dumped his office suit, picked some stray beach gear and a couple of balsa wood surfboards [the preferred material in the days before fiberglass], and built a surf shack for himself in Malibu.  While 21st century California is mostly known for its strangling list of civic regulations, Malibu of the 1950's was a gloriously free place where no one cared if some "beatnik" decided to live on the beach and spend his days doing nothing other than waiting for the waves to be right for surfing.  Well, and accept handouts of food and beer.

Because of his singular commitment to not being committed, Tracy became an idol to the other surfers, including Miki Dora, the troubled personality who was regarded as the best surfer anyone had ever seen. While Tracy's technique was not as refined, the least critical would describe him as "decent", he brought to the experience something beyond style or athleticism.  He made it all about having fun at the beach.

For example, on a sunny day in Malibu in the late '50's or early '60's, one could observe a brace of young people riding a curl with style and concentration, each in the common attitude of balance.  Except for one.  He would be standing impossibly straight on top of the board with his arms extended in cruciform, his chin uplifted in an imperial regard.

Yes, that would be the Kahuna, practicing his singular move, "The Royal Hawaiian".

On other occasions, Tracy would ride a donkey down the beach dressed as a Roman Catholic saint, build impossibly large fires around which the other surfers and their disciples would gather in the evenings, and always seemed to have access to the wherewithal necessary to keep the assembly in order.  If there was a party, he probably started it; if there was a commotion, he would calm it.  Tracy enforced the rules of comportment in the surf and the rule of fun on the beach.  He became, for those who knew him, knew of him, or read of him in a Life magazine article about the world of Gidget, the quintessential beach bum.  He was, according to Kohner, the kindest and friendliest member of the tribe.

After a couple of years, the California tendency to over-regulate reared its grotesque head and the "authorities" [actually, the Malibu parks and recreation department] tore down The Big Kahuna's shack.  With that, beach bum culture evolved, surrendering a portion of its innocence and fun.

Tracy would marry, have seven children, and work a variety of jobs.  He was always around the beach somewhere, and he would continue to surf until his un-disciplined lifestyle resulted in a debilitating case of diabetes which would cause him to surrender the surf and the beach and, eventually, his mortality.  He died in the summer of 2012 at the age of 77.

The Big Kahuna in his later years; still with a sense of humor.

As a friend mentioned upon his passing, "Once the lifeguards showed up and began regulating, that was it. Tube ruled through charm and good humor. LA County lifeguards ruled through laws and regulations. No beach fires. No alcohol. No shack. Kind of like how, a hundred years earlier, when the missionaries squashed gambling and public nudity, they pretty much squashed surfing, as well. For Tubesteak, if you remove the shack and the beer, what's the point?"

Well, there is one lingering point for which we should be grateful.  During a recent trip to ride the hurricane agitated waves in south Jersey, I was musing about the changes in surfing and its culture since my introduction to it in the late 1960's, as there are more people in the water, more equipment to be had, and greater accessibility to instruction.  Surfing is much more technical these days and, frankly, a little soul-less compared to what I once knew.

That's because I had forgotten, and re-learned yet again on those waves, that this whole business is supposed to be fun.  That, more than anything else, is what has powered me through the years and the injuries and the aging on the beaches from Ocean City to Bondi.  That seems to be, as learned from the Kahuna, the one, great translatable spiritual lesson that makes surfing, and life, worthwhile.

[A note from The Coracle: Yes, we've had two surf-associated postings over the last two Fridays, but those on the eastern shore have to admit that the summer has been long one, almost endless, and the days that haven't been claimed by work have been spent in The Great Other that is the ocean.  As the season is coming to its inevitable end, so we will move onto other subjects next week.  Well, there may be some water to it....]