Music for Fridays; Larkin Poe "Long Hard Fall"

Been off visiting my parents for their 60th wedding anniversary.

A poppy bluegrass group with two good looking front(wo)men.

Plus, I'm a sucker for any Dobro, anywhere, anytime.



TOH to YouTuber "Edvinsrec" for pointing the group out.

Gorge Blowout from the Crash Boat

This time the view from outside the Laser.......

Footage of the 2010 Laser Gorge Blowout as shot from the crash boat..........



Brutal!

Laser Grand Master Jets the Gorge

Tillerman (we seem to be joined at the hip recently) posted last year about a Downwind Laser Race in the Columbia Gorge . The Laser Gorge Blowout; eighteen miles downwind in 'NOO-kyuh-luhr' conditions. Drop me in this race and I might be good for two miles and then I'd be upside down, crying uncle.

A YouTube video surfaced this week of top Northwest Laser Grand Master Mark Halman doing the 2010 Gorge Blowout and a helluva downwind sailing lesson this old fart demonstrated for the cameras. Finished fourth as well.

Any singlehander can tell you that things seem manageable up until you capsize; if you keep capsizing and keep capsizing, strength, concentration, and the will to continue blasting out of control...... all these athletic responses rapidly depart. To keep it together for 18 miles, in these conditions, in a roly-poly Laser, is a remarkable feat.... for anyone, at any age.



Tip of the hat to Mark Halman!

Dylan Winter films the Three Rivers Race, Norfolk Broads, Part 3

There were two more Dylan Winter videos of the 2010 Three Rivers Race that caught my eye; both of them featuring two local Broads dinghy classes.

The Norfolk Punt sailing class developed from gunning punts, but now the sailing Punt is so tricked out as a racing dinghy (double trapeze, assymetric, full battened sails) that the only traditional characteristic that remains is the canoe stern (very similar to the International Canoe!). Punt Number 19 seems to be a traditional model with a low rig, long boom, gunter rig. Number 69 and 96 are Wyche and Coppock hard chine designs (designed in the 1950's if memory serves); the most popular sailing Punt model going. The Norfolk Punt is a restricted development class with hull lengths approaching 22 feet. Some of the higher number hulls have probably had the hand of one of the modern English dinghy boffins, like Morrison or Howlett, in drawing up their lines.

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Sorry, video has been removed!

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And the Norfolk One Design. Designed and built by Herbert Woods, the first in 1931 and the last was built in 1968; 86 in all. The Norfolk One Design's very much look like an Uffa Fox International 14, though they are lapstrake, not smooth bottomed. They seem very comfortable short tacking up the river. A very pretty traditional design!

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Sorry, video has been removed!

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Watching the video of the Norfolk One Design, it occurred to me that one could take a Jet 14 hull, knock the deck off it, put in some seat tanks, add some wooden spars and gunter rig and get very close to the same boat. Oh no, not another mashup!

Tip of the hat to Dylan, my favorite sailing videographer, for this series.

Music for Fridays; Jimmy Fallon, "Pants on the Ground"

I skipped last weeks "Music for Fridays"; my head was in the clouds as Tillerman just discovered that I was a Google #1 hit . I was still basking in all that unexpected Internet notoriety.

Well, it's taken a week. After getting congrats from my kids and a resigned shake of a head from my wife, life has just about returned to normal.

Continuing the "iconic parody" theme from the last post, here is a heretofore unknown Neil Young song performed for the very first time.

Iconic Mashup's and the July Heat

Tillerman, the godfather to sailing blogs, took pity of my lamentations about Blog Mortality and decided to redirect blog traffic my way..... but in a perverse post as befits The Godfather. Tillerman excoriates Classic Mothists for daring to (gasp, the horror of it all) "reconfigure" beater Lasers into very functional Classic Moths. Suffice to say some Classic Mothists took umbrage at Tillerman's rant and the following exchange took place on the Classic Moth forum;

From Rod K.

"That's NOTHING! If you want a flame war, post on a Buick message
board that you just bought a mint '72 GS and want advice on putting a
small block chevy in it."

Reply from George A.

"make that a small block Ford if you want a real war."

And then from George B.

"Well, how about putting a small block Ford in a chopped up Laser...."

Sigh!..... It's hard to keep these tinkerers on topic.

Well, to look at it from the perspective of popular culture, the Maser is another mashup of an icon. For the mashup to be successful, the icon must be popular and well known..... so the Maser pays homage to Laser's ubiquity. A cut down Classic Moth project wouldn't have the same effect if Classic Mothists were cutting down Banshee hulls or Force Five hulls (sorry Joe).

And did I mention that this July ended as the second hottest July on record for the Mid Atlantic. I think we had four or five days near 100 degrees F. For the most part I repaired to the house and sweated.

Which brings together the July heat and an example of an iconic mashup.

"Tropical Heatwave".

First the iconic Marilyn Monroe;



And then the iconic mashup from Miss Piggy and the Muppets (with some Fred Astaire thrown in for good measure);



Does this clarify how the Maser and the Laser are intertwined in iconic parody?

I thought so....

Blog Mortality

Tillerman recently has had two posts, here and here trying to answer that weighty, age old human question, what happens at "the end", when it truly is "finis", when everything is finally "kaput".

I too have been pondering on "the end", but not in the context of aging decrepitude. I've been contemplating the death of blogs. It happens. My output in my second year of blogging has dropped precipitously. In the hyper-accelerated Internet, have I reached my apex and am now rapidly descending to the end? I have several blogs in my blog list that at one time were vibrant with daily posts but now blink feebly, like Tinkerbelle, a post coming once a month, once every three months. Am I watching the death thrall of these blogs, or even the beginning of the end of my blog?

Blogs are human. They have birth, life ,death. Some blogs flame out quickly, some like Tillerman's live a long life (over six years?). Most blogs seem to have a shorter lifespan than guppies.

For the blogger, blogs are time consuming, frivolous, and for most of us, despite what we think, primarily a solitary ego trip.

I have installed a blog counter; it seems conveniently designed to make me feel good. One day it added 400 hits overnight. It blithely adds hits at a nice daily rate, completely divorced from the reality on how small my readership really is.

But I'll let you in on a secret...... I blog for myself. As long as I can amuse myself by clicking on some old links to a "Music for Fridays" video or some arcane sailng topic, I'll keep going for the time being.

Meanwhle, I better add some more posts so that I can bump July up.