Yearly Archives: 2009

This is wonderful and worth a look.

The whole video is over an hour and a half long. Embedding has been disabled but you can get to it by going here:

It says the video isn’t abailable, but it is. I’m watching it off and on while writing this.

I have lived in southeast Florida, off and on, since I arrived in August of 1961 to attend the University of Miami. (Notice I said attend, not study. I had a real good time and learned absolutely nothing except that driving out to Crandon Park in a convertible with the top down in February beat slogging through the snow to go to classes in Missouri where I’d spent the previous winter.)

Through the years people have asked the question, “How can you stand the summers there? Isn’t it horribly hot?”

I would always answer, truthfully, that I had never seen it hit 1oo here. Close, but never made it to the century mark. I’ve seen it get to 100 on Cape Cod when I was a kid. Same thing in Chicago and New Orleans when I lived there. Every summer all over the United States it hit’s 100, but our southeast breezes off the Atlantic always keeps us just under the magic number. Sure, the “heat index,” summer’s answer to the “wind chill” factor…the “feels like” temperature will be over 100 degrees, but the mercury, what the temperature actually is, has always stayed below 100.

That is until yesterday. At 4:59 p.m. at the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport, the official National Weather Service reporting station it hit 100 tying the record set on August 4, 1944!  The temperature actually reached 101 degrees in Fort Lauderdale but only for a few minutes, said meteorologist Brad Diehl of the National Weather Service in Miami.

“It didn’t retain that value long enough to count,” he said.

The heat index came in at 111 degrees.

It’s been raining all morning today and the temperature is clocking in at a comfortable 74.

I have been avoiding doing anything about the subject of legendery boat designer Phil Bolger since he took his own life May 24th. It seemed as if everyone who has a boat site on the web did their tribute to Phil. My main contributor, Ken Hulme, sent a post which I declined to put on here because I didn’t want to add to the overload.

Earlier today I stumbled across the site http://www.furledsails.com/. The site has 148 “podcasts” all relating in one way or another with boats, boating and the people involded in same. There are two very interesting interviews with Phil Bolger to be found here. If you have an iPod you can listen to Phil and his sylibant “esses” and maybe learn a thing or two.

The other podcasts, like with Lin and Larry Pardey, Ted Brewer and Chay Blyth and John Guzzewell who sailed his Trekka into yachting history are also there, too.

I’D LOVE TO LIVE HERE….

It is the Cinque Terre, a rugged portion of coast on the Italian Riviera.  It is in the Liguria region of  Italy, to the west of the city of La Spezia. “The Five Lands” comprises five villages: Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore.

The coastline, the five villages, and the surrounding hillsides are all part of the Cinque Terre National Park and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Being retired I go to bed when I want to and get up whenever it happens. However, I set the alarm once a week so I can get up and watch the program Sunday Morning on the giant one-eye HDTV in my bedroom. While I enjoy almost all the stories they air, I really look forward to Bill Geist’s offerings. I think of Bill as sort of a gonzo Charles Kuralt. Since it’s summer they’re playing reruns on Sunday Morning and I got to watch Bill’s visit to the Heart Attack Grill in Tempe, Arizona. I loved it the first time and loved it this morning, too. If you are ambitious, go to youtube and search “Heart Attack Grill” and then  pick and choose from over 1,000 hits. Even Geraldo Rivera made a trip there, but I love Bill’s best. So, if you don’t have anything better to do for the next five minutes, check it out…

Even the Japanese know about the grill

And that bastion of gastronomy, the French pallet, where ketchup is labeled “sauce Americaine” had their shot at the grill…

But as with everything in life that’s fun there’s some person out there with a defective humor gene, like the Arizona Board of Nursing and Sandy Summers of the Center for Nursing  Advocacy.

I bet she’s the kind of person who tells their kids early on that there’s no Santa, Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy.