Monthly Archives: January 2010

I found, and started playing, an interesting typing game on line the other day. The reason why I started playing the game will be revealed in the natural course of this article, but with the finding and playing of this game I started thinking about my personal, evolving relationship with the printed word.

That relationship started in the first years of my life when my mom and I lived with her parents while my dad was serving on the USS Logan (AP-196) an attack transport ship in the Pacific during WWII. Each evening my grandfather would tuck me in to bed and read me a chapter from one of Howard R. Garis’s  Uncle Wiggily books. While I liked the stories themselves, what I loved the most were the endings like this:

“Now, in case I see a green rose in bloom on the pink lilac bush, I’ll tell you next about Bully making a water wheel.”

“Now in case the little boy next door doesn’t take our baby carriage and make an automobile of it, I’ll tell you next about Bawly and Uncle Wiggily.”

“Now if it should happen that I don’t lose my watch down the inkwell so I can see when it’s time for my pussy cat to have his warm soup, I’ll tell you in the story after this about Bully’s and Bawly’s big jump.”

“Now in case that alligator doesn’t chase after me, and chew up my typewriter to make mincemeat of it for the wax doll, I’ll tell you in the next story about Grandpa Croaker digging a well.”

Of course the next story would be about Grandpa Croaker digging a well, or Bully’s and Bawly’s big jump or whatever the cliff-hanger ending was about.

I was so totally enthralled by these stories I vividly remember gathering up some paper and crayons determined to write my own book. Then, as I set out on this project it occurred to me that, at age four, I didn’t know how to write even a single letter let alone an entire book. No matter how brilliant my story might be, no one would ever understand the scribblings on the paper. Hell, seconds after scrawling out a line I didn’t know what it meant. So the dream was deferred.

When I started school I whizzed through Dick and Jane in about a week and started to devour just about everything I could get my hands on. I remember that in the second grade my teacher asked me how I learned to use commas. Well, DUH, if you read books you see them everywhere.

My father, back from the war, was a voracious reader. Books were everywhere and since he didn’t approve of comic books I had to read what was available. By third grade I had a library card and in the sixth grade I was tested as having the reading level of a college freshman. The only thing I thought strange about that was I thought all my classmates should be reading at that level, too. My mom, though she always said she enjoyed reading didn’t do much of it. After all, she had a husband and five boys to look after. What she did in lieu of reading was knit. She was a veritable loom. A Madam Defarge without the guillotine.

(An aside regarding my mother and her knitting. She made wonderful things. Well in to my fifties I still had sweaters she had made for me when I was in high school <and I was still of a size that they fit me>. Later in life I married a girl who only read one book <Valley of the Dolls> in the seven years we were married, but she was a seamstress. She made almost all of her own clothes. She could look at a dress in a magazine and then sit down and make one for herself. In their spare time both she and my mom created things that were useful and lasted for years while my father and I had stacks of books to show for our wasted hours.

I’ll never forget the evening when I was twelve years old and watching television sprawled out on the living room floor when she put her knitting aside, got out of her rocking chair and said, “come with me.” I followed her out to the back of the house where the laundry was located. “This is how you use the washer,” she said going through the procedure. “This is how the dryer works.” Then, setting up the ironing board she proceeded with, “This is how you iron a shirt,” and “this is how you iron a pair of pants.” And that was the last time she ever did it for me, and as each of my brothers hit the magic age of 12 they, too, learned the mysteries of the laundry room. There was absolutely nothing wrong with any of this and I firmly believe all mothers should do the same thing with their sons. It was so funny when I went away to college the first time I went to the laundromat to do my clothes. There I was putting my whites in one machine and my colored things in another while all around me were a bunch of guys reading the backs of boxes of laundry soap trying to figure things out.)

It’s a shame that boys weren’t required to take typing classes in high school. Almost all of the girls took typing and the ones destined to become “secretaries” took shorthand as well. On reflection all these years later both typing and shorthand should have been required courses for those of bound for college. The typing for the term papers we were destined to write with all their ibids and op cits, and shorthand for note taking in lectures.

I got my first typewriter, a portable Smith-Corona my senior year in high school and worked out a typing system that was to serve me for the next four decades. I didn’t learn how to “touch type.” I found it impossible to get a good, crisp impression on a sheet of paper with those keys that required the use of the little fingers. Instead what I pieced together worked this way: I used the little finger of my left hand on the Shift key and my index and middle fingers on the other left hand side of the QWERTY keyboard. My right index and middle fingers found the keys on the right side of the keyboard while my thumb worked the Space bar and my little finger hit the Shift key when a capital letter was required from the left side of the board. Even when I acquired an electric typewriter and pressing the letter “Q” no longer required brute force I  didn’t modify my typing style. Any I remember when I got a job where I got to use an IBM Selectric. Man, did I think that was tits, that little ball spinning around. State of the Art technology.

That system served me well through college, a short stint in the Public Information Office of the USS Lake Champlain (CVS 39). It worked for me as a general assignment reporter on the Cape Cod Standard-Times, as assistant editor of the Inland Printer/American Lithographer magazine, as an advertising copywriter and hospital public relations hack and a hundred or so freelance magazine articles. It is interesting to note that the reporters at the two news rooms I worked in (as a copy boy <yes, there was such a creature> at the Miami Herald and at the aforementioned Standard-Times) generally pounded out their stories with only three or four fingers. If you see old news reel footage of the likes of Walter Cronkite and Andy Rooney you’ll see them typing like that. The only people I ever saw “touch typing” in a newspaper office were the secretaries.

Despite my typing style, I was fairly fast and could pound out about 30 or 35 words per minute, but I was, of course, hampered with certain work that required me to look at a book or some sort of printed material and then type out what was necessary. I had to stop typing, look at the book and then back at the keyboard when I needed to type.

About 15 years ago I bought my first computer. It was then that I decided to learn how to “touch type” since you could buy a program that would teach you how to do it. Of course I modified the learning curve by not bothering to learn the keys with the numbers and symbols since I rarely use them in writing anyway and I’ll never have a job that requires a blinding typing speed anyway. With a little practice and playing the typing games when there wasn’t anything interesting to watch on the electronic cyclops my typing speed was pretty consistently in the low 40 wpm range and I no longer needed to look at the keyboard in order to type.

Recently, being bored, I looked up some online typing games to play and one has grabbed me. It’s a lot of fun. It’s called “Type Down.” The object of the game is to prevent a rising column of 20 words from reaching the top of the page. When you finish a group of words the next group’s speed increases and three groups represent a level. When you complete a level the next group’s words are longer and the speed is reset. Quite challenging. You can find it here…

http://www.onlytypinggames.com/games/type_down/

One of my favorite New Orleans piano players was James Booker. Not only was he a great piano player, but he worked for a time for the City of New Orleans and was a champion typist which shouldn’t be too surprising since the typewriter is simply another kind of keyboard.

Ever thought about owning your own B&B in a romantic location? Here’s your perfect opportunity. This 4,000+ square foot home with 3 separate apartments in Panama City, Panama is currently for sale.

It’s recently renovated and located in the quiet residential neighborhood of Balboa in what was formerly called “The Canal Zone.” It’s just minutes away from world-class restaurants on the Amador Causeway; the Albrook Mall, one of the biggest shopping malls in the Western Hemisphere; and down town Panama City, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in world is a short, 10 minute drive away.

The house has 8 bedrooms, 5 baths and 3 kitchens and is TAX EXEMPT until 2022!!!

I know, personally, that the house is EXACTLY as described. I spent five days there this year and if I had the where with all I’d consider it for myself.

If you’re interested and contact the owner, let him know you saw it here on the Old Salt’s blog (and in the interest of full disclosure, there’s a little something in it for me if you do.)

Healthy is merely the slowest possible rate at which a human being can die.

There’s a blog of exceptional literary quality that I check on daily, and while bookmarked on my home page there is also a link here on the right side of the page in my “Blog Roll”…it’s called “The Task At Hand…A Writer’s On-Going Search for Just the Right Word” and is found here: http://shoreacres.wordpress.com/. Not only are the posts themselves a great read, but so are the comments and the author’s responses to them.

In her most recent posting one of the comments mentioned fog and it brought back memories I have had with fog.  Having a problem falling asleep tonight thoughts of  fog kept tickling my brain to the point that here I am at the keyboard at 3:25 a.m. writing about the stuff.

The poet Carl Sandburg wrote:

The fog comes

on little cat feet

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

Sandburg was a fool. The only thing he got right was relating fog to a cat…both equally sinister, evil, sneaky and despicable entities.

Basically fog is little more than a cloud with a fear of flying. Fog forms when water vapor in the air at the surface begins to condense into liquid water and normally occurs at a relative humidity of 100%. This can be achieved by either adding moisture to the air or dropping the ambient air temperature.

There are several kinds of fog. Radiation Fog is formed by the cooling of the land after sunset by thermal radiation  in calm conditions with clear sky. The cool ground produces condensation  in the nearby air by heat conduction.  It occurs at night and generally doesn’t last long after sunrise when things begin to warm up. Radiation fog is most often referred to as Ground Fog.

Then there’s Advection fog which occurs when moist air passes over a cool surface by advection  (wind) and is cooled. It is common as a  warm front  passes over an area with significant snowpack and is most common at sea when tropical air encounters cooler waters. In Louisiana, where I worked for several years running crew boats, we would encounter advection fog in the Spring and Fall. In the Fall it was caused by cold air from northern winds sweeping over the warm waters of the marshes and the Gulf waters and in the Spring time when the shallow waters had been cooled by winter temperatures the fog would form when the warm air returned from the south. Advection fog is also known by sailors as Sea Smoke.

Precipitation fog (or frontal fog) forms as rain  falls into drier air below the cloud and the liquid droplets evaporate into water vapor. The water vapor cools and at the dewpoint it condenses and fog forms.

Upslope fog or hill fog forms when winds blow air up a slope  (called orographic lift), adiabatically (occurring without loss or gain of heat) as it rises, and causing the moisture in it to condense. This often causes freezing fog on mountaintops, where the cloud ceinling would not otherwise be low enough.

Valley fog forms in mountain valleys, often during winter. It is the result of a temperature inversion caused by heavier cold air settling into a valley, with warmer air passing over the mountains above. It is essentially radiation fog confined by local topography, and cal last for several days in calm conditions.

Frozen fog is any kind of fog where the droplets have frozen into extremely tiny crystals of ice in midair. Generally this requires temperatures at or below −35 °C (−30 °F), making it common only in and near the Arctic and Antarctic  regions. It is most often seen in urban areas where it is created by the freezing of water vapor present in automobile exhaust and combustion -products from heating and power generation. Urban ice fog can become extremely dense and will persist day and night until the temperature rises.

Garua fog is a type of fog which happens to occur by the coast of Chile and Peru. The normal fog produced by the sea travels inland, but suddenly meets an area of hot air. This causes the water particles of fog to shrink by evaporation, producing a transparent mist. Garua fog is nearly invisible, yet it still forces drivers to use windshield wipers.

Hail fog sometimes occurs in the vicinity of significant hail accumulations due to decreased temperature and increased moisture leading to saturation in a very shallow layer near the surface. It most often occurs when there is a warm, humid layer atop the hail and when wind is light. This ground fog tends to be localized but can be extremely dense and abrupt. It may form shortly after the hail falls; when the hail has had time to cool the air and as it absorbs heat when melting and evaporating.

None of the stuff is any good.

Fog was quite common where I grew up on Cape Cod since, essentially, the Cape is surrounded by water. To the east of my town of Orleans was the Atlantic Ocean and the cold Labrador current passes quite close to shore. The waters of Cape Cod and Buzzard’s Bay and Nantucket Sound to the north west and south are relatively warmer than the ocean so the mixing of warm and cold air passing over these bodies of water is very conducive to the formation of fog.

I vividly remember one night when my mother was driving my brothers and I back home from an excursion to Boston. Around Hyannis, about 30 miles west of where we lived, we ran into a real “pea souper.” Fog so thick we could barely see past the hood of the old “Woody” Ford station wagon we had at the time. (Boy, do I wish I had that car now; my financial worries would be over.)

Headlights are worthless in fog. The droplets of water diffuse and scatter the rays of light making visibility even worse. Knowing that the fog wouldn’t lift until after sunrise, there was no way my mother was going to have us camping out in the car over night. We were driving on what is now known as Route 6A, a narrow, two-lane, twisting road through Barnstable, Yarmouth, Harwich, Brewster and Orleans and then on up all the way to Provincetown where the Cape ends. Her solution was simple. She opened her door a crack and crept along in first gear keeping her eyes on the white line running down the center of the road. We spent several hours in that fashion moving slowly along the deserted road until we reached the road where we had to turn to get to our house. That wasn’t hard to recognize since there was only one stop light on 6A between Hyannis and Orleans.

For boaters there is absolutely NOTHING worse than fog. High winds and heavy seas can be dealt with rather easily. It’s hand to hand combat against the elements. A battle of survival. Fog is creepy. It distorts the perceptions. It blinds you. The horizon disappears. Fog even bends sound waves so that what you hear over there is actually over here. If you’re lucky and have radar you can at least determine what is hidden out of sight. Under normal operating conditions, out of sight of land, you steer the course indicated on your compass, but that’s not easy in the fog. In the brief time you take looking in the radar to check your surroundings by the time you look back at your compass you’ll be way off your course.

My first winter in Louisiana I worked in the oil and gas production field for Kerr-McGee in Breton Sound running a small, 48 foot crew boat similar to this:

We actually lived on Breton Island which is about 30 miles south east of the mainland and the southernmost of a chain of islands that extend north eastwards to Mississippi Sound. The field was immense, extending about 20 miles north of the island and 12 miles south and 10 miles or so east and west. There were hundreds of oil and high-pressure gas wells that fed into five “facilities” like this:

Each morning at 6 a.m. we would take the men who maintained the wells to their facilities and then spend the days running them to each well leading into their facilities for the next 12 hours. And we did it, literally, in all kinds of weather short of a hurricane. “Small craft warnings?” We laughed at small craft warnings. Actually we didn’t laugh at them, we simply ignored them and went about our work. The operating principle for crew boat skippers is you “go or go home.” And if you go home they don’t let you come back.

We would get horrible fog conditions each Fall and Spring but we went to work anyway. I remember one horrid day of fog. We’d taken the men to their facilities and then just tied off to the nearby barges that the crude oil was stored in to wait for the end of the day when we could take the men back to the island. I picked up three men and was heading back at idle speed peering into an ancient Kelvin-Hughes radar to pick up the day marker at the seaward side of the channel leading into the island’s lagoon.

I loved that old Kelvin-Hughes. All the other boats were equipped with newer Furunos but mine was the only radar that could pick up the marker, simply a piece of drill pipe driven into the bottom, and I could spot it from about three miles away. The Furunos couldn’t pick it up from anything over a half mile.

While I was creeping along the idiot captain of another boat was blasting along full-bore, and those boats topped out at around 35 mph, when he ran head-on into one of the big day markers that guided ocean-going freighters up the Mississippi Gulf Outlet Channel  to the Port of New Orleans. The accommodations in the crew boat cabins were aluminum bench-type, three-man seats through bolted to the aluminum deck. When he hit the day marker, and believe me he couldn’t have hit it any more perfectly had he been aiming for it, everyone was thrown forward by the sudden stop. One poor soul hit the back of the seat in front of him ripping the seat out of the deck and destroying everything south of his nose. The injured man had to suffer for another four hours as another crew boat searched for the damaged vessel, transferred him aboard and crept the 30 miles to the closest dock where an ambulance waited to take him to a hospital. Of the five boats out there that day, mine was the only one to make it back to the island for the night. Everyone else had to spend the night in the field.

No, fog is the only thing that scares me out on the water.

The great science fiction author, Ray Bradbury, had this to say:

“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold, sunless shore and said, ‘We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice like all of time and all the fog that ever was; I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their soul, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a foghorn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.’

“To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.” ~Agnes De Mille

“Dancers are the athletes of God.” ~Albert Einstein

“Whatever you want to do, do it. There are only so many tomorrows”

“The people who do not dance are the dead.” ~Jerry Rose of Dance Caravan

“You know you’re dancing when tears of pain and happiness blend in with your sweat” ~anonymous

“Champion”  Jack Dupree is another New Orleans piano pounder I have always admired though I never got to see him play. Orphaned at age 2 he grew up in the New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs as did Luis Armstrong. Jack taught himself piano and became known as a barrel-house  style “professor.”

In his early years he lived in Chicago and then moved to Detroit where he worked as a cook and met the great Joe Louis who encouraged Jack to become a boxer. He ultimately fought in 107 bouts and winning the Golden Gloves and other championships, and picked up the nickname “Champion Jack” that he used for the rest of his life.

Dupree moved to Europe in 1960 living in Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and England before settling in Germany where he died of cancer in 1992.