Red Right… Returning?

As someone who has spent more time in the last six years than I ever could have imagined either tying and/or chaining, then untying and/or unchaining, tour boats and barges onto or away from very large cruise ships, I was interested in today’s top story from Italy, especially this photo credited to AFP/Getty Images.

How interesting that, instead of the usual red and green marker buoys, the island of Giglio, off the Tuscan Coast, has red and green lighthouses. But then, as I looked again at the photo, it occurred to me that it seemed backward, for the red lighthouse, certainly, should be on the right, not the left.

Which led me to this webpage, which includes information I had never imagined — that in Europe, Africa, and most of Asia, not only do the foreigners often drive on the wrong side of the road, their rules of the sea state “red left returning. This is, that site suggests, because “when we were at war with the mightiest navy in the world over 230 years, the revolutionaries turned all the buoys around so that the English men-of-war would run aground… and we just kept them that way ever since…!”

Duh

Every so often something comes along that’s so obvious you can’t believe you never considered it before. Example: many years ago I was walking around the campus of the University of Washington and came upon a large statue of George Washington. Oh. That’s who the place (the whole state, in fact) is named after.

Today’s example: I’m reading an old Agatha Christie novel from the 1930s called Poirot Loses a Client (English title, Dumb Witness) when, in Chapter 8 (Roman chapter, VIII), the great Hercule Poirot is pretending to be interested in buying a house in the country. During a tour of the place he and his companion Captain Arthur Hastings are shown the drawing room, whereupon, Hastings writes, “The drawing-room conjured up memories of the past… The atmosphere of a bygone day, a day of leisure, of refinement, of ‘ladies and gentlemen’ closed round me. This was indeed a ‘withdrawing-room’.”

Oh. That’s why they’re called that.

QWERTY

Michael sends word of a Guardian gallery dedicated to writers and their typewriters. Very nice — although I have trouble believing that Agatha Christie actually worked under those conditions.

They should have a photo of the great Charles Bukowski, who summed it all up in Notes of a Dirty Old Man, 1973: “WHEN YOU LEAVE YOUR TYPEWRITER YOU LEAVE YOUR MACHINE GUN AND THE RATS COME POURING THROUGH.”

Bukowski also said, in a poem in You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense, 1988: “take a writer away from his typewriter / and all you have left / is / the sickness / which started him / typing / in the / beginning.”

Ah, the millions (?) of keys pressed, the thousands of pages produced, in a former life spent with typewriters. Dean Koontz told me some 35 years ago, on the first evening I spent discussing books with him in his Central PA living room, that he had surprised local repairmen by typing so much and so often that he actually melted the motor of his IBM Selectric, fusing its innards into an unworkable mass. What a joy it was back then to even own one of those — mine was a lovely blue — even though it never produced any books, let alone dozens as did Koontz’s.

And now not only typewriters are — in the words of Miracle Max — “mostly dead,” it’s hard to find even a decent replacement keyboard that’s moderately priced. People type mostlywith their thumbs these days, on tiny phones.

Old People’s Music

Dan, a friend from the 60s, emails from Texas about Wolfgang’s Vault, which he calls “a site featuring an astonishing number of concert videos and other music-related stuff. There’s a free subscription and a premium one; my freebie takes me to a seemingly endless archive.”

(Wolfgang, of course, was the nickname (or maybe the Americanized first name) of the late great music promoter Bill Graham, born Wolodia Grajonca in Germany in 1931.)

Dan continues, “These videos bring back memories of great concerts I attended — Coleman Hawkins at Gettysburg College, Simon and Garfunkel at Cornell, Jimi Hendrix in St. Louis, Miles Davis at the Hollywood Bowl, 1969 Newport Jazz Festival, Lena Horne at Tanglewood, Brooks and Dunn at their taping of Austin City Limits — and those I took a pass on:
* An unknown Canadian folkie named Joni, whom I missed on a trip to Boston
* Some weird Brit rocker, Elton something or other, when I lived in LA in 1970
* About a dozen Rolling Stones tours
* And, of course, the Mudstock Dope Festival, which all my New Haven roommates trekked to.”

* * *
I wrote back to Dan: “Sounds like you must be an old person. According to the Internet that was the first week ‘Elton something or other’ ever performed in America. I saw him at the Farm Show Arena in Harrisburg, Thanksgiving 1972, and thought he was pretty brand new then.

“I was pretty brand new myself that year, as a music reviewer for the Harrisburg Independent Press, and surprised to get a phone call from somebody in… Pittsburgh, I think it was… saying that since the local daily paper wasn’t interested, would I like to come cover the show? The voice said he would leave a ticket for me at the box office, and then I could go to a party in town afterwards with Elton. The ticket was there, as promised, then afterwards I waited around in the bowels on the Farm Show for maybe a half-hour or so until, when no one showed up looking for me, I went home alone.

”Ah, the rock and roll lifestyle.”

The ‘unknown Canadian’ named Joni I saw even earlier, the first week of November 1968 at the tiny Main Point in Bryn Mawr PA, with my friend Keith who went to Haverford College nearby. She also was pretty brand new, having only released one album at the time. The thing I most think about from that show was that her opening act, Chris Smither, still goes around playing little clubs and arts centers like he did back then. He’s going to be in White River Junction on the other side of VT, at the Tupelo Music Hall next month. Almost 45 years later!

p.s. As Paul Harvey used to say: “And now. The rest of the story.” Three years after not partying with Elton — July 1975 — with the local daily still not interested in covering rock music, I got another call, this time from a guy in New York City who wanted me to go to the gym at Kutztown State College to cover a tour Columbia Records was promoting heavily. ”That’s like 75 miles away,” I protested, at the same time I probably was thinking to myself, “And I’ll have to borrow my mom’s car.” The Kutztown gym, also, was no Fillmore East.

The promo guy kept at it, and nagged me into going (which I did). He insisted that I would love the show (which I really did). And it’s a matter of historical record that 3 months and 2 days after that night — thanks no doubt to my review in HIP — Bruce Springsteen appeared on the cover of both Time and Newsweek.

The Hick

“Did you hear this one, Richard?” Kevin asks me at the end of today’s lighthouse tour. “The other day on the whale watch this guy come to the galley and asks Todd for two bottles of water. He’s maybe 50, bearded, he looks like… well, basically the guy’s a hick. So Todd get out two waters, puts them on the counter, and suddenly the guy snarls at him, ‘American water not good enough for you people?’

“ ‘What?’ Todd says; he can’t figure out what’s going on. Then he looks at the water sitting on the counter. Two bottles of Poland Spring. ‘Why don’t you people buy American, instead of this Polish crap?’ the hick wants to know, at which point Todd realizes he really doesn’t want to get into a discussion with him….”

I Should Talk…

My favorite grandniece (well, I only have one, I guess) celebrated her first birthday last Wednesday. Which surprised me — her parents run the most active child blog maybe in history, and I have heard so much about this kid already that I assumed she was at least two or three years old.

The blog is a welcome oasis of happiness in the usually dismal news of the day, in fact, but I was teasing her mother (one of my two favorite nieces of the two I’ve got) about all the attention her daughter gets. “How many photos have you taken of her so far?” I asked. “Your digital camera will tell you.”

Turned out the answer was about 7,000. 7,000! (A year, by the way, is made up of 8,760 hours, so 7,000 equals a photo about every 75 minutes. Every single day. Of the same little girl.) I suppose, actually, that many photos get taken of, say, Scarlett Johansson or Angelina Jolie, every time they walk outside, but we’re talking here about a (as of last Wednesday) one-year-old.

So I laughed about that a bit, and then a day later it occurred to me to check out how many digital photos I’d taken during that same year, June 2 to June 2. Not all of the same kid, it’s true, but when I added things up from my two cameras, the answer was (d..r..u..m  r..o..l..l..) 13,779.

13,779! In one year! That’s, like, close to 200% of 7,000. (In my defense, let me say that at least a dozen or so of the pictures were very very good.)

I was so embarrassed that the next day I went over to a gathering in central Maine and shot 542 more.

Pack Fair and Square

One of my favorite blogs, The Walker, is consistently good; today it takes a look back at an early 1980s concert at the Los Angeles Coliseum featuring The Rolling Stones, The J. Geils Band, and a then-little-known performer named Prince, who outraged the crowd when he appeared in “a long black greatcoat that opens to reveal he’s wearing nothing but bikini underpants underneath.”

I was never a huge fan of J. Geils, but I admire their live album Full House, which I think is a masterpiece. When I myself saw them in the early 1970s (not in a splendid coliseum but in a hockey arena in Hershey PA), I was most surprised to find that Peter Wolf — who at the time was seriously involved with Faye Dunaway, who subsequently became his wife — appeared from my vantage point to be a weird little troll, who spent much of the concert frog-hopping around the stage.

“Why would a glamorous actress be dating a frog-like gnome?” I wondered, but when I met up with Wolf after the show, in my capacity as the area’s ‘with-it’ concert reviewer, I found him to be a) not short, b) not troll-like at all, and, in fact, c) quite handsome, intelligent and charming. When I photographed him, he even asked if I would send any good photos to him, since he needed some new ones.

I immediately envisioned a whole new career for myself — photographer to the stars! — but as it turned out, the camera I had borrowed for the evening was broken, so the pictures were definitely not a success. (One of them, when liberally Photoshopped, is at least mildly interesting.)

p.s. I see that the Hershey Arena these many decades later is now the Giant (I mean GIANT) Center — perhaps a grocery store or a tribute to the late great Andre. Tomorrow night, in fact, the Hershey Bears hockey team will be there playing the Syracuse Crunch. The Bears were of course started back in the 1930s as the Hershey B’ars, so this means that whenever players on the two teams collide they will create Crunch Bars.

p.p.s. It’s a wonderful thing to remain oblivious to reality. The Wikipedia points out something that has never occurred to me about Full House, an album I’ve now owned for 38 years. Turns out that the five playing cards on the album jacket cover do not, in fact, make a full house.

Google Fiber? Sounds Like a Healthy Diet Indeed.

Some local people are trying to make the Internet work properly in Shelburne, which would be a welcome change. If we lived in the next town, we’d be eligible to go with Green Mountain Access, about whom I have heard good things. Unfortunately, the boundary line is a mile or so to the south and thus, to put it politely, we’re screwed.

Visual Aids:

Nothing like being in the bottom third of the class… especially since I’ve been working more and more this winter as an Internet researcher. Of course I also spend much of my spare time roaming the Internet; it would be nice to be able to waste time online at a much faster rate.

It’s especially bad in our case, because — while trying to avoid the phone company without using cell phones — we signed up with an Internet phone company, and the connection is so bad that our phone service drops out all the time. When people call, they’re often told our number isn’t even in service… but I guess if it’s that important, they’ll try again, right?

Of course, in the end there’s no avoiding the phone company, because they’re the only ones allowed to provide DSL service to Shelburne. And, as you may have heard, they’re doing a tremendous job:

“Fairpoint at Fail Point?”
and a followup.

They’ve also apparently gone bankrupt. But, happily, that’s one problem they have that’s not also mine.

Great Moments in Baltimore History (which never happened)

A law professor at the University of Arizona wrote me last summer, out of the internet ether, to ask about my sources for a Sports Illustrated article I wrote 27 years ago (published 7-12-82) about Thomas Edison. He was interested, he said, because of a book about the legal history of the movie industry that he was writing for Yale University Press. Maybe I no longer had the specific details, he suggested, not knowing that (to my wife’s dismay) I rarely throw anything out.

Today I looked through that file of material again. It includes a copy of the front page of The New York Times from Friday, September 7, 1894, which contains probably my favorite unknown fact I’ve ever stumbled upon in many decades of library research. Nothing to do with Edison, but something I spotted while reeling through a spool of microfilm, trying to get to September 9, 1894.

“Reported Sale of the Eiffel Tower,” the blurb is headlined; the two-paragraph story goes on to say that “a syndicate of Baltimore capitalists has bought the Eiffel Tower,” that the French are going to disassemble it, “and that the immense iron and steel structure will be brought to Baltimore” for that town’s centennial celebration in 1897.

Printed on the front page of the Times? It must be true… although this never seems to have happened. And even a lot of people in Baltimore have never heard the story, as a recent article in that town’s Sun newspaper explains.

No Eiffel Tower, sadly, but Baltimore still can be proud of its famous Bromo-Seltzer Tower.

Let Me Get Back to You on That…

This afternoon on the boat I got into a side riff about the stupid questions tourists ask when they’re on vacation. (Examples: “What do you do with the islands in the winter?” “How long does it take a deer to grow into a moose?”) I encourage questions from our visitors, of course, for how else can you tell what they’d like to know? And even the stupid ones are valuable, since they provide a great deal of entertainment value.

Later, as we neared the dock at the end of the tour, I realized I had never talked personally with some people who’d been standing on the bow, so I went down to say hello. One man, a county commissioner from southern Minnesota, said he’d enjoyed my talk about the questions. He told me his favorite question from work had been asked by a strange woman — “I think she was from Chicago” — who called his office to inquire, “If I ever need 911, what number do I call?”