I took the Power Squadron test last night and passed with only two questions wrong. Hooray for me, I’ve learned the basics of boating.
I read an interesting article on blogging the other day in the Seattle weekly. It was a funny, well-written article about the pitfalls of writing so public a diary. She makes the point that people have gotten fired and relationships have ended for what was written in blogs, and that a writer should always be careful. I am, but I don’t think anyone reads this, anyway. She made a good point also about the cardinal sin of blogging is writing about not writing—she said it’s like announcing very loudly at a cocktail party that you’ve got nothing to say. Maybe it’s also like being at a bar and talking about how drunk you are—it disturbs the brittle good cheer the other patrons are feeling and makes them confront the fact that their newfound confidence and ease is the product of chemical ingestion and not a sudden onset of charm. So, new rule: no more writing about not writing and only limited writing about writing.
We’re just passing a boat laying out crab traps at the end of Eagle Harbor. There must be about 50 of them out there, some sticking into the channel. I heard a guy behind me comment to someone else, “That’s the tribes. They’ll clean out a whole bay.”
A guy came over the loudspeaker: “For your safety, we will be accompanied this morning by a U.S. Coast Guard escort as we make our way to Seattle.” Escort is sort of a funny name for it, if you think about it within the senior prom context. Aren’t they more like chaperones?
Yesterday my brother sent me a heavily-forwarded e-mail about the dangers a high-school chemestry student found in microwaving plastics. According to the mail, when the plastics heat up in the microwave, they dump a shitload of poisons onto the food, which can be linked to low sperm counts, cancer, and badness of many other kinds. I read it and quickly forwarded it to others I know, and thus broke two of my own e-mail rules:
- Never believe uncorroborated statements forwarded to you over the Internet.
- Don’t forward e-mail chains to people.
When I’ve done this before, half the time I found out it was an urban legend and had to write back to everyone and apologize. If I had the time, I suppose I would try to verify the story, but I don’t. Better not to forward them along next time. Still, I will be taking food out of the plastic to microwave it from now on, just to be safe.