What the health! Pequod.
on George Hamilton (Jamaica), 29/May/2011 23:25, 34 days ago
Nothing much new happened, but many thoughts crossed my mind today.The title suggests that I stubbed my toe on something and swore. You are only half right. Health is the swear word as illustrated by this incorrect map and correctly spelled Kingston bus ticket below it.We're talking Hellshire near Kingston, not Healthshire.And Pequod? It's just the name of the boat in Moby Dick. I'm curious though. What could the word mean? It sounds a bit Latin. Maybe Julius Cesar may have once said "A pequod for your thoughts". Wrong again. Moby Dick's author ventured that the Pequods were a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct; but there are academic doubts on this. To my legal mind, it sounds like a good way to get off a speeding ticket in Massachusetts. "Me speeding officer? Why, I'm a Pequod and I am extinct, so it couldn't possibly have been me speeding that you saw."Moby Dick is boring in places– the lesson is that if you write about an interesting topic you can get away with less than perfect words. Maybe I should learn from this and raise my subject matter bar.You can look high and low for things that you already have.A Donald Duck example in the comic strip today recommended looking in the last place you would think of first and then go backwards - "Ludwig's law of looking for something". Usually, where something is will be the last place you look, so by reversing the order of your search you find what you are looking for quicker. Actually my experience would disprove that formula, because nothing for me was in fact lost.I've been looking for weeks for a waterproof container for when I go swimming, but I had something that would work all along. All I had to do was put my money inside Glad zipper bags inside my money belt. I left it submerged in the sink while I was away at Fort Clarence beach and there was no water damage over a period of four hours when I came back. Here's proof.You can read my un-smudged writing at the bottom, so it worked.You are sometimes defined by what you are not– the ticket issuer at Fort Clarence beach asked about my other half. Everyone remembers you Bunty.My surprise ending for Moby Dick: the good ship Pequod sailed into MD’s snarge, was overwhelmed by the weight of it and sank to the bottom of the Antarctic Ocean. But maybe MD would have preferred a robust fight instead and envisaged this ending for me?Towards the end of the day, I took photos of flowers trying to get them without the leviathan of constructed objects appearing unwanted in the photographs, It was good practice for me. I concentrated not only on the subject matter, but also controlled what was in the foreground and background.Here's another thing I learned. Archeological pancake dig. Piled pancakes tell the story of my world today, Four levels with more recently made pancakes being plunked/placed on top of the earlier ones. At the deepest level, the one that suffered from the pan not being hot enough and that was torn to shreds as I tried to loosen it - it stuck to the pan surface and then the spatula like a soccer ball attaching itself to Barcelona's Messi's boot. The next least ancient panchook, was over-greasy as I determined in advance that there was no way it would cling limpet-like to my pan. The penultimate product was quite OK but nothing to write home about, so I didn't. At the pinnacle, a loosely defined term for the top of four pancakes hillock, a quite good breakfast feast but gone too soon. 100% Canadian maple syrup helped my breakfast down perfectly adequately. There was no cause to have cretaceous bacon-like strips as a side.For the linguistic purists among you, a panchook is the name for a Lenzie or Prestwick type of pancake made by my dad's cousin Sheila.