Dinosaurs and humans coexisted, Sarah? You don't say!

And this woman could be the leader of the free world when McCain kicks the bucket?

Palin treads carefully between fundamentalist beliefs and public policy

By Stephen Braun
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 28, 2008

ANCHORAGE — Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago -- about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct -- the teacher said.

After conducting a college band and watching Palin deliver a commencement address to a small group of home-schooled students in June 1997, Wasilla resident Philip Munger said, he asked the young mayor about her religious beliefs.

Palin told him that "dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time," Munger said. When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said "she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks," recalled Munger, who teaches music at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and has regularly criticized Palin in recent years on his liberal political blog, called Progressive Alaska.

The idea of a "young Earth" -- that God created the Earth about 6,000 years ago, and dinosaurs and humans coexisted early on -- is a popular strain of creationism.

Where I blog

Now that summer season is quieting down and guest visits are less numerous, I actually have the ability to blog again. Since town is super mellow without much going on, I've certainly been making up for lost blogging time lately. Thought I'd post a pic of my (well actually, the captain's) sanctuary, formally called the wheel house, to where I escape for great light, a sweet view, and a little quiet time to commune with the Internet.

Stewart & Colbert: New Yorker Fistbump, Take Two!

I loved July's infamous New Yorker cover in all its Swiftian, satirical glory. A few days after its publication, The Daily Show did a great bit called "Satire on the Street" mocking the backlash against the "controversial" illustration by Barry Blitt. But Entertainment Weekly does one better this week. Not only is the cover sublime, its corresponding chat with the simultaneously modest-yet-genius team of Stewart and Colbert is well worth reading if you're at all interested in the current (sad) state of affairs.

The entire Mock the Vote Q & A interview with both of Comedy Central's Emmy-winning funnymen (Colbert for Best Writing, Stewart for Best Late Night Overall) is online and includes the below excerpt, my favorite analogies from the entire piece.

E.W.: There are a lot of issues in this election. The biggest one right now is the economy.
STEWART: We were in this huge credit crisis, out of money. Then the Fed goes, We'll give you a trillion dollars, and all of a sudden Wall Street is like, ''I can't believe we got away with it!'' Can you imagine if someone said, ''I shouldn't have bought that sports car because it means I can't have my house,'' and the bank just said, ''All right, you can have your house. And you know what? Keep the car.'' [He throws up his arms joyfully and shouts] ''Yeaaaaah, I get to keep the car! Wait, do I have to give the money back?'' ''No, it doesn't matter.'' ''Yeah, I'm gonna get another car! I'm gonna do the same thing the same way, except twice as f---ed up!''
COLBERT: The idea that Lehman Brothers doesn't get any money and AIG does reminds me very much of ''Iran is a mortal enemy because they have not achieved a nuclear weapon. But North Korea is a country we can work with, because they have a nuclear weapon.'' The idea is, Get big or go home. How big can you f--- up? Can you f--- up so bad that you would ruin the world economy? If it's just 15,000 who are out of jobs, no. You have to actually be a global f---up to get any help.

2008 Emmys

The $7,000,000,000 Apocalypse is Now

"Hank Paulson has become kind of like a Colonel Kurtz character. He's gone insane, nobody can stop him, and they need to send like a Martin Sheen guy up the river to find him and take him out because he's taking the entire U.S. economy into oblivion!"

~ Max Keiser

The most brilliant analogy yet regarding the whole Wall Street fiasco is this clip below featuring Max Keiser, financial expert, Prediction Markets analyst, inventor, and Huffington Post blogger. He co-hosts "The Truth About Markets" on Resonance FM 104.4 in London and also produces documentaries covering markets and finance for Al Jazeera's "People & Power" series.

You've gotta see this video. It would be even funnier if I didn't get paid in dollars.

McCain said "horseshit!" during the debate! Twice!

What a crazy old coot. The cooler Obama is, the more pissed off McCain gets. Listen for yourself at 4:33. Angry Man needs to go BUH-bye.

I miss this dog so much!

At auntie Susan's house

Underdog

November beach trip

When I was a personal assistant to a wealthy woman in Manhattan last year, her dog Jake sort of adopted me as his owner because I fed him, bathed him, walked him at least three times a day, scooped the poop, made sure to visit the dog park every day so he'd have doggie friends, brushed him, threw the ball, threw the stick, bought him a raincoat for torrential downpour walks, bought him a red sweater for blustery bitter-cold winter days, dressed him up as Underdog for the annual Tompkins Square Park Halloween doggie parade, let him sleep on my bed, covered him up with his own doggie blanket on chilly nights when he slept on the bed, bought him squeaky toys, took him to the vet when he was sick, and kept a jar filled with dog cookies and Snausages at all times, which I gave to him many, many times a day. Woof.

But the best reason why this dog should, in my opinion, belong to me is the fact that I even took care of him during my Christmas vacation. Yes, her dog came home to my parents house on Cape Cod with me for the holidays. My sister Amy just found this pic of Jakie and emailed it to me.
Christmas vacation!

I miss "my" doggie. Sniff sniff.

Walking to the dog park

Nappy time

"That's what she said."

The fifth season of "The Office" starts Thursday night. Woo! In the meantime, check out this compilation video containing every utterance of "That's what she said." Even Stanley gets in on the action. Genius.

SNL's John McCain skit

Conceived by Al Franken. Enjoy.

Travis Barker (and DJ AM), get well soon

DJ AM and Travis

In 2004, I got the opportunity to see Blink-182 perform live under the stars at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center. The concert, which was amazing, left me in awe of Travis Barker. Not only is he one of the best drummers ever, right up there with Neil Peart of Rush, Ginger Baker from Cream, and Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann of the Dead, but Travis Barker did the unbelievable. The guy played with a broken foot. I had brought binoculars (much to the embarrassment of my then teenaged-nephew Andrew who is also quite the fine drummer himself), and I watched him bang away, mesmerized by how damn good he was, cast and all. Once Andrew decided that it wasn't too dorky to check out the show through the binoculars, he was pretty amazed himself that Travis had learned to play the bass drum with his left foot due to the cast. You'd never have guessed. He was smoking good.

Today on the news it was just announced that Travis is in critical condition at a burn unit in Augusta, Georgia after the Learjet he was on crashed and burned on takeoff last night in South Carolina. Of the six on board, he and DJ AM with whom he'd played a show last night were the only survivors. Perry Farrell also played the show, I just hope he wasn't on the plane too.

Get well soon Travis, so we can continue to enjoy you banging on those skins again soon. Here's a clip of him and DJ AM doing a show recently in Chicago. Good stuff.

Greasy Rider: Two Dudes, One Fry-Oil-Powered Car, and a Cross-Country Search for a Greener Future

My college buddy Jonathan writes,

Greg is basically my younger brother. He's a great writer - well published (NYT, Outdoor, Conde Nast Traveler...) and this is his latest book about his "cooking oil powered car."

Curious to learn more, I clicked on the Facebook link Jonathan provided and from there I hopped over to Greg's Greasy Rider blog, and from there found this review of the book at AudubonMagazine.com. Sounds interesting. You can buy the book as of October 7th for only twelve bucks on Amazon.

Greasy Rider: Two Dudes, One Fry-Oil-Powered Car, and a Cross-Country Search for a Greener Future
By Greg Melville
Algonquin Books, 266 pages, $15.95

Journalist Greg Melville and his college buddy Iggy are just a couple of regular (if quirky) guys on a cross-country road trip. Their goal: to drive Melville’s 1985 Mercedes, reconfigured to run on used fryer oil, from Vermont to California without stopping at the gas pump. It’s a mechanical challenge—breakdowns, while frequent, always manage to be just this side of catastrophic—and also a hilariously social one. Reluctantly, the pair begs (or, failing that, steals) waste oil from a string of fast-food restaurants, struggling to explain to observers and burrito-joint managers that their grease-stained clothes and French fry-scented vehicle are the wave of the future. Melville, who has written for Outside and Men’s Journal, has a breezy, unpretentious style as well as the ability to work in the occasional edifying digression—a brief history of wind power, for instance, or a discussion with a professor about cellulosic ethanol—without disrupting the book’s brisk, novelistic pace. At trip’s end, Melville explains to his pal that they have proven something important: “If two goobers like us can actually get in a car and drive across the country without fossil fuels or putting a lot of carbon into the air, the answers for sustainability are easier than people think.”—Alexa Schirtzinger

Jack and Sally on the dock

I like taking photos of the marina at dusk. In the photo below, I shot the reflection of the dock, and then rotated the picture 180 degrees.



Then using Photoshop, I went to Filters>Artistic>Dark Strokes.



I liked the results. I call it Jack and Sally. Doesn't it look like them hanging out on the dock? It's kind of fitting, seeing how fall is in the air and this place is like a ghost town lately. If Jack and Sally are missing from your pop culture lexicon, rent Tim Burton's "Nightmare Before Christmas."



We can live like Jack and Sally if we want
Where you can always find me
We'll have Halloween on Christmas
And in the night we'll wish this never ends
~I Miss You lyrics by blink-182

Hoots from Hooterville

Last night we got back from being out at anchor, and lo and behold this was the new boat in the slip next to ours. There goes the neighborhood. You can charter this thing complete with full crew for a mere $42,000+ a week, as I found on its website.

The guys on the boat were not disappointed, especially when Hooters-type chicks emerged this morning on the top deck to pose for each other's snaphots.



The plethora of perky silicone and blonde hair extensions blowing in the breeze was enough to send Cheffie into smiley happyland as he gazed longingly out the galley window. I hope he doesn't jump ship and apply for a job on Hooter Patrol IV. I doubt he will, though, because he'd surely miss my very own impersonation of a Hooter Girl . . .



. . . behold the all-natural mushroom Hooters!

Deserving Marines

Last month I blogged about the organization AnyMarine, and about how my sister Amy and I sent a care package to a platoon stationed in Afghanistan. Today I got the nicest thank-you email and the above pic from their point person who distributes the goodies. He writes,

Thanks to you and your family. It's people like you that help us remember why we are doing the things we do. We have had a tough week as we lost 2 Marines and 1 Sailor to a roadside IED.

We are a small team (stationed in Okinawa, Japan) of combat advisers to the Afghan Army. We train, mentor and advise so that means we do whatever they do and go wherever they go. Our deployment started in March and we hope to be home before X-mas.

These Marines make up an ETT, which stands for Embedded Training Team. Check out this article I found about the hellish, high-elevation, freezing, snowy-blowy search-and-rescue training these guys had to do in order to prepare for their deployment in the Afghanistan mountains. If anyone deserves a big fat care package, they do!

Thank you to all service men and women who are living in uncomfortable and dangerous conditions while we sleep safely in our warm, fluffy beds here in the U.S. Thank you thank you thank you. You guys rock.

In NYC on 9/11

pic courtesy of Associated Press
Yesterday was my day off so I took the Jitney into Manhattan and went for an evening outrigger paddle on the Hudson. I hadn't paddled in NYC since June, and last night might have been my last session before the yacht leaves for Lauderdale for the winter season, so I really appreciated being out on the water. The views to the east of the almost-full moon and the Empire State Building lit up in red, white and blue, and then to the south, of the Tribute in Light, made it especially memorable. When I get back to the Hamptons later, I'll post the pics I took with my camera.

(Later . . .)




Taken from Pier 66 Maritime on the Hudson River, the coolest hangout spot in Manhattan.

A Room With a View

This is sunrise from the portal of my crew quarters. Photo by our chef, Mitch.

Juneau

via Gawker