It doesn’t look like much in normal conditions, but during the gullywasher last week this strip mall on Putney Road flooded, meaning the butcher, the fish market, AND the wine store are closed for weeks.
Super Halloween costume idea: a green tomato that fell out of somebody’s bag and landed in the street. Everyone else will feel inferior to your awesomeness in their lame Donald Trump outfits.
These yellow mums appeared, fully formed, all over town this week. Must be fall!!
Flying in to New Orleans, you can see how flooding could be a problem.
Cobblestone Hill, Nantucket Town
The picture doesn’t do justice to the steepness or bumpiness of this block. I think Nantucketers who want big SUVs use this road to justify their choices.
For years I thought ATL was my least favorite airport: too big, too busy, nobody (staff or travelers) particularly happy to be there.
Lately, however, I’ve been going through DTW a lot. It also sucks… Lots of delays, lousy food choices… so it became my least favorite airport.
But today I’m back sitting on the Tarmac in ATL because of something to do with catering.
Maybe they both suck.
On the death of an industry
The other morning I jogged past this figurehead from the whaling ship RIchard Mitchell. In her 20-year career, she brought back almost 10,000 barrels of whale oil. Think of the costs of producing that oil… Build a ship, hire crews, sail around braving many dangers… Not to mention the karmic costs of hunting whales nearly to the point of extinction. Despite all that, great fortunes were made from those barrels.
But along comes petroleum. The McClintock #1 well outside Titusville, PA (billed as the oldest continuously producing oil well) produced 175 barrels a day at its height, but then settled down to a steady 50 or so. At that rate, it produced as much as the RIchard Mitchell in about half a year. Operating essentially automatically.
And that’s just one well. Today, we have about 600,000 producing wells in the US alone, most of them a lot bigger than McClintock #1. Smelly, difficult whale oil didn’t stand a chance.
An update: it was pointed out to me that a barrel of crude wasn’t quite the same as a barrel of whale oil. Whale oil was mostly used in lamps, like kerosene, and most of what comes out of oil ain’t kerosene. So, an oil well was only 50 times more enticing than whale oil, not 500. Or maybe the numbers are 20 and 200, doesn’t matter: oil’s magic not only killed whaling but spawned THE ENTIRE MODERN WORLD…
Fall is in the air
Which means it’s time to fire up the hot tub.
I must take acception!
Maybe if the Whitingham Library did something with the books besides sell them, the world’s newspapers would find it easier to hire people who know the difference between except and accept.
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 