CapeCodToday Blog Chowder

Another great way to avoid the August kid doldrums

Summer Science School: another great way to avoid the August kid doldrums

Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve is featuring some very interesting topics during their Summer Science School in August.

Estuary Adventures - For kids entering grades 4, 5 & 6
Time/Dates: 8:45am-12pm noon, August 11-15, 2008
Cost: $100

Young scientists use a variety of equipment, from crab traps to salinity meters to sample the marshes, creeks and bay, discovering an ocean of adventure along the way.

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Power Rangers - For kids entering grades 4, 5 & 6    
Time/Dates: 8:45am-12pm noon, August 4-8, 2008   
Cost: $100

Children participate in activities that encourage team work and problem solving while exploring renewable energy concepts. Design and test wind and solar powered devices and use scientific equipment to discover how climate change could affect the creatures that live in the bay.

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Women in Science - Girls entering grades 7, 8 & 9
Girls only session includes an overnight on Washburn Island
Time/Dates: 8:45am-2pm, Mon-Wed, overnight Thurs 1pm-12pm noon Friday, July 28-August 1, 2008

Young women receive inspiration and support from WBNERR staff while building confidence through activities relating to scientific research, marine biology, and ecology. An overnight camping trip fosters peer relationships as girls leave cell phones behind and face the challenges of setting up shelter, cooking and exploring the island at night.

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Space is limited - only one session per child please.  Full or partial scholarships may be available.  For information call 508-457-0495 ext.108.

Check out their site here and get the kids signed up by downloading a registration form here.

Also: Don't miss the Watershed Block Party, Tuesday, August 5 from 3pm-6:30pm.  One of the highlights of the year with activities for the whole family!

The Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve is located at 149 Waquoit Highway in Waquoit, MA. 508-457-0495.  Learn more about the reserve here.

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Photographs by Mark Chester on display in Woods Hole through August 2008

Three Dogs and a Leash among the photographs of Mark Chester on display in Woods Hole through the end of the summer

Three Dogs and a Leash a photograph by Woods Hole photographer Mark Chester is on display at Coffee Obsession, 38 Water Street, Woods Hole, 508.540.2233, through August 2008.

"Taking photographs is like driving a car. You need to look ahead", says Chester.

Chester is a freelance professional whose work is in permanent museum collections - Baltimore, Brooklyn, Corcoran Gallery of Art, among others. He photographed the book DATELINE AMERICA by Charles Kuralt, and  more recently NO IN AMERICA  (www.no-tations.com) with a foreword by Edwin Newman, essays by George Toomer.

A Board Member of the Falmouth Artists Guild, where he teaches, Chester also teaches a teaching a photography class at Lesley University  September 23-October 28, 2008.

"Taking photographs is like driving a car. You need to look ahead", says Chester.

For more information: www.markchesterphotography.com.

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MA residents closer to a much needed holiday from sales tax

Massachusetts Residents Closer to a Much Needed Holiday from Sales Tax

BOSTON—Representative Jeffrey Davis Perry (R-Sandwich) is pleased to announce that the hardworking taxpayers of Massachusetts are one step closer to receiving a much needed holiday from sales tax.

In an overwhelming turn of events, the House passed the two day tax holiday by a vote of 139-15.  The holiday, if approved by the Governor will take place the weekend of August 16th and 17th. 

"The Commonwealth has a lot of work to do on property and gasoline tax relief in the future, but for today, I am pleased to support another sales tax holiday." - Representative Perry

High food and gas prices combined with skyrocketing energy costs make this year as good as year as ever to provide consumers with some tax relief.  Retailers will waive the sales tax on products costing less than $2,500, including computers and home appliances in hopes of saving consumers money as well as stimulating the local economy.

“While this two day break from State sales tax is not a significant new direction for Massachusetts, hopefully it will stimulate economic activity and give consumers a much needed break.  The Commonwealth has a lot of work to do on property and gasoline tax relief in the future, but for today, I am pleased to support another sales tax holiday” said Representative Perry from his State House Office.

This year’s tax holiday is expected to save consumers close to $16 million.  It will also provide a shot in the arm for businesses, which normally have a lull in sales during the dog days of summer.

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Go McCain Go!

No people, we are not making this up.  The Colbert Report is currently holding a contest to see who can come up with the most outrageous video of John McCain's recent green screen speech.  To download the footage and give it a go for youself, visit www.colbertnation.com. 

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Chapter 13 The Hummer

Chapter 13

THE HUMMER

Tommy and Daniel both ended up in LaSalle working at OWENS ILLINOIS where they stacked boxes of beer bottles onto shipping pallets.  On Saturday nights when their pockets were full of cash Tommy would say, “Let’s go out and raise a little hell.” 

And for the first time in his life Daniel did just that. 

   He drank a little bit and f---ed a lot; at least he practiced f---ing trying to count to five hundred before he came.  He practiced short strokes and long strokes, fast strokes and slow strokes.  He knew that sex was like the trumpet, if you practiced enough you would get the hang of it.  The girls didn’t complain and he got a little bit of a reputation as a really cute kid who never talked; but Tommy was a drawback in all this—being not so cute and very talkative.  And so Daniel, after some weeks, decided that he should separate his endeavors from Tommy’s.
   They did agree upon one thing—they would both take out Louise, “the hummer”.  This Marilyn Monroe look-alike was notorious.  She liked her boys in two’s and three’s and naturally every young male without good sense gave her a ride.

   They took her to the park and they both “knew her” in the Biblical sense.  Then after a break for lunch and burgers and fries and cokes they took her into the woods behind the baseball diamond where they both “knew her” again.  At the end of a parade of moans and groans and sighs and giggles and gasps and shrieks and laughter and other sounds, which we shall not recount, she was smiling broadly and said, “God, I’ve never climaxed so much in my life.”

   When they took her home she ran into the house and came back out with a platter of cookies and said to them, “Thank you, thank you so much.  I’m glad I was able to have you.”
   But there was a downside to this called “the crabs”.  An army of critters that infested both of their pubic hairs, critters they could not rid themselves of.

   We should have let her blow us,” Tommy said, “That’s where she got her name “the hummer”.  She always hums when she gives head.”But it was too late, lice powder didn’t work.  They took to safety razors and ended up looking like two harem eunuchs.  This did not interfere with their next act which was to raise their right hands, stand in front of a recruiting officer and join the Army.  Daniel did this with a forged birth certificate, courtesy of his mother’s first cousin, the County Clerk of Wayne County.  Both he and Dorothy’s brother, John, agreed that Daniel would be better off in the Service.
   Tommy and Daniel ended up at Fort Riley, Kansas.  It was not the exotic destination they had hoped for but rather more of the same Midwestern dreariness.  They were assigned to different units and didn’t see that much of one another until Basic Training was finished.  But on the first weekend after Basic Training they made the most of it and on a trip into Manhattan, Kansas.  Tommy paid cash for a used 88 Oldsmobile and on the first test run he drove it off the highway onto a wheat field and spun it round and round on the recently harvested shards.  At one point, he ran it aground on a hump in the middle of a tractor road.  It took hours using the hand-cranked jack to shift it out of this position.

That night they double dated two high school seniors after the Manhattan, Kansas High School prom.  Daniel’s date, the homelier of the two girls, was so hot for him that she gave her all in the back seat of Tommy’s Oldsmobile.  Tommy was not so lucky, something he was not accustomed to, and he sulked all the way back to base.

This was their last weekend together before Tommy was shipped out to Germany where he was stationed near a small town in the Schwarzwald named Aschaffenburg.  They wrote to one another and Tommy, who had become a cook, measured out the cost of pussy in foodstuffs.

“You can get laid here for a pound of sugar or five pounds of flour or two dozen eggs or a couple of oranges or bananas; but chocolate will buy all the pussy you can handle.  I’m so glad I’m a cook.”

In Korea where Daniel ended up, pussy was strictly cash and carry.  Cooks who traded food for snatch could end up very badly in a war zone.

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Former Cape priest convicted of serial child rapes

Priest Pleads Guilty To Raping Boys In Massachusetts

   The convicted priest, Frank Genevieve shown here at his sentencing yesterday, served as an assistant priest at a Cape Cod parish from 1998 to 2000.

Franciscan's sentence suspended, served at St. Margaret's Parish in Buzzard's Bay

"It ruined my life. I haven't been in a church since it happened." Mark LymanA New York priest has pleaded guilty to four counts of rape and another count of rape and assault while on field trips with children in the Bay State in the late 1970s. The Rev. Frank Genevieve, 51, who now lives in a Franciscan retreat in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., was charged with taking children from his Troy, N.Y., parish on field trips to Massachusetts during a period of several years.

Priest Pleads Guilty To Abuse Charges

Once there, according to the victims, he would abuse them."It ruined my life. I haven't been in a church since it happened, and I don't think I'll ever go to a church again," said victim Mark Lyman, of Troy, N.Y.  The boys were between 13 and 16 years old at the time. One boy was raped three times and another boy once at an unnamed rectory in the North End or in Genevieve's car in downtown Boston, said a spokesman for the Suffolk County district attorney... Genevieve taught at the former Christopher Columbus High School in Boston's North End and was an assistant priest at St. Margaret's Parish in Buzzard's Bay in the late 1990s...  WCVB.

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Worker shortage not as bad; Marc Jacobs's excellent vacation

Cape Cod worker shortage not as bad as anticipated

Early this year, when it became clear that returning foreign workers would not be granted their seasonal H-2B visas, business owners panicked, predicting dire circumstances ranging from reduced services to shorter hours to closing altogether.

The reality as of mid-July has not turned out to be as earth-shattering as originally envisioned. However, an informal survey of local business owners and managers shows that while the impact of the loss of returning workers varies, few have been able to proceed with business as usual.

As might be expected, the larger businesses are having the most difficulty... Still, the sky has not fallen, as many predicted back in January, when the town hurriedly put together a survey of local businesses in an effort to determine the scope of the problem the town was facing. Of the 111 Provincetown and Truro businesses that responded, about one-quarter of the total, the town estimated that 809 full- and part-time foreign workers needed to be found... MetroWest Daily News.
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Buzzards Bay Oil spill bill clears the Legislature

Legislation that would offer new protections against oil spills in Buzzards Bay is heading to Gov. Deval Patrick's desk.  The House approved a bill Tuesday that would require the state Department of Environmental Protection to assign state pilots and escort tugs to all oil shipments in the bay.

The bill passed the Senate earlier this session. It is an attempt by the Legislature to get around a federal court ruling that struck down major provisions of the state's 2004 oil spill law, enacted in response to a devastating oil spill in Buzzards Bay a year earlier.  Gov. Patrick and Ian Bowles, the secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs, are expected to look favorably on the legislation...  Standard-Times.
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Marc Jacobs's excellent vacation

Here I am in this highly gay summer vacation village at the end of Cape Cod, trying to be mellow and uncritical for a month. But one day last week I was standing on Commercial Street, the town's main thoroughfare, when - I am not exaggerating - a dozen men walked by dressed in those puffy pleat-pocket Abercrombie & Fitch cargo shorts, scuffed-up baseball hats and tight-fitting tank tops with blocky, meaningless team numbers on the fronts and backs.

Suddenly my mellow was harshed. I wanted to grab each guy by his knotty lats and say, "You don't have to live this way!" Like that tinny "oonce oonce" music that emanates from the dance clubs here, the sporty college jock look has been a reigning summer style for guys for more than a decade, and it needs to die... Now a Marc by Marc Jacobs has set up shop here. I thought it would be full of precious, overpriced safari bags - and it does have them - but here's the shocking thing: a lot of stuff here is cheap and pretty great... International Herald Tribune.

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Cape Blind; Pickens on $300 a barrel oil; Dutch Wind Mill

Rebuilding a Dutch Tradition, One Windmill at a Time

  De Distilleerketel, a restored mill on the edge of Rotterdam, where Karel Streumer grinds grain.

The Dutch are building windmills again. Up and down the coast, out from port cities like this one, you can see them: white and tall and slender as pencils, their three slim blades turning lazily in the North Sea breeze.

Boone T. Pickens tells US Senate $300 bbl oil absent a push for renewables

Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens warned a Senate committee today that the United States could face $300 per barrel oil within a decade unless it acts aggressively to boost renewable energy and reduce its dependence on foreign petroleum.
   "In 10 years, if we continue to drift like we're drifting, you're going be importing 80 percent of your oil, and I promise you, it will be over $300 a barrel," Pickens told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
   Pickens said he believes oil production worldwide has essentially peaked as demand grows. "We have walked into a trap, and we have to walk ourselves out of it," he said.
   And Pickens - in interviews and TV appearances - continues to warn about dire economic and national security implications of sending $700 billion or more overseas each year for oil.
   "We are more fragile today from a national security standpoint than we have been since World War II," Pickens said.
"I am convinced," he added, "we are paying for both sides of the Iraqi war."
   Pickens spoke in his first public Capitol Hill appearance since he unveiled his plan to reduce U.S. oil dependence. The Pickens Plan calls for building massive wind farms to provide electrical power and switching transportation to natural gas. Pickens is planning to build the world's largest wind farm in West Texas, with a total capacity of roughly 4,000 megawatts.
   All told, Pickens has predicted his plan could eliminate roughly 38% of the nation's oil use and cut roughly $300 billion from the annual amount that the country uses to purchase oil.
   Pickens told the Senate panel the government could facilitate the development of wind and other alternatives by extending the renewable-energy production tax credit for the next decade and help remove some of the potential roadblocks involved with building transmission corridors from the central United States to cities on the coasts.
   "If the government wanted to build a grid, do it. If they don't want to do it, I think the money is there to do it privately," Pickens said. "So it's kind of like either do it, or get out the of the way. But give us the corridors to put it in, and it'll be done."
   When asked by lawmakers, Pickens also threw his support behind drilling in offshore areas and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, saying he was in favor of "everything American" when it came to energy. "I'm saying do everything you can to get off foreign oil," he said.
   But Pickens also said he did not believe production from protected areas would substantially reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil and questioned just how much oil there was off both coasts.
   "I think you're going to get a rude awakening as to the value of the East and West Coast when it's opened up and when it's put up for sale," Pickens said. "When those tracts are put up for sale, you're going to be surprised at the price you get for the tracts.

These generate electricity, of course, rather than grind grain. The government has already built one enormous farm of mills far off the coast, where they're inoffensive to tourists, and there are plans for a second farm. Yet it is also building, and rebuilding, mills like the squat, homely ones that have seemingly always dotted the Dutch countryside, and reflect as much the nature of the country as do tulips or Gouda cheese...  But the fast pace of change in the modern Netherlands is reviving interest in the old mills. As immigration changes the face of Dutch cities and globalization spreads its veil of uniformity over life in the Netherlands, many among the Dutch are looking for their roots. “It’s a little bit of national pride,” said Lukas Verbij, whose company, Verbij Hoogmade, is one of the leading mill builders and restorers... NY Times.
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Cape blind
A failure of leadership in the wind

[By Erik Hoffner - This recently appeared in Wendy Williams' blog. She is coauthor of the book Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound, now out in paperback -- a fascinating and horrifying read.]

I've been giving lots of talks about Cape Wind around the country, and I can tell you -- the American people are getting really angry. Both Democrats and Republicans are equally disgusted by what they read in our book about Cape Wind.

At this point, they're angry about a lot more than Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney getting together behind the scenes or over dinner to plot about how to kill Cape Wind.

The average American has caught on to the fact that the above behavior is happening in every sector. Corporate behavior is simply out of control. The airlines behave as if passengers are little more than cattle. The insurance companies have doubled and tripled their prices. Food prices have sky-rocketed, while the farmers who grow the food see little in the way of increased money. (It mostly goes to speculators.) Gasoline prices are doing real harm to rural people, who have little in the way of discretionary income in the first place.

Meanwhile, the folks in Washington fiddle and fiddle.

There are some simple things a leader -- a genuine leader, that is -- could do to bring things under control.

How about, for starters, suggesting that all Americans who own a car give up one automobile trip this coming Sunday. Since a good deal of the current price of gasoline is due to speculators' trading, imagine what would happen to the speculators if that happened. The price of gas would drop immediately.

And if a leader helped ensure that Americans kept up that kind of genuine grassroots pressure (as opposed to the "astroturf" emanating from fossil-fuel-funded outfits like the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound), the people themselves, with the right leadership, just might be able to bring this problem at least a little bit under control.

That won't happen though. That's because "leadership" is afraid to step out. Or more likely, just doesn't want to be bothered. After all, if they want to travel somewhere, all they have to do is call up someone with a corporate jet, and they're ready to ride ... Grist.
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US takes wind-power lead away from Germany

"It would take another $200 billion to build the capacity to transmit that energy to urban areas across the country. That's a lot of money, but it's a one-time cost, and, compared with the $700bn we spend on foreign oil every year, it's a bargain." -T. Boone Pickens

The US rush into wind power has enabled the country to pass Germany to become the world's biggest generator of such energy, according to estimates for the first half of 2008 from the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA).

The US had not been expected to reach this milestone until the end of next year. It achieved this early, while still running behind Germany in total installed capacity, because its average wind speed in significantly stronger.

The total capacity of wind installations in Germany was 22,000 megawatts in 2007, compared with 17,000mw in the US.

Nonetheless, with growing attention on wind energy in the US, the AWEA says the country could well take the world lead in installed capacity as well by the end of this year... Financial Times.

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1856: Disastrous Gale distroys twenty-nine vessels

Disastrous Gale on the Coast of Labrador
Twenty-nine out of thirty ships lost, one Provincetown ship is survivor

   A small harbor 0n the rocky, inhospitable coast of Labrador in an 1856 photo

On this day a century and a half ago, word was finally received by Cape Cod Marine telegraph about the ships lost in an enormous gale that struck the coast of Labrador earlier in the month.

Of the thirty sailing vessels along the shore that day, twenty-nine were driven ashore and destroyed including one from Provincetown, the brig Samuel Cook.

The one vessel which rode out the storm was the General Warren, also out of Provincetown.  Read the complete report below.

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Hungry? Hike to Harwich

 Cape Cod is full of interesting contradictions.  Among the most interesting is that one of the best restaurants on the Cape happens to be located on industrial Queen Anne Road next to the Harwich Highway Department.  And in between these two sites, mundane yet essential in their own way, is the trailhead to one of Harwich Conservation Trust's newer and more circuitous pathways, the Island Pond Trail.

 First, the food.  If what matters are taste, freshness, and reasonable prices, you can't beat Dave's Cape Cod Smokehouse at 291 Queen Anne Road, previously mentioned in Cheap Eats.  Dave's barbecued ribs or chicken, and awesome sides like baked beans with rib meat and corn bread with real kernels of corn, make perfect take-out for messy backyard eating.  And, he's offering free samples of his new smoked bluefish or cod pâté specialties made with fish caught by members of Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fisherman's Association.

It was a trip for ribs the other night that led me to the brown trail sign which appeared by the adjacent lot not too long ago.  I returned by bike the next day to explore.  According to the trail map secured in the new kiosk in the small parking area, if I kept going straight for three junctions, then left, then three rights, I would go around Cape Cod Lavender Farm and Island Pond and end up on the Harwich/Chatham spur of the Rail Trail.   

Walking with my bike on the slightly overgrown path which skirted the highway department, I forged ahead as the trail wound this way and that, descended into cool glades and ran along a cranberry bog or two.  The actual trail didn't much resemble my mental map, and I briefly regretted not bringing my GPS unit.  Somehow, I ended up back where I started.  The Harwich Conservation Trust received a state grant last fall to improve this trail, and I'm told a town-wide trail map is coming out soon; so I'll finally be able to see where I was going.

 The trail held many delightful finds, including an Eastern box turtle traversing the path - slowly  - but there is no geocache hidden in the woods and wetlands.

The southern section of the Island Pond trail system is accessible off of the main Rail Trail, near the mile 4 marker and sign for the William D. and Barbara Lang Hacker Wildlife Sanctuary.  This new enhancement to the Rail Trail has a small bike rack (cyclists are asked to keep the wheels off the trail here) and well-marked path, which does go by the Lavender Farm and Island Pond, and through to the Chatham/Harwich spur.

 For the nature-lover with an enthusiastic palate, a Harwich hike-and-bike topped off with smoked fish and barbecued ribs is a satisfying way to savor some of the Cape's enduring complexities.

Photos, from top:

Dave's Smokehouse Cafe on Queen Anne Road

An Eastern box turtle along the Island Pond Trail near the highway department

A bog pond by the trail

The Hacker Wildlife Sanctuary trailhead at mile 4 on the CC Rail Trail

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