Churbuck.com

 Blue Crabs return
:Blue crabs have been showing up in estuaries from one end of Connecticut to the other, and have proved to be particularly abundant this year, officials and recreational crabbers said. “That’s what we’re hearing,” said David Simpson, associate director of the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Marine Fisheries division in Old Lyme. “We’re getting a lot of calls. I’ve been out myself.”

This from the Stamford, CT Advocate by way of Capecodtoday.com, verifies what Cousin Pete was learning all June — there are a shitload of blue crabs around, very tasty crustaceans one traps and then steams with a ton of Old Bay spice. Hard pickings, but the best crab meat there is. Pete was so overloaded with them (I can manage four at a sitting), that he pulled the traps and let them be.

from Bluecrab.info
Trapping isn’t nearly as fun as stalking them at night with a flashlight and a net. The pugnacious suckers make their stand and wind up in the bucket.

One of my favorite analogies of all time, one used to describe the tendency of some-naysayers, pessimists, and weasels to put down success is to call them crabs, after the observation that if you study a bucket of crabs long enough, one intrepid crab will stand on its tippy-toes, get a claw onto the handle of the pail, and begin to pull itself up and out towards freedom.

And every time the crabs below it reach up, grab the escapee, and pull them back into the doomed mob.

I guess our estuaries are completely doomed by human cess. — Callinectes sapidus  is doing fine for now.

I highly recommend Beautiful Swimmers by William Warner, a great book on the culture and natural history of the Chesapeake crab fishery.

Streets are vacant. Like a scene from The Omega Man. All sentient creatures are on Nantucket or in the Hamptons. Me? Two days of intense meetings, then back to the Cape. Beautiful flight in this morning from Hyannis — came in low over Nantucket and saw swarms of bonito breaking in the channel between Tuckernuck and Muskeget.

NEIL BUDDE

Neil Budde was the founder of the Wall Street Journal Online in 1995 — and is now the editor in chief at Yahoo News. I’m dying to hear his opinion on the question of what would happen if News Corp. were to drop the longest standing and most notable of the newspaper cost-walls.

“Budde and his team recognized that the Internet offered a better technology platform for achieving their goals. Work switched to the Internet in early 1995, and the team launched its first site – Money & Investing Update – in July of that year. In April 1996, the team rolled out the full Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition and stunned many observers by announcing that it would soon begin charging for access to the site. It stuck with that business model through the Internet bubble and steadily grew the subscriber base as well as advertising revenue, achieving a cash-flow-positive status in late 2002.”

Strange, maybe it’s come on with age, but it seems the time to start mourning the summer came early this year, brought on as it usually is by a cold front and a shift in the wind from the southwest to the northeast.

Then again, the old days, when summer ended in a parade of Volvos laden with bicycles and teary children on Labor Day, are long gone, replaced by a new end of summer — the middle of August. It seems the classic definition of school vacation no longer is true. Colleges get started before September, most public schools, especially those in the south start in mid-August,   never close their doors.

What has brought on this early termination of summer? I have heard the theory that standardized testing, and the impact it has on teacher salaries and job security makes it compelling for educators to get kids back in school before the lessons of the previous year have faded. Sounds specious to me.

Anyway, as a townie in a vacation land, the good side is the place clears out a little, and left turns become possible again. The downside is sad faces and the unmistakable feeling that the days are growing shorting, the flower garden looking a little tattered, and the pungency of a New England autumn is a little more than a month away.

Camping – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Camping describes a wide range of activities. Survivalist campers set off with little more than their boots, whereas recreational vehicle travelers arrive equipped with their own electricity, heat, and patio furniture. Camping may be an end unto itself, but often it is done in conjunction with other activities, such as hiking, swimming, fishing and binge drinking.”

All my video posts out of YouTube never carry titles/headlines. Attempts to go in and code them in the HTML always hose the blog formatting. I know there are some video embed plug-ins, but Mark and Esteban — the men who know WP — have told me to stay away from further plug-in dicking around.

8.13 – Monday, Cape Cod

8.14-15 – Tuesday/Wednesday, New York City

8.16-20 – Thursday-Monday, Cape Cod

8.21-23 – Driving daughter to University of Virginia, freshman orientation

Cape Wind Comedy Daily

The Wind Farm — a blight on the horizon?

Discovery disbands without backer

Sad news:

“Lance Armstrong’s former team Discovery is to disband at the end of the season after failing to find a new sponsor.”

$45 million over three years is a steep price in sports marketing to be associated with the most tainted sports of all. Sad, the legacy of Discovery — formerly US Postal — as the team that drove Armstrong to seven Tour de France palmares should have been as one of the preeminent franchises in any sport. Now it sputters out without a whimper like my subscription to VeloNews which expires with the current issue.

Let’s see if pro cycling’s slide in irrelevancy does two things:

1. Kill off the big surge in yuppie cyclists (self included) riding $10,000 bikes

2. Cause other sports to crack down preemptively on doping to keep their ranks clean (except pro wrestling which needs freaks as part of the draw).

Guess my new Giro Discovery helmet is destined to become a collector’s item someday.

Giant statue of Hadrian unearthed

“Parts of a huge, exquisitely carved statue of the Roman Emperor Hadrian have been found at an archaeological site in south-central Turkey.The original statue would have stood 4m-5m in height, experts estimate.

His achievements include the massive wall built across the width of northern Britain which bears his name.”

A reminder, one of my favorite novels, historical or otherwise, is Marguerite Yourcenar’s  Memoirs of Hadrian. Published in France in 1951, it is a favorite recommended to me by a college girlfriend. Yourcenar’s The Abyss is another great find.

Burrito Blog

Into the blog roll goes this foodie blog — an excellent stroll through taqueria cuisine.

Being a big fan of the urban food log burrito, this is the mexican equivalent of the excellent pizza blog, Slice

(given the food content of today’s posts, can we guess who came off of a ten day fast?)

This is a personal list, nothing more

Greatest novel: The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy. This one was declared by Uncle Fester, who has impeccable taste in all things and is not known for backing off of declarations such as the ..

.

Greatest album: Again, Fester made the claim, and I agree: Astral Weeks, Van Morrison. Here is Jimmy Guterman on this masterpiece.

Greatest film: Ordet. Thanks to my son Eliot, the film auteur, for this recommendation. Danish. Black and white. Religious. Go figure. Still, floored me more than any other movie.

Greatest Car: 1974 Dodge Dart with a slant six.

Best taqueria: La Cumbre, Valencia between 16th and 17th, San Francisco

Best bar: Tosca, Columbus St. San Francisco (one must drink a Negroni, neat, while listening to a Caruso aria on the juke box after eating at the ….)

Best Chinese: Brandy Ho’s, Columbus and Pacific, San Francisco, across the street from Tosca. Smoked ham.

Forbes.com Entrepreneurs LinkedIn Group

As I wrote a while back, show me a LinkedIn spammer and they are a member of a Forbes.com LinkedIn group. Try to join such a group and … good luck. I worked there and can’t join.

Scott Allen (who I am not accusing of being a LinkedIn luser) writes about the torture of joining one of these useless bands of Forbesians.

“I had a reader write to me asking how to join the Forbes.com Entrepreneurs LinkedIn Group (of which I’m a member). So, being the helpful guy I am, I went to go look it up to send it to him. Imagine my surprise when I couldn’t find it!”

JEALOUSCOMPUTERS.COM | A global warning

Best viral I’ve seen in over a year. From Nokia for it’s N-Series of phones.

So this is it. Last day on the so-called Master Cleanse fast — lemonade made with maple syrup, fresh lemons, spring water, and cayenne pepper. Why? Pal Marta, one of the fittest people I know was pretty persuasive and I needed to: a) lose some weight, b) reset eating habits, c) generally clear out the plumbing.

Random observations:

1. Fasting makes people uncomfortable. “Whaddya going to do? Get all spiritual, meditate, and swallow a string?”

2. I was never hungry — the lemonade mixture took care of that. I did crave stuff, specifically: french bread and cheese, dal makhani, a grilled chicken breast. Pizza, hotdogs and the stuff the kids push into their mouths never got me that worked up.

3. I lost 8 11 pounds.

4. I was able to exercise regularly with no increase in heart rate or decline in erg scores.

5. I slept better. I feel better.

Tomorrow I taper back onto real food — starting with orange juice, then soup, etc. The issue is what to stay with to keep the weight coming off and the exercise continuing.

Happy to see other people on it too.

Silicon Alley Insider

“This move confirms just how hard it is for news organizations to generate subscription revenue online: If the Times can’t do it, almost no one can (the one modest success story, the Wall Street Journal, will presumably be next to throw in the towel). The failure of TimesSelect is also yet more proof that newspapers will have to fundamentally restructure their businesses as the world migrates online. The revenue-per-reader the companies can generate online is only a fraction of what they can generate in print, and the online businesses simply won’t support the same cost structure.”

Poor guys. It’s all Fake Steve All the Time Today.

So they swung and missed on FSJ a couple times and FSJ coined a new verb after their founder (to denton). It was high humor. But not as funny as Rich Karlgaard speculating in his blog.

Now Owen sees homoerotic significance in the fact that Lyons and I were on the same wrestling team (we never touched each other, I swear), and that I alluded to him with the female pronoun when blogging about the economics of blog sponsorships after discussing how to turn a buck on the blog with him last February.

Mea culpa. I’d never throw a buddy to the wolves.

Fake Steve Jobs Comes To Forbes.com – Forbes.com

It was too good to last this long, but last it did. Fake Steve is no longer a mystery. It’s Dan Lyons, Senior Editor at Forbes.

“A posting on the New York Times Web site Sunday named Daniel Lyons, a technology writer for Forbes, as the author who conceived and writes the blog. “I’m stunned that it’s taken this long,” Lyons, 46, told the newspaper. “I have not been that good at keeping it a secret. I’ve been sort of waiting for this call for months.”

A lot of people knew this. So it is amazing that it has been secret for as long as it has. Good for Dan. He got a book out of it and FSJ will live on at Forbes.com.

Dan and I went to prep school together. We were on the wrestling team together. Then we worked at the Lawrence Eagle Tribune in the early 80s as cub reporters, then PC Week, then Forbes. He is, doubtlessly, one of the funniest humans on the planet, as anyone who has read his novel, Dog Days, will attest.
Preorder the book based on FSJ — Options — it goes on sale in mid-October.

And the Times gets no glory for ending the party.
Fake Steve last wrote:

“Well it had to happen. Honestly I can’t believe it’s taken this long. But as you may have heard, I’ve been busted by a newspaper reporter. My cover has been blown. Guy named Brad Stone, who works for the New York Times. Have you heard of him? Well, tip of the hat to you, Brad Stone. You did the sleuthing. You put the pieces of the puzzle together. You went through my trash, hacked into my computer, and put listening devices in my home. Now you’ve ruined the mystery of Fake Steve, robbing thousands of people around the world of their sense of childlike wonder. Hope you feel good about yourself, you mangina. One bright side is that at least I was busted by the Times and not Valleywag. I really, really enjoyed seeing those guys keep guessing wrong. For six months Dr. Evil and Mr. Bigglesworth put their big brains together and couldn’t come up with the answer. Guy from the Times did it in a week. So much for the trope about smarty-pants bloggers disrupting old media. Brilliant. My only regret is that we didn’t get a chance to see Bigglesworth take a few more swings and misses.”

I’m not saying how long I knew. But it was a privilege while it lasted.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Indian suspect in banana ordeal

An Indian suspect was forced by police to eat 50 bananas as a laxative, to retrieve a necklace he was accused of stealing and swallowing.

Next time I suggest a bad clam.