Churbuck.com

I had a ton of photos to edit and sort, tag and upload, so what better thing to do than download a bunch of new music.

It started on “Surviving Grady,” my favorite Red Sox blog, where co-blogger Red expounded on a few of his favorite albums, citing The Killer’s Sam’s Town, which contains the Guitar Hero classic When We Were Young. That sparked a visit to iTunes where I was immediately diverted by the banner announcing the release of Metallica’s Death Magnetic. Bought that, downloaded it, then moved onto The Killers. Pluged in the iPod, synced it up, hit play on Metallica’s first tune, That Was Just Your Life, and gave up all thoughts of going to bed early tonight.

So while cranking some head banger music directly into my head at high volume, I was browsing through Google Reader and saw the hyperperceptive Jon Udell point to Andy Baio’s masterful analysis of Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals.

For those unfamiliar with Girl Talk — it’s a dude, Gregg Gillis who makes mashup albums from heavily sampled music — stuff the New York Times once called a lawsuit waiting to happen since its entirely comprised of other people’s music. Think of M.C. Hammer’s Can’t Touch This taken waaaay further.

Baio broke out the Mechanical Turk and analyzed the source, duration, era of the tunes that went into Feed the Animals.Intrigued I bought a copy directly from the label –

Baio blogs: “Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals is one of my favorite albums this year, a hyperactive mish-mash sampling hundreds of songs from the last 45 years of popular music. Gregg Gillis created a beautiful, illegal mess of copyright clearance hell, which you should download immediately. (It’s free, but I kicked in $20 for Gregg’s legal fund and a copy of the CD.)”

Girl Turk: Mechanical Turk Meets Girl Talk’s “Feed the Animals” – Waxy.org.

PS: Metallica’s That Was Just Your Life, just became a staple of the Power Erg playlist for rowing entertainment and inspiration.

There is rowing in Bangalore. I suspect this rowing takes place in the lake I could see from my hotel room window. When I drove to the office I passed this sign inviting people to become rowers. I think that lake is Lake Ulsoor as I saw some kayakers, canoers, and sailboats on it one morning earlier this week.

The man on the billboard is PT Paulose of Kerala who sculled for India in Athens, the first Indian sculler to qualify for the Olympics.

I need to get more focused on sculling my way around the world. I used to carry around a letter of introduction from my club, The Union Boat Club of Boston, and have been able to borrow boats in a few cities, including Zurich and Newport Beach. It’s not easy persuading a club to let a stranger borrow a $10,000 shell, but then again, it takes about two seconds to figure out whether or not the person is qualified as the typical novice capsizes the instant they push off from the dock. Flipping a new racing shell is not recommended.

9/11

I fly out of Bengaluru in five hours on British Airways to Heathrow, then onwards to Boston where I arrive Thursday evening at 6:30 EST. If I do the real-time conversion for actual travel time, that will mean about 26 hours from the time I leave the Hotel Ista on Swami Vivekananda Road to the time I roll down the clamshell driveway on Main Street in Cotuit.

WTF?

This is nearly an intercontinental flip turn. Not as epic as the McKinsey director who allegedly flew to Paris from New York and returned the same day on the Concorde, but close enough for stupid-traveller-bragging-rights. I arrived at 6 am on Tuesday, went to the hotel, showered, went downstairs and had breakfast with my colleagues, and was in a day long “summit” by 9 am in Lenovo’s global marketing hub, sucking down waaaaay too much caffeine and feeling utterly vulnerable, clumsy, and addled. Now it is Wednesday night, I am vulnerable, clumsy, and addled, and by the time I depart will have been in Bangalore 45 hours having travelled a grand total of 48 to get to and fro ….

WTF is wrong with me?

Tuesday ended in a thumping roof-top night club eating mystery kabobs in the dark with a view of Bangalore all green trees and tropical below me. I crashed hard, slept six hours, than ran 3K on the treadmill before another breakfast of masala dosa and sambar. Today,  Wednesday, was more meetings, a solid moment of narcolepsy around 4pm during a discussion on metrics and analytics which ended when someone noticed my snoring and loudly volunteered me for a project I still haven’t figured out yet. Another roof-top restaurant, more meat on a stick, another cab ride through twisty little streets where packs of dogs roam and cows pick through the piles ….

Then back to the Ista where I am resisting the bed like my final resting place, convinced if I nap I will miss my flight and get another day of meetings and more meat on sticks for my troubles. I ate something in the interesting category and am doing the Pepto Bismol thing so I don’t end up spending the first leg of my flight in my own private cabin.

I’d post pictures of cows and crowds but I left my card reader on my desk at the Cape.

This is a good news and will get me watching cycling again.
“Seven-time champion Lance Armstrong will come out of retirement and compete in next year’s Tour de France, VeloNews reported Monday, citing sources close to the situation.

“Armstrong, who will turn 37 on Sept. 18, will join the Astana team and compete in five road races, the sources told VeloNews.

“He will compete in the Amgen Tour of California, Paris-Nice, the Tour de Georgia, the Dauphine-Libere and the Tour de France. The sources told VeloNews that Armstrong will receive no salary or bonuses.

Armstrong’s manager, Mark Higgins, would not comment.

ESPN – Report: Armstrong to come out of retirement and ride for Astana – Cycling.

This came to me via colleague Gary Milner, who forwarded a column by Joe Marchese,president of socialvibe, who quotes Rishad Tobaccowala who in turn channels the ghost of Albert Einstein:

“Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted, counts”

A four hour layover at Heathrow would knock the enthusiam out of a televangelist. Being of Anglo/Celtic descent, I feel a genetic bond to the doughy middle-aged faces on British Airways, that slightly deranged, broken nosed, shaved head-butting boyo look that indicated past excesses on the rugby pitch or time spent terrorizing the continent as a soccer hooligan.

The pod seating thing that BA businessclass has going is totally creepy, with privacy screens erected to keep the bad dentistry of the bloke in 10D out of one’s own bleary face. The airlines have to fire Recaro, the Italian bucket seat designer, and do away with the modular pod thing that is absolutely useless to anyone over 6 feet tall. I’d prefer to lie on the rug and curl into the fetal position. Dude to my left looked like Gordon Gekko, right down to the blue shirt with the white collar and cuffs and the pound of vaseline in his hair. He spent the first half of the flight trying to barter for a pair of duty-free Bang & Olufsen ear buds for his iPod with the purser arguing that the price was the price and the 777 was not the Dirt Market.

Heathrow — grey, tubular, about three degrees too warm on a classic English morning where the sky looks like a stewed sweatshirt — is one of the singularly depressing travel experiences. Aside from the multicultural paegant of Asians, Africans, Sub-continentals, and other colonial descendants packing their villages into the overhead compartments, aside from the peevishly quaint terminology (Border Control, the Luddington Suite), the atrocious pub/breakfasts in the concourses, there is the oasis of the British Airways Lounge, a sort of hipster purgatory with genuine Oliver Twist porridge, unlimited espresso, and gangs of gesticulating Russian businessmen who bellow and drink white wine at 9 am.

Settling in is a ritual. Plug in the notebook, boot up, read a book while that happens, look at the Blackberry, charge that, set the clocks on the PC and phone, get a coffee, get some food, take off the blazer, reassure self that wallet, passport and ticket are in place, find wireless, curse wireless pain-in-the-ass effect, look out at the grey landscape of tarmac, English suburbs, highways, wait for PC to finish booting … read email. Wish you hadn’t. Write an aimless blog post. Wish you hadn’t. Think about taking a shower but wonder how weird that will be but how great it will feel.

Three more hours till I board for Bangalore — nine hours then onwards to the Hotel Ista where I intend to eat a dosa for breakfast.

Hanna came in and through late last night, announcing itself (sorry, I can’t anthromorphize a frigging rain storm with a feminine “she”) with a burst of rain on the skylights that drove the terriers into the closets and under the couches to hide from the thunder and lightning that surely must follow. I stepped outside at the conclusion of the Sox game to check the boats in the yard and the trees were tossing pretty vigorously in the thick, warm wind.  Just another squall, so I went to bed and woke this morning to scudding skies and a stunning bright sunrise.

I walked the dog down Old Shore Road to the harbor, didn’t see any boats tossed onto the shore, just a finger pier looked a little battered over by the old yacht club beach at Mrs. Cabot’s. The skiffs, still rigged, looked safe and sound on the yacht club lawn. Some people were snapping pictures of them and a dog walker forged down the beach to Little River, plastic poop bag in hand.

Just another September morning on Cape Cod, and now I have a day of paperwork and bills, taxes and tedium before the car service comes to fetch me in ten hours for the ride to Logan then British Airways to Heathrow and onwards to Bangalore. Some Sunday morning randomness:

• I have travel fatigue. Beijing knocked the stuffing out of me and now that I’m back and adjusted to my home timezone I have to do the far worse trip to India. 23 hours door-to-door (that’s real hours, not timezone hours) is not fun. I get back on Thursday night and do it again to Raleigh the following Tuesday for four days of catchup. Week after that Chicago and New York in the same week.
• I have to prep a 45 minute talk to 400-some magazine/publishing executives at the Folio show. This has me anxious as most public speaking makes me anxious.
• I have to put the Olympic blogging program to rest. Last week was spent gathering metrics and traffic and impressions and press mentions and all that good stuff that goes into a post-mortem report. I miss that program a lot. An awful lot.
• Seriously maudlin over not seeing my oldest two when they disappeared last month for college and the eldest’s first trip to Europe. We have one left at home, he’s a high school freshman, and are staring at the empty-nest scenario sooner than later. September has always been the bluest month for me — I guess for anybody — and this one is particularly wistful.
• Crossfit kicked my ass. Yesterday’s workout, “Linda” involved lifting weights (deadlift, benchpress, snatches). My son spotted me on the presses. Ten, “declining” sets, 10-9-8-7-6….. 57 minutes. Horrifying. May need to take today off but don’t want to, will miss some workouts in transit to India and if weren’t for Crossfit I wouldn’t have survived China as well as I did.
• Fat Sunday New York Times is an indication that summer is truly over and the Times is back in full swing after the August doldrums. Some randomly interesting stuff in there. One is the profile of ad network Blue Lithium founder. Young guy. Made a stack. I have no idea what he did to make his first pile using some software on top of DoubleClick. Made no sense. Big meaty article about ambient conversations or something in the Magazine. Essentially microblogging via Twitter and Facebook and what it does to us. Don’t know about you but both services continue to unimpress me, but I know are giant foundations for the under 30 generation where relationship management is everything. And I skimmed a piece pitting Yelp against Zagat’s — ok, I get it and I use neither.
• I found myself writing two things yesterday defending Vista. I guess the Seinfeld ad’s are working.

That’s all for now. I write some posts offline on the plane and post when I get to the Ista Hotel in Bangalore at 6 am on Tuesday (local time). Couple days of workshops and I think I fly home in time to be back in Cotuit on Friday. Not sure. Need to go download my itinerary.

We pulled the boats in the Cotuit version of an old fashioned barn raising — the Hurricane-Is-A-Coming Boat Pull — a ritual that involves at least six Cotuit Skiff owners  simultaneously flipping out and amplifying weather rumors into a pending disaster worthy of a Jerry Bruckheimer/Chad Oban film. Strike up the bad electric guitar solo as these six adults anxiously unrig their antique sailboats while bemused rubberneckers drive past in their SUVs and snap pictures.

It’s not that frantic. We’re pretty good at it. Conrad hauls his boats and his customers boats out of the water fully rigged and up the hill to his boat shop. Since he’s a boat builder he has a special trailer that makes skiff pulling a simple one-man operation. The rest of us — Dan, Jimmy, Brad, Tom, and me — play boat trailer roulette, pressing into service anything with wheels and a trailer hitch to get the job done. In a full-on hurricane boat pull during the summer season, dozens of people swing into action and we can move an entire fleet of 40 boats into the meadow atop Rope’s Hill in about three hours. Off season, as we are now after Labor Day, the remaining townie sailors have to play good Samaritan and pull the remaining fleet. Thankfully yesterday’s pull was minor as we’re only operating under a tropical storm watch and Hanna was pooping out in the Carolinas. Nevertheless, I had to pull my boats because of next week’s trip to Bangalore and the fact that two more storms — Ike and Josephine — are right behind Hanna.

Our last legit hurricane on the Cape was Category 1 (the weakest on the one-to-five scale) Bob in August of 1991. That is the one and only true hurricane to hit the Cape in my 50 years on the planet, but beginning in 1938 on through the early 50s, the Cape got pasted with some regularity, including some big damage to the Cotuit Skiff fleet. So, rather than risk a 60-year old nautical antique built by my grandfather in the hopes of getting a few more weekend sails in before Halloween, I pull.

So, here’s the drill. My son Fisher and I row out to the motorboat, tow the dinghy to the beach, motor back out to the skiff, untie and tow it ashore and do the same for the other boats. The first rule of boat pull is the first boats to get pulled are those belonging to people physically present and assisting. Boats being pulled for those absent — pity pulls — take low priority.

Fisher rides the skiff in and starts unrigging the sail while I anchor the motorboat. I fetch the ditty bag (sailor term for canvas bag of nautical tools) and start pulling out the mast wedges that hold the mast secure inside of the mast step. Forestay is unshackled. The halyards (ropes that raise and lower the sail) are unreeved. Fisher stands on deck, hugs the mast, lifts it out and we lower it down and into the cockpit of the boat along with the boom and the gaff. I get into the car attached to the trailer, back it down the ramp until the rear wheels touch the water, set the parking brake, jump out and pull out ten feet of winch rope. Fisher guides the hull onto the carpet covered bunks, gets the boat centered and I stick a rubber mallet with the winch line clove-hitched around the handle into the mast hole on the deck and start winding the boat carefully up onto the bunks. As soon as the boat is secure on the trailer, Fisher and I hop into the car and drive the boat out of the water, up the ramp and up Old Shore Road hill to Main Street, bang a left, go 50 feet and drive into my driveway.

Brother-in-law, brother, and college roommate/best man arrive in pickup truck. Hop out. Two guys on the bow. Two on the stern. Fisher on the saw horses. We lift on one-two-three, step over the trailer, put the gunwale or side of the skiff on the sawhorses, tip it up and over and then upside down, bottom up on the sawhorses. The horses are placed in the middle of the yard so when and if the trees come down they won’t land on the boat. The boat could, in theory, blow off of the horses, but the hull weighs 500 pounds and should be secure. Putting in a garage isn’t a smart move because a) the boat needs to be washed with freshwater first b) that takes too much time and c) the garages are too close to the treeline and could get smashed by a falling maple and really mess up the boat.

Then we jump back into the vehicles and drive back down the hill to do it a few more times on the other guys’ boats. Whole operation takes less than hour but can be made more complex when:

1. The gang drinks beer and tells stories in between boats.
2. Tools from my ditty bag are borrowed and dropped in the water
3. The trailer tire goes flat and a can of a Flat-Fix gunk needs to be located
4. The stem on the trailer tire rips off and the flat fixer is coated with white Flat-Fix gunk
5. Another trailer is found
6. More beer is drunk
7. People who don’t know how to back up a trailer are allowed to back up the trailer
8. Weekend Wally’s who don’t understand boat ramp etiquette slip in with their trailers and decide to give their boat a manicure on the ramp while the rest of us made loud suggestions that they move it elsewhere

Colleagues in North Carolina are reporting no big deal, their lights are still on, and Hanna is right to their east. We awoke to a good, unrelated rain storm, now everything is muggy and quiet, but the fun should begin around 7 pm. Tomorrow I should be able to relaunch the motorboat, and sun shine permitting, get in some beachtime before departing for the airport and my Bangalore flight at 6:30 pm.

Watching the Red Sox game tonight (Beckett is back!) I saw an ad for Verizon FIOS (bring it to Cotuit you slackers!). The ad shows a poor cable guy leaving and apartment and running into the FIOS installer in the hallway. They say hey, compare notes. Cable guy asks the Verizon guy what’s happening. Verizon guy consults an Amazon Kindle, sans leather cover, hits the touchscreen (wait, my Kindle doesn’t have a touch screen) rattles off some addresses. Cable guy, who is a schlub, consults a lo-tech clipboard.

Okay, so Kindle is wide area wireless, but no way Verizon is using them any place other than TV ads. Right?

I aspire to earning a nickname when all is said and done. Something like the one the Byzantine Emperor Basil II earned, First I need to do something either heroic or heinous:

“Finally, on July 29, 1014, Basil II outmaneuvered the Bulgarian army in the Battle of Kleidion, with Samuil separated from his force. Having crushed the Bulgarians, Basil was said to have captured 15,000 prisoners and blinded 99 of every 100 men, leaving 150 one-eyed men to lead them back to their ruler, who fainted at the sight and died two days later suffering a stroke. Although this may be an exaggeration, this gave Basil his nickname Boulgaroktonos, “the Bulgar-slayer” in later tradition.”

Basil II – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Not doing it for me. But what do I know.

UPDATE: – I’m pulling the boats this afternoon. The town just sent an email to the mooring permit holders and all indications are things are going to get windy tomorrow. Can’t risk a 6-year old boat for a couple extra weekends of sailing.

September is when I start really worrying every time business travel takes me off of the Cape and I still have boats in the water. For September is hurricane month on Cape Cod — they hit rarely enough to make them a freak occurance, but often enough and with enough violence to make them a very bad thing and something to worry about.

I’ve been out of town when a hurricane has threatened and the feeling is very very bad. I rather be here, with the family, battening down the hatches and pulling boats for storage in Ropes Field rather than following it online via the National Weather Service.

Now with Hanna coming up the coast and me scheduled to leave for Bangalore on Sunday night, I may have to pull the Chugworm and the motorboat. Not a lot of people left in town to do it for me. It’s a shame, out is out when it comes to a Cotuit Skiff. They aren’t easy boats to launch and rig, but I have spent less time sailing this year than I spent sanding and and painting and there are some fun “cove races” throughout the fall weekends.

Tropical Storm HANNA Public Advisory.

I noted a while back the controversy over dinghy storage in Chatham. Let’s tag this one under the “clamming” strategy aspect of this blog, as part of my ongoing crusade on waterfront access, riparian rights, water quality, and the old ways of life around the Cape Cod shorefront. Expect more ranting on my part through this fall as beachwalk season commences and I start to spend more time contemplating issues ranging from the dredging off of 600 feet of Sampson’s Island to nitrogen loads in Cotuit Bay to the evolving nature of waterfront policy around Cotuit and the Cape at large as population pressure and escalating waterfront values pit the public against the private. Anyway — here’s the Cape Cod Times on a compromise in Chatham to let people continue to store dinghies on the beach. This is an issue in Cotuit and I find myself fiercely guarding my dinghy slot by being the first on the beach every spring. Yet the beach is cluttered with abandoned hulks and needs to be purged.

“CHATHAM — The dinghies can stay, but only if their owners play by the rules.

That is the essence of a new policy that grew out of a confrontation over the winter between a Stage Harbor property owner, the town and the owners of small skiffs used to access boats offshore. The small boats have historically been left on private beaches around town.

Harbor Master Stuart Smith and the owners of the property near the town landing at Champlain Lane, identified as Champlain Realty Trust, have agreed on a solution that will preserve the age-old tradition and allow the owners to have an orderly, clean beach.”

CapeCodTimes.com – Chatham resolves dinghy controversy.