Churbuck.com

A topic of significance for my nearly 18-year old son and me is the appropriate plan of action when dead people start shambling around biting people and turning them into more shambling dead people, aka zombies.  Having been scared shitless in his childhood by the brilliant “28 Days Later” — which introduced the concept of sprinting zombies after years of the George Romero classic shamblers — he has had serious issues with zombie terror. This phobia even extended to certain levels of Halo where the Master Chief is called upon to kill an infectious horde of parasitic people snatchers called The Flood and was so bad in his case that he refused to play the Flood levels for several years.

Since, like bacon, zombies are the au courant American meme, my son is fixated on theoretical survival strategies. Now that he has figured out my Amazon account password, he decided it would be prudent to immediately order a Gerber “Bear Grylls Edition” Parang — think high-tech machete best suited for decapitation. This actually arrived. In a box. At my house. And now hangs on his wall. Any annoyance I may have had over this unauthorized purchase was diminished when the exact same parang appeared in the AMC series, The Walking Dead, a sighting that sent him over the top with smugness.

The parang purchase was followed by a pellet gun and a request to be allowed to take the firearms safety course so he could apply for a gun license (that request has not proceeded). The pellet gun has led to many hours of window replacement and glazing by yours truly, and has done nothing to dissuade the local herd of squirrels from digging up and snacking on next spring’s tulip bulbs.

Then dear Uncle Fester weighed in with his suggestion for the correct firearm for zombie control. A shotgun-in-a-can essentially.

I maintain that firearms, while effective in delivering a long-to-medium range headshot (I am told the only viable way to terminate a zombie is with a couple slugs “in the hat” as my mafia friends would say),  lead to inevitable ammunition shortages and the ensuing need to occupy a gun store or WalMart during times of cemetery uprisings. Converging on gun stores will lead to competition with other would-be zombie hunters, bikers, homicidal maniacs, and other human detritus and would doubtlessly cause a shoot-out that would waste all the bullets in the store because of competition to loot all the bullets in the store.

I believe an effective zombie solution has to be non-ballistic, delivered automatically, and depend on easily renewable supplies.  Think catapults or trenches filled with diesel fuel. Anything manual, like swinging a parang at a zombie’s neck at close quarters is far too risky, especially if the sprinting, angry variety of zombies are involved. And then there is the dreaded splatter-in-your-mouth infection possibilities. No, the parang should be strapped, upside down, in the middle of one’s back, ready for that last stand when your back is against the wall and the gun is going click-click-click.

As we drove to college campuses or rowing regattas, our last fall together, what did my son and I talk about? Zombie strategies of course. Where we would go (desert island, boat, gun store, Home Depot, army base), what we would bring (the arsenal), and how it would probably go down. A good guidebook is World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War which both of us read with keen interest, especially the revelation that aquatic zombies walking on the ocean floor make island refuges untenable.

My solution, which he ridicules, is to hijack a truck, drive immediately to the local Women’s Workout World, load up all the treadmills, stop off at the hardware store and get lots and lots of extension cords, and then arrange the treadmills around the house, facing outwards, without their railings of course, and switch them on when it all hits the fan. Any zombie shambling up to Chez Churbuck would step onto the rapidly spinning treadmill belt and be propelled backwards at high speed.

He maintains I’d be out of luck once the lights went out — which would probably happen immediately as panicked motorists ran their Prii into utility poles  – to which I say I would raid my neighbor Conrad’s barn (he runs Cotuit Solar) and cover the roof with China’s finest solar photovoltaic cells. What about nighttime, when zombies usually attack? he asks. Batteries, I reply. Lots of them.

This is for Marta, who I imagine is skiing across all the late fall bald spots somewhere in Jackson, New Hampshire.

Om Malik delivered a thoughtful recollection of ten years at the front lines of the new, new media revolution yesterday when he recapped a decade of blogging that started in the earliest days of Dave Winer’s Userland, a humble beginning that has grown to one of the leading professional tech blog networks (GigaOm) and his rightfully deserved position as one of the world’s leading tech pundits.

We worked together in the mid-1990s at the launch of Forbes.com until he departed for San Francisco and I decamped for management consulting.  What started as a professional relationship quickly turned into a personal friendship that has endured over the years, perhaps forged in the mutual crucible of 85 Fifth Avenue and the dingy second floor office that served as a launch pad for many interesting people and personalities.

Some highlights of his essay that stood out:

• Cacoethes Scribendi:  blogs scratch the itch to write for people accustomed to writing a lot. Moving from the intra-day publish-often always-on newscycle of Forbes.com to a monthly print schedule meant he needed a daily outlet. “When I was working for Forbes.com during the early days of the dot-com bubble, I learned a vital lesson – you had to write every day to be any good and to have a complete handle on the beat. There was no way around the plain-old beat the pavement reporting.”
• Twitter Is Not a Blog Killer: maybe it is a communications vehicle for the barely literate, but 140 characters doesn’t stand a chance of competing with 250 words. “Twitter has only acted as an accelerator for my blogging role, allowing me the luxury of writing less but reaching far more people.”
• On curation: “Mostly because curation and sharing of content has become as important as writing. By sharing videos, photos, links, or quotes we are all essentially editors and the sharing itself is an act of editorializing.”
• And of course, what is a great blog post without a good list?

I never voted for Barney Frank — I couldn’t, he represented the next congressional district over from the Cape and Islands — and even if I could have I wouldn’t publicly expose my vote because, well, as an independent and former political reporter I’m conditioned not to tip my ballots in public.

I ran into him in July in Washington, in Reagan National Airport in the US Air terminal, both of us bound back to Boston; him for the beginning of some summer congressional break, me wrapping up a six month consulting engagement designing a social media metrics framework (if that isn’t a dreary bureaucratic cliche and hopeless mission, I don’t know what is) for a big public relations firm. He looked perturbed, a bit conscious of his face recognition among the people, hoping that no one would pick him out of the crowd and start chewing his ear about one contentious issue or another. He wasn’t alone, there was a New Hampshire congressman on the same flight, but there’s no mistaking Barney, one of the more visible and intelligent legislators of our time.

When I manned the statehouse bureau for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune — that is when the parochial editors back in North Andover deigned to let me out of their sight and flee the smoke-filled newsroom and their inane assignments to interview Megabucks winners (“I’m gonna buy a Winnebago and a microwave oven …”) and write thumb-suckers about the weather in the royal, USA Today inspired, “we” (“We Hate Snow”) — there was a now famous Barney Frank campaign poster tacked onto the wall of the press room by the tinny loudspeaker that piped in the ravings of the state representatives.

“Neatness isn’t everything”

By that point in time (1984), Barney had graduated from the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and gone onto represent suburban Boston and Southeastern Massachusetts in the U.S. Congress. We reporters loved him for his lack of preening polish and his sharp wit,  his willingness to deliver the perfect mordant quote on any occasion. He was an unmade bed of a man, a schlub, a man living on an astral plane where clothes and body type didn’t matter. His statehouse office was a legendary mess.

He was one of the few elected types that would actually pop into the press room, a feral pen of hacks and wretches banging away on little pre-laptop Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100s, and yuck it up with the crew from the Lowell Sun, Quincy Patriot-Ledger, the Salem Evening News.  I was too green and intimidated to yuck it up with him or any of the big personalities in state politics, but I did love to lurk on the edge of the scrum, micro-cassette recorder held over the shoulder of some television or radio reporter, and listen to him dig into some opponent or issue with his slightly retarded lisp and swallowed “G’s”.

My favorite Barney Frank moment is this YouTube video, taken at a constituent town hall in New Bedford, when an unhinged Lyndon LaRouche candidate decided to mess with the wrong guy.

Politics and sexual proclivities aside, Congress has lost one of the smart ones. Henrik Hertzberg’s recollection in the New Yorker is worth the read. Today’s New York Times’ story about Frank’s retirement announcement at the age of 71 is somewhat depressing, only in that Frank blames the current partisan bitterness, lack of cross-aisle respect, and shallow-as-a-mud-puddle media coverage for his decision to leave the hustings and become a public intellectual.

“When he arrived in the House in 1981, he said, “you had Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan talking about how they were friends after 5 o’clock — although if you knew Reagan’s work habits it was really, like, after about 2:30.”

Now, Mr. Frank said, the notion that wrangling between Democrats and Republicans is “a competition between people of good will with different views on public policy” has vanished. For that, he blames Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and current Republican presidential candidate with whom he has a tense history.

“Newt’s the single biggest factor in bringing about this change,” Mr. Frank said. “He got to Congress in ’78 and said, ‘We the Republicans are not going to be able to take over unless we demonize the Democrats.’ ”

Mr. Frank also blamed the conservative news media for the bitter divide that had made him reluctant to continue in Washington, as well as moderate voters who he said do not make their voices heard enough.”

A few weeks ago, while taking my afternoon constitutional with the dog along Ropes Beach, I witnessed the weirdest example of a massive biomass I’ve ever seen on the Cape. The fall is a particularly fecund time of year on the water, with the baitfish balling up into a tight concentrations that are assaulted over and over by blitzes of bluefish and striped bass fattening up before their southern migration for the winter. Usually the baitfish are immature menhaden, also known as “peanut bunker” but what I saw that afternoon on the shores of the cove was, in my opinion, a school of immature river herring, or alewives, also known as dropback herring because they drop back into the sea following their anadromous cycle of birth in the inland freshwater ponds and maturation in the deep sea.

The spring herring run is a classic event on the Cape, occurring in mid-April around the time the forsythias bloom.  During that run the adult alewives swim in from the deep ocean up to the very heads of the saltwater estuaries, lured in by some mystical genetic marker that leads them to seek out the same sweet waters they were born in. The fish then jump and wriggle their way up the coastal streams, over concrete fish ladders and other obstacles, dodging gulls and people with nets to finally made their way to some inland pond to drop their eggs and milt. These runs used to produce prodigious amounts of fish in colonial times, not so much any longer, and the state has imposed a ban on the taking of spawning herring for a number of years now.

What I saw, beginning at the footbridge and extending a half mile along the entire curving shoreline to Handys Point was a band of tiny black fish — minnow sized — that extended from two feet from the water’s edge out about 12 feet — a big long, moving black band of a gazillion tiny fishies all finning and pointing in the same direction, occasionally erupting when something disturbed their peace. Why do I think they were herring?

1. The week before I saw a steady stream of little black smolts swimming out of Little River.

2. Peanut bunker are distinctively shaped and these were not peanut bunker.

3. I’ve heard that herring like to circle the shorelines of the ponds in a big schools following their hatch. These fish were tucked right up on the beach, in the shallows where the sun could warm them.

Cue the video for a vague sense of what I saw. It’s not an exaggeration to say I walked past 20 solid minutes of fish during that sunny stroll.

When I was in college my girlfriends tended to dress me, and one in particular, decided that my preference for rowing shirts won off the backs of vanquished opponents, Grateful Dead concert t-shirts, and frayed collar button downs carried over from my prep school dress code days needed to be replaced with a new standard “Dave Look” based on white Brooks Brothers button downs and well faded blue Levi’s 505 classic jeans.  Brooks Brothers was different in the 1970s, still the standard bearer of the iconic American Ivy Traditional look, and because of my allegiance to all things Yale, I expanded to include a few button flap pocket J. Press shirts as that shop was the classic Dink Stover haberdasher of New Haven.

After thirty years of Brooks Brothers I finally decided enough was enough. The quality of the oxford cloth was deteriorating, everyone and their brother owned the same shirts, and button downs simply aren’t fashionable enough for someone in the digital creative world. I’ve always been accustomed to life spent in coat and tie thanks to my years in boarding school. Forbes was a good place to indulge in bow-ties and suits. But once I arrived at McKinsey at the nadir of the dot.bomb revolution I realized the older partners were lost trying to repurpose closets full of $8,000 Brioni suits into something resembling business casual. The pit of sartorial despair was Lenovo — the computer industry is the worst dressed collection of pleated Dockers, golf-shirt wearing conformists in the world. As one former colleague despaired, the look was pure Greg Norman.

One headhunter last summer gave me shit for showing up in a bowtie and said I needed to go more digitally hip. For example? I asked. Carry an iPad and dress like Bradley Cooper the guy said. I didn’t know who the hell Bradley Cooper was, but I had visions of being a tan-in-a-can douchebag in distressed fashion skinny jeans with a collarless shirt, hipster fedora, and some wasp waisted velvet blazer with a pink lining.

Feh. No thanks.

A couple years ago I sucked it up and went English, specifically Turnbull and Asser, and haven’t looked back since.  I can’t afford custom shirts — hell, Forbes.com in its annual “Living Extremely Well” index pegs a dozen bespoke T&A shirts at $4,380, a mere $365 a shirt. Me, I am content going off the rack, and being an American preppy at heart, can’t bring myself to go to french cuffs and cufflinks, so my cost per shirt is considerably less. Sure, a custom shirt would be a fantastic luxury, but I’m not living at that end of the sartorial closet where I have the right to insist on hand tailored suits from the likes of Huntsman, Thomas Mahon, or Gieves and Hawkes (someday, but not now).

One thing to be said for the Jermyn Street school of shirtings is the British don’t shy away from plumage and do a wild job with color and patterns. So, goodbye boring blue, white and pink Brooks Brothers, and hello to tattersalls, university stripes, spread collars and those nice little gussets that beef up the tails.  The shirts simply feel better and feeling good is the first step towards looking good. And thank heavens for the current office environment in Manhattan, something about working out of a mid-town townhouse behind the Museum of Modern Art demands a little more fashion effort than a Research Triangle office park.

It’s been a good stretch book-wise, so I thought I’d weigh in with a trio of recent readings and what is on deck in the Kindle.

First off is The Art of Fielding, one of the best first novels and best baseball novels I’ve ever read. Chad Harbach sets the rise and fall of a shortstop prodigy in a small liberal arts college set in the northern midwest. Immediately I began to compare it to Don DeLillo’s End Zone, a great metaphysical sports novel I first read in the 1970s, but Harbach is far more accessible and compelling, with characters so rich that I began to cast the movie adaptation in my mind. The Art of Fielding is one of the better fictions I’ve read in 2011, and while the baseball theme may put off some non-sporting readers, I can assure you the basis of the novel is far more than a tale of the diamond.  I am most grateful for the reminder of the majesty of Moby Dick, and impressed by Harbach’s affection for The Lee Shore, one of the most powerful piece of 19th century writing in my estimation:

Second in the list of recent good books is James Salter’s Solo Faces.  Given my affection for mountain climbing literature, this is the best piece of climbing fiction I’ve read since Trevanian’s The Eiger Sanction. See the previous post for my thoughts on Salter, but this is a gem that lends credence to the claim that Salter is a “writer’s writer.”

And finally, last night I finished Stephen King’s most recent novel, 11/23/63, his great take on the cliche of the time-traveler, only done with far more savoir faire than the usual “butterfly effect” meta-weirdness most sci-fi writers dwell on.  I’d position this alongside James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand as the best Kennedy assassination novel ever written.

I finished this big book in three days of obsessive non-stop reading and would stack it up against The Stand as one of King’s finest. Amazing how he’s destined to go down as one of the great voices in American literature and this book confirms it.

Some of my favorite childhood literature memories were the bookcases filled with pulp novels from the first two decades of the 20th century.  These were the books my grandfather and father read in the years before television. Cheap hardcovers with coarse yellowing paper that smelled like a dusty basement.

The original Tom Swift series was a big favorite, the Thornton Burgess books, and closer to home, three novels written by a family member, Charles Pendexter Durrell, who lived across the street in the 1930s and was my cousin Peter’s great-grandfather. Those three novels were published as The Bluewater Series, by Milton Bradley, the Springfield, Massachusetts game publisher best known for The Game of Life. They featured Sam Hotchkiss, the son of a wealthy Boston businessman who is ordered to the peaceful southside village of Saquoit (a concoction of Santuit, Cotuit, and Waquoit)  by his physician to recover from overwork and bad health. Sam is irked to be exiled to the remote shores of Cape Cod and cops a sulky attitude upon arrival. He’s eventually introduced to Captain Seth Nickerson, an old salt who could be patterned on my Great-great grandfather, Thomas Chatfield, to whom the first book, The Skipper of the Cynthia B. is dedicated:

Captain Seth patiently takes the young boy under his wing and takes him sailing on his trusty catboat, the Cynthia B., named for his devoted wife, and tagged with a “B” because it is considered bad luck to have a boat’s name end with a vowel.

The book describes Sam and Captain Seth’s sailing and fishing adventures, and is interspersed with tales from the Captain’s whaling days in the Arctic and Pacific. There’s a some drama in the plot involving a catboat race, and the book has some wonderful illustrations by the Chatham, Massachusetts illustrator, Harold Brett.

Some of Brett’s painting of the book’s dust jacket covers hung in the house across the street when I was young.  They were beautiful things that are gone now, taken away by the inevitable generational divisions of property. But they were very impressive examples of the Brandywine School of illustration as Brett was a student of Howard Pyle.

The three books in the series are:

• Skipper of the Cynthia B
• Heave Short
• Lights Off Shore or Sam and the Outlaws of the Bay

They were published in the 20s and 30s, and are, to my knowledge, the only novels set in Cotuit other than Clara Nickerson Boden’s The Cut of Her Jib (another distant relation of mine).

What I know about Charles Pendexter Durrell is that he was born in Maine in the 1880s, lived in Watertown, Massachusetts, and married Chatfield’s daughter Susan granddaughter, Mildred Chatfield Fisher. They had one child, Elizabeth Durrell, who married Fred F. Field and lived across the street and was my grandmother’s best friend. They collected shells together, made beach plum jelly, and carried on like two old Cotuit ladies with a lot of memories would carry on. Elizabeth, or “Betty” as we called her, took care of me one summer because of some family medical dramas, and fed me awesome hamburgers on Wonder bread with yellow mustard. Her grandson Peter Field is my youngest son’s godfather and in some convoluted fashion due to proximity, along with his brother Tom, like a first cousin even though he is probably twice removed or however that works.

Durrell died in the 1950s. His books live on, available used or online in Google Books at the links above.

Y Combinator: Elementary Worldly Wisdom.

Charles Munger is Warren Buffett’s wingman and co-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. If you want to read the most brilliant piece of advice and insight into how to think, the importance of mental models, and just plain old horsesense. Check out this transcript of a talk he gave in 1994 at the USC Business School.

The observation that chiropractors are the “great boob[s] of medicine” is priceless.

“What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.

What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models—because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does. You become the equivalent of a chiropractor who, of course, is the great boob in medicine.

It’s like the old saying, “To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” And of course, that’s the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you’ve got to have multiple models.”

Ten years ago, on a perfectly windless day when the water of Nantucket Sound were flat and mirror smooth, I ventured a few miles offshore from Cotuit to Horseshoe Shoals — a long curving sandbar that can be a great place to catch bluefish throughout the summer months. I had my son and daughter with me and after we caught a nice 12 lb. blue for dinner, I shut off the engine and enjoyed the strange experience of floating calmly over the shoal without the usual three to four feet of surf and chaos that usually cover the two-mile long crescent of glacial sand and pebbles during a brisk southwesterly breeze and a flood tide.  The Horseshoe is a fascinating place. Remnants of an ancient forest have been discovered out there. The controversial Wind Farm is proposed for the general vicinity (which I support). And, navigationally, it’s interesting because it is the location of both the shallowest water in Nantucket Sound and the deepest — the two extremes only less than half-a-mile apart — an indication of the massive hydrodynamics of the east-west current flows and infamous shoals that have long made the Sound a bad place for shipping.

I stood on the bow of the skiff, fly fishing, casting in hopes of tempting a spanish mackerel or bonito, but nothing was biting. The current would sweep us across the shallow, the bottom rising pale green, then yellow up from the depths until the boat passed over the shoal itself, the bottom just a few feet below us.

I gave up the fly rod and just watched the bottom, at one point, as we crossed over a new section, I swore I saw a pipe or something man made sticking up from the sand. I turned on the engine, circled back and took another look. Gradually, as I opened up my field of vision, the perfect outline of a boat revealed itself… just the outline, no hull, as if someone had drawn the concept of a boat on the bottom.

It was a wreck. The first I had ever seen in the Sound.

But which wreck? What had happened out there and when? Had people died? Was it fifty years old, 100? It was both creepy and thrilling in a macabre way. It was definitely something to avoid as there were some portions of the superstructure that seemed to be close to the surface.

Once ashore I started researching the wreck lists for the area and found nothing. There had been a light ship at Cross Rip (a nearby shoal) in 1918, but that vanished during a winter blizzard, carried off station by ice and never found with all hands lost. Since that ship, the LV-6, was last seen adrift at the eastern end of Nantucket Sound, 15 miles away, I ruled it out.   I recalled old navigational charts of the Sound showing an icon for a half-submerged wreck south of the Horseshoe, yet I never saw any such boat out there as a kid.

Here’s a 1968 Coast Guard chart of the area.

And specifically, here’s a zoomed-in look at the spot where I saw the hulk that day ten years ago.

Once ashore, I started telling people about the wreck, asking if anyone knew what it was or if they had ever seen it.  ”Ask Leonard Peck,” someone said. He’d been around for a long time and was one of the saltier people in Cotuit, but Leonard passed away before I could ask. Other old timers shrugged and said they didn’t have a clue. So I gave up but talked about it with my fishing and sailing friends, looking for some information about the hulk I had glimpsed lurking out there.

Then, this morning, in the Barnstable Patriot, the local weekly newspaper, the “Early Files” section that excerpts news from past editions of the paper had this entry under 1971:

“Three hundred pounds of explosives demolished the submerged Navy patrol boat off Horseshoe Shoals last Thursday after several weeks of delay caused by weather and tides. The Ad Lib II struck the wreck last month, resulting in the deaths of Dr. James L. Chute of Osterville and Harland L. Matthews of Cotuit. The explosion removed all the wreck’s superstructure and part of the submerged hull. Coast Guard expects the wreck buoy will remain at its present location.”

Mystery solved. Sort of.  A little knowledge makes one thirsty for more.

First I went looking for any information about the tragedy that occurred in the fall of 1971 when the Ad Lib II struck the wreck. I found this lawsuit filed by descendants of  the two dead local men against the Federal Government. Made sense since Horseshoe Shoe is outside of the state’s three mile territorial limit and officially in federal waters. Second, it was a US Navy ship. But why was it there? How had it come to be wrecked? What kind of ship was it?

The lawsuit, Chute v. The United State of America, dated February 17, 1979 has the details:

“…plaintiffs have brought this action to recover for the deaths of their respective fathers as a result of the sinking of the boat AD LIB II on September 30, 1971 in Nantucket Sound. Both decedents had been guests on the AD LIB II, which was owned and operated by Dr. Robert L. Baxter, a friend. Plaintiffs allege the AD LIB II sunk when it struck a submerged wreck on Horseshoe Shoals in Nantucket Sound, approximately seven to eight miles south-southwest of Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. The plaintiffs contend that the wreck was improperly marked by the defendant, the United States. The wreck consists of a Navy ship, PC1203, which had been deliberately grounded on Horseshoe Shoals in 1949 for use as a bombing target.”

The law suit tells the story of how the Ad Lib II sank:

“Between 7:00 a. m. and 8:00 a. m. on September 30, 1971, Dr. Robert L. Baxter (aged 69); his wife; John Ohrn (aged 34); and the decedents, Dr. James L. Chute (aged 75) and Harlan L. Matthews (aged 77), departed from Lewis Bay on the AD LIB II and proceeded to Nantucket Sound to fish. The AD LIB II had a length of 24 feet, a width of approximately 10 feet, a mean draft of 3 feet, and a fiberglass hull. Dr. Baxter was an experienced mariner in the Nantucket Sound area, having fished in the area for some 40 years. He had also taught local courses in navigation and therefore knew that a wreck buoy is not placed on top of a wreck.

According to the lawsuit, a few days immediately following the Ad Lib II tragedy, Chester Crosby, chairman of the Town of Barnstable Waterways Commission (and owner of the Crosby Boat Yard in Osterville) asked the Coast Guard to mark the wreck.

“The plaintiffs had sought to introduce two letters of correspondence between Chester Crosby and Lieutenant Commander Ransom K. Boyce, then the Assistant Chief, Aids to Navigation Branch of the U. S. First Coast Guard District. Crosby was Chairman of the Waterways Committee, an advisory committee to the Board of Selectmen of the Town of Barnstable, Massachusetts, with regard to problems around the harbors and waterways. Writing to the Coast Guard in his capacity as Chairman, under date of October 4, 1971, Crosby expressed concern as to the adequacy of the marking of the wreck of the PC1203. As will be discussed in this court’s Findings of Fact, the buoy set up to mark the PC1203 was not placed directly on the wreck, but at some distance from it. The letter from Crosby, Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 15, refers to a previous request to have the Coast Guard attach a day beacon to the wreck and the fact that that request had been refused. It further acknowledges the problem of placing buoys close to submerged wrecks, but suggests that “since the United States Navy placed the wreck on the shoal, couldn’t an eventual solution be to have them dynamite the remains [of the wreck] during the late fall after the fishing season and remove the debris.” Boyce’s response, dated October 13, 1971, Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 16, states that the Coast Guard had decided “to blow up the remains of the wreck and wire drag the area to the depth of five feet below the reference plane,” and concludes that “[i]t is felt that this is a satisfactory solution to the problem.”"

There are no online archives of the Cape Cod Standard Times or the Barnstable Patriot available for 1971 — so I need to get in the car and drive to the Sturgis Libraryif I want to read the contemporary accounts of the wreck of the Ad Lib II.

As for the PC1203 — she was a 175-foot patrol boat with a crew of 59 men, of the PC463 class, built in 1943 by the Consolidated Shipbuilding Corporation of Morris Heights, New York. I have no information where she was assigned or if she ever saw action. Apparently the 1203 was decommissioned, towed out to the middle of the Sound, and scuttled on a sandbar to serve as a target for pilots flying out of Otis Air Force base. The Cape and Island were very active with military training activities during and after World War II, with landing craft operations practiced out of Cape Candoit in Cotuit’s North Bay and Mashpee’s Popponnesset and Waquoit Bays.  Another famous target practice ship, the Longstreet, was a Cape Cod Bay landmark for years off of Wellfleet off of the shore of the Cape’s northside, and Noman’s Land, the island south of Martha’s Vineyard, was pummeled for years by strafing fighters and practicing bombers.

According to the lawsuit:

“…little, if any, of the remains of the PC1203 wreck was above the water’s surface except at low tide when small portions of the vessel broke the water’s surface. The depth of the water in the vicinity of the wreck varies according to the tides from approximately 2 feet to 4.8 feet. From 1949 to 1961, the area where the PC1203 was grounded was designated as a danger area. In 1961, the danger designation of the area was removed. During this period, the PC1203′s location was unmarked except for a pipe affixed to it by persons unknown. This pipe, however, was destroyed during a hurricane in the mid-1950′s.

Obviously for Mr. Chute and Mr. Matthews, that wasn’t enough to prevent their deaths by drowning after the Ad Lib II succumbed to the gash in her hull and sank.

I can only imagine the chaos out there that foggy afternoon as the water gushed through the rip in the Fiberglas hull. Despite an experienced skipper, life jackets, and relatively warm water. Two men died.

From the law suit:

“After the AD LIB II struck the wreck, the decision was made to “try to make it” back to shore. However, the boat was taking on a lot of water and subsequently Dr. Baxter turned the AD LIB II toward the shoal, hoping to be in shallow waters. While in the turn, however, the boat sank and the parties were forced into the water.

In the end, the court ruled for the plaintiff, and found the government liable for not adequately marking the wreck with a buoy, light, rip-rap or structure directly on the wreck itself.

I can’t find much about Harlan Matthews, the Cotuit man who drowned. His daughter Helen Dottridge,  one of the plaintiffs in the 1978 lawsuit, passed away in 2007 at 86,and was a well known figure in the village historical society and Federated Church: the Dottridges being one of Cotuit’s oldest families. The owner and skipper of the Ad Lib II, Dr. Robert L. Baxter, was a former commodore of the Hyannis Yacht Club and navigation instructor.

If you pick the right day and tide and have a good pair of polarized sunglasses, the remnants of the wreck of the PC1203 are still out there, perfectly outlined in the rocky sands of Horseshoe Shoal.  The modern edition of the chart may not show the half-exposed icon any longer, but some versions do show the simple word “pipe.”

This is fun. Extend the New York street grid around the planet and see where you live in Manhattan terms. Takes Cartesian coordinates to another dimension of dementia.

From ExtendNY

Where has James Salter been hiding my entire literary life? Seriously, the blurb on the book jacket and wikipedia entry laud him as a “writer’s writer.”  I agree — and then some — after reading his  mountain climbing novel, Solo Faces, and recent memoir, Burning The Days.

After mentioning the recent passing of Walter Bonatti, the acclaimed Italian climber to my business partner — a climber and mountaineer himself — he recommended Solo Faces as a great book. It is the spare, economically told story of one of the better fictional heroes in literature: Vernon Rand, a laconic climbing mystic who haunts Chamonix climbing the needles and faces by himself, rescuing lesser climbers when no one else can, a man who prefers mountains to women, though women love him.

Salter wrote the novel for Robert Redford, who commissioned it as a script (and then rejected it.) Redford had starred in a film Salter wrote, Downhill Racer,  a great classic in my opinion. The voice, the language, variously described as “compressed” and “spare” in the Hemingway school of speak-low and slow, is wonderful:

“They were at work on the roof of the church. All day from above, from a sea of light where two white crosses crowned twin domes, voices came floating down as well as occasional pieces of wood, nails, and once, in the dreamlike air, a coin that seemed to flash, disappear, and then shine again for an endless time before it met the ground. Beneath the eucalyptus branches a signboard covered with glass announced the Sunday sermon: Sexuality and God.”

The Paris Review has a great appreciation of Salter and his work here.

Salter’s life, as recounted by him in Burning The Days is remarkable, giving the World’s Most Interesting Man a run for his money.

• Born James Horowitz, the son of semi-wealthy New York real estate developer, grandson of Polish Jews, rising from the slums to the good life during the Depression, a brilliant time in Manhattan
• Schoolmate of Jack Kerouac at Horace Mann
• West Point, 49th in a class of 852
• Learns to fly in eight hours during World War II. Crashes a plane into a house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and walks away
• F-86 jet fighter pilot and ace flying 100 sorties over North Korea and across the Chinese border
• Literary sensation when he publishes The Hunters  under the pen name James Salter in 1957
• Expatriate celebrity, writing novels and screenplays in Paris, Rome during La Dolce Vita days. Elbows rubbed with Redford, Redgrave, Fellini, Sophia Lauren
• East Hampton literary life, habitue of the 1970s Manhattan literary life

The orange harbormaster stickers are out at Ropes Beach. The remaining kayaks, skiffs, shells and even paddleboats are all festooned with one of these. As of tomorrow they’re at risk of being collected and hauled away to places unknown. (I hid mine on the yacht club property as I intend to keep motorboating for another month.)

This is a good thing the harbormaster started a couple years ago. Getting the boats off the beach gives the beach grass a chance to grow back and winnows out the hulks and derelict pieces of Fiberglas that have littered the place for years. Some of these boats — like the weird yellow paddle boat below — seem to arrive and then never, ever go any where.

The town needs to address the public beach. Phragmites are invading, the cement sea wall is spalling, and the place is getting rattier every year, a far cry from the pristine little beach I knew as a kid, complete with lifeguards, water fountain and bath house. Swimming ended twenty years because of some strange skin mite caused by bird droppings interacting with periwinkles. Little kids would get covered with itchy bites. Now it’s a dog park and a sand box of sorts where people sunbathe on nice days amongst the dinghys and sunfishes.

Quote of the Day: “Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender.”

via Reasons why the social graph deserves to die — Tech News and Analysis.

I think I need to reconsider my indifference to Burning Man after watching this. Tip of the hat to Laughing Squid.

1. He may not have flushed toilets
2. He smelled bad
3. He had serious food issues
4. What ever the opposite of loyal is, he was
5. He blamed the post- Restoration commute between Pixar and Apple  for his cancer
6. He was a serious walker
7. The Apple store may have been his greatest design
8. He sort of screwed himself early on by avoiding surgery
9. He cried a lot in business settings
10. It really wasn’t about the money

For years, whenever I found myself in the vicinity of the New York Hilton at 53rd and Sixth, I would be re-surprised by the monster line of people standing next to a corner food cart. Others would comment on the weird popularity of the spot. Was it the neighborhood? Dense with publishing houses, the Museum of Modern Art, Rock Center and the hotel? Or was it the food? Some strange attraction that had to be tasted to be believed.

Working as I do now on 54th between Sixth and Fifth, this cart is pretty much across the street and hard to miss. Today I worked up the gumption to try it after reading some glowing reviews on Yelp and checking out the cart’s website. Yes, they are at www.53rdand6th.com

Here’s the deal. It’s a Halal cart. Think Islamic Kosher. There’s a gazillion of them. They serve chicken and gyros and rice. Your basic Bourdainian stoner street food.I usually avoid street meat for the same reason I take lots of Immodium with me to Bangalore. Dirty water hot dogs — not my thing. But street food can be awesome, especially in places like Istanbul, and being a fan of the grey mystery meat known as gyro, I am not above finding my food in the great concrete canyons.

If you want the whole foodie obsessive take on the 53rd and Sixth chicken and rice thing, I suggest you read this guy. People get worked up over whether the day guy is the same as the night guy and whether the mythical “white sauce” is the same. I couldn’t tell you. I ordered a round foil plate of orange rice, chopped up chicken and gyro meat covered with the white goo and a splash of what is allegedly the hottest hot sauce in food cart land. A little sad chopped up iceberg lettuce, some sliced pieces of pita, on went the cardboard lid, into a bright yellow  bag it went, and five minutes later I am in my office tempting the e.coli/shigella gods.

Verdict: not bad for $6 bucks, but will give me a fat ass if eaten too often. The rice and pita are decidedly not “paleo” (which makes them all the better for being forbidden). The line, at 11:45 am, was nonexistent, apparently the fun is after the bars close at 2 am. I’m amazed at how people worship the place. Just Google “53rd and 6th”

And people have been killed for cutting the line.

Gawker network three times more valuable than Drudge Report, according to survey | Poynter..

Interesting list of top 25 blogs/aggregators by 24/7 Wall Street. Congrats to my buddies who work at or own some of these.

”

1. Gawker: $318 million
2. Drudge: $93 million
3. PopSugar Media Network: $64 million
4. SBNation: $56 million
5. Macrumors: $52 million
6. Business Insider, Seeking Alpha: $45 million
7. Cheezburger Network $41 million
8. Mashable $39 million
9. GigaOM $32 million
10. Perez Hilton $29 million
11. Funny or Die $27 million
12. The Blaze $24 million
13. Zero Hedge $16 million
14. ReadWriteWeb $13.2 million
15. VentureBeat $13 million
16. PItchfork $12.9 million
17. Mediaite $12 million
18. Newser $8 million
19. Boing Boing $7 million
20. Gothamist $4.2 million
21. Breitbart $4 million
22. Destructoid $3.7 million
23. Breaking Media $3.5 million
24. 24/7 Wall St. (Of course the site had to put itself on the list, though it doesn’t estimate its own value.)”

Great profile of Cotuit’s oldest clam company. I love the final paragraph which sums up why we need to encourage more aquaculture and be less concerned with McMansion waterfront rights.

“And the oysters are actually good for the ecosystem, each filtering as many as 50 gallons of water a day and removing nitrogen. The bivalves’ combined effect, says Gargiulo, is like removing 100 houses with septic systems from the waterfront.”

via Splendid Through the Centuries – Cape Cod Life Online.