This dramatic photo of a waterspout appeared on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. It was taken four years ago off Tampa, Florida.
Florida waters are known for waterspouts.
I have seen them off the Keys. Fortunately at a distance.
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Sailing Anarchy recently ran a link to Levi Cohen’s informative site tracking Atlantic hurricanes. Before leaving GANNET I asked the good people at Marathon Boat Yard to keep hurricanes away. They said they would. But I still check tropical tidbits every day.
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While looking for a bank routing number, I happened across several other things in my notes that I had forgotten and don’t believe have ever been published.
Return to a city where you lived twenty years earlier or were in love. It is not the same. It has changed and you have. It fades even as you look at it, and you fade too. It seems solid, but is mostly space. Reality sketched lightly on a veil of oblivion.
It vanishes even as you look at it. Perhaps because you look at it. Or not. It vanishes anyway.
….
Fake book cover blurbs for A SINGLE WAVE:
I thank Webb Chiles for perpetuating my memory. May someone in centuries hence do the same for him and A SINGLE WAVE.--Chidiock Tichborne, poet
A SINGLE WAVE. Resurgam! --Christopher Wren, architect
Although Mr. Chiles has transformed my swan into a more bellicose bird, A SINGLE WAVE sings a glorious song of the sea. --Jean Sibelius, composer
Now that Webb has at last removed to New England, he is worthy to be my successor. I only wish I had written A SINGLE WAVE myself. --Joshua Slocum, sailor
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And if in the end he had dreamed the wrong dream, the dream that others didn’t wish to enter, then that was the way of dreams, it was only to be expected, he had no desire to have dreamt otherwise.
MARTIN DRESSLER, Steven Millhauser
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I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. Job: 30:29
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Where would a poet be today?
It is easier to say where he would not be. He would not be in a university. Or an ad agency. Or working for a newspaper or magazine or anywhere in ‘publishing’ or the ‘media.’ He might be almost anywhere else. A garbage collector. A surgeon. An astrophysicist. A cop. A sailor. A poet would be an original. ‘Genius’ is only a term of approbation. It means only that ‘I like your work a lot.’ Something akin to ‘superstar’, which is an irrelevant absurdity. If the language had not been debased by publicity agents and imprecise minds, ‘star’ would be enough. There are no geniuses, only originals who are admired.
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They were making it up as they went along, improvising on the edge of catastrophe.
from FOUNDING BROTHERS by Joseph J. Ellis
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For someone who has been called a romantic, I have a hard mind that seeks to quantify things in the belief that that which cannot be quantified is merely opinion, though I harbor the suspicion that what is most important cannot be quantified. As a boy I quantified my ambition as wanting to be loved by one woman and to have something I wrote be remembered a thousand years. What I really wanted was to join the pantheon of the immortals and I reasoned that if one is remembered a thousand years he will go on being remembered. Although that ambition never changed, I have been loved by many woman and I expect I will be totally forgotten.
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Que lindo es soñar despierto. ‘How beautiful it is to dream while you are awake.’
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The price of heroic deeds
Is great effort and endurance.
To risk life to the point of losing it
Is the guarantee of glory.
The man who is not cowed by abject fears,
Though life be short, his fame survives the years.
THE LUSIADS, Luis Camoes
