Tag: Fandango's Flashback Friday

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Little

A Flashback Friday Presntation from March 2020:

Have little space, no time, and just a few tools? Try miniature work.
When I started woodcarving, I had just a few tools and almost no wood. I carved the little box from scraps of cherry and walnut. The tool kit for making the small sloop was minimum: a few small gouges, V-tool, and a riffler file. For work in this dimension, my bench was a handicap; I did most of it on a carver’s hook with some anti-slip fabric to hold the piece in place ( you can use woven shelf liner material or carpet underlayment). I did finish the piece in varnish, but you could do as many European carvers have done for centuries and rub the carving down with a bit of beeswax candle. The beeswax gives a beautifully mellow, soft look to the carving.

Small boat box about half finished


Access to a bandsaw made it possible for me to create a small box with the boat carving as a lid. But I created similar pieces for small glued-up business card holders and refrigerator magnets. This little boat has an LOA (lenght over all) of less than an inch and a half.
Work in small dimensions doesn’t seem to be as impressive as more substantial work, but it requires thoughtful attention to detail and forces us to focus our skills. Doing small versions can also be a way of working out design elements for later work when you scale up your design.

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Obscure

For Fandangos’ Flashback Friday. Originally published on April 26,2020

Ego? Sure, I do. Why else would I have done all those shows? Blog posts and blather about my carving from one end of the internet to the other! I guess mine is as healthy as anybody else’s. But you know who I admire? It’s the woman or man who carved this little portrait. Its hidden away on a back alley on Rockport’s Bearskin Neck.
The person who carved it had to have known that 99% of the people passing by would never notice it. But, there it is anyway. Obscure and hidden. Now that’s self-confidence. The knowledge that your work stands on its own—a genuinely audacious lack of concern that your art receives admiration. Except by the 1%, who’ll acknowledge what you already know. Bravo!

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Campfire Stories

The crew all sat around the campfire. The conversation was about monsters and spooks.

Anticipation ran high after each selection as the crew detailed their humorous, and scary choices. The Stay Puffed Marshmellow Man got several mentions. Also listed were: vampires, mummies, the Holy Ghost, their in-laws, and former husbands and wives. It was all in good fun. 

I remained silent. “Wes?”

The Tall Tale

“Well, it’s not going to mean much to folk’s who’ve never been to sea, but we used to call it Mr. Wakey Wakey. You see, there’s always someone who’d come around on board ship to wake you up for a night time watch. But once in a rare while, you’d go to wake them, and they’d be dead. Dead with a grimace on their face. 

I knew a shipmate who survived. He said it was an old petty officer who shook his shoulder while whispering in his ear, “Wakey Wakey!” right after that, they took him to sickbay with appendicitis. But he survived. Other shipmates compared notes, and Mr. Wakey Wakey was known on lots of cruises and ships. Always after midnight. So yeah, I’m afraid of Mr. Wakey Wakey.

The only other former Navy person there that night was Mike. No one was as superstitious as Mike, especially after more than a few beers. So I made sure to elaborate about ships we both knew and drop names of former shipmates. Mike had served two enlistments and had lots more sea duty than me; he knew the watch standing routine. By bedtime, he was primed. Just to set the hook, I piped Word Passed through my lips and then announced to all, but specifically to Mike: “All hands turn in your bunks. Turn out all lights. Keep silence about the decks. The smoking lamp is out in all berthing compartments.” We all turned in.

Wakey Wakey!!!!!

A bit before midnight, I dipped my hands in the nearby stream to get them wet and cold. I slipped beside Mike’s tent and carefully unzipped the fly. There he lay asleep and snoring hard. I tossed a large towel over his head, grabbed him by the neck with cold, wet hands, and hoarsely whispered, “Wakey Wakey! You have the mid watch!” then I rushed to my tent to watch the reaction.

Mike didn’t seem to realize at first that his head was completely covered. He floundered about hollering out loudly, ” I’m not ready to die!” As the entire campsite erupted, he took the towel from his head and looked out into a campground lit by flashlights. Several loud “what the hell’s going on?” rang out. Mike’s flashlight came on and caught me in its glare. I was lying in my tent, howling with laughter. “Wes, I’m so going to get you for this!”

And I did too, but that’s another story.

a bit of history:

First presented in October of 2020 as my Halloween offering. The idea for Mr. Wakey Wakey actually came from someone I knew who served in the Royal Navy. But the tradition of cutting the hammock cords of those who fail to wake for watch is an old one that I first heard about from my Merchant Marine father.

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Bamboozle

I originally published this on October 17, 2021. It’s a very short story about an almost friend I had during the 1960s who was a con artist. But when I re-read this morning, it seemed even more relevant now with Crypto and all the new schemes. If John’s around now, he’s in his glory. Republished for Fandango’s Flashback Friday:

Bamboozle was not one of John’s favorite words. He found it repugnant and lacking in any vestige of craft. And craft, strange as it may seem, was what John’s clever schemes and cons were all about.
If you asked him who among the fathers of modern con he most respected, he’d answer with no hesitation, Charles Ponzi. Ponzi let new breath and an entirely new approach into the old games. Ponzi was one of the visionary lights of Wall Street; any young man interested in arbitrage, International reply coupons, or such could spend their time wisely looking at the trail he had blazed.

John moved to New York to be near the action. We understand that he was instrumental in creating the new fiscal devices derivatives that were so instrumental in the last large financial crash. Unfortunately, I guess he hasn’t worked all the bugs out yet.

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Ritual

It was among the few things I fondly missed when I left grad school to return to the world—the dancing. Anthropologists are taken up with the study of casual and formal rituals. Imbibing psychoactive beverages and dancing performed the role of a ceremony for our tribe of graduate students. Our tribal elders frequently joined in, too.

Dance


That’s right, the booze-filled evenings with crazy dance tapes. Dancing till four AM, even if it was sometimes with enemies, was normal. Tomorrow in the colloquium was tomorrow. Tonight we danced our unity as a tribe.
The parties could start as early as Thursday and run through the weekend. An utterly successful round of parties might see a group of beached graduate students washed up like whales at our morning coffee spot, desperately seeking to replace fluids with Coke and coffee—a subdued first class on Monday, routine.


After grad school, the American Anthropological Association meetings had to do. Hoteliers were happy to see us. Once, I asked a hotel manager how we were as a group. He smiled and said that Anthropologists drank more but broke less than other groups. Which I guess was his way of saying the company made money on our stay – we attended meetings during the day, then drank and danced all night.


Dance was how I met the professor who was to have the most profound influence on me. It was at an Anthropological meeting in Toronto. At the time, I barely knew what the term Anthropology meant. I was visiting friends in Canada, and having lunch in the same hotel as the meetings. During lunch, a stocky man got up on a table and started dancing. Hotel management seemed OK with the performance. Years later, I learned who he was and what he was dancing. At the time, he was just an oddity.

Epilogue

It’s been long years, but on occasion, I recall the mornings ( around four AM) that a group of us would wake up sober while line dancing to Greek music: the evening before, just a pleasant buzz, and the new day yet to dawn.

Initially published in 2020 and presented here as a Fandango’s Flashback Friday presentation.

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Not as they Appear

A Flashback Friday presentation from – September 2021:

Right off the start, I knew that Rory and I would not be friends. If the bluff, macho sort of way he related to everything was not enough, it was his referring to me as a beanpole in a semi-sarcastic tone of voice. When I told him to stop calling me that, he just smiled and said, “Sure…beanpole!”
My friends suggested that getting used to Rory would take a period of adjustment; he got along with them just fine. But as is often the case, people are worse when inebriated, and Rory turns out to be a mean drunk. His natural sarcasm turned bitter and biting, and I was the target frequently.

In the Alley

It was not the way of my friends to intervene. They just figured that the two of us would work it out. In a way, I guess we did. One night at the Harvard Gardens, he began to imitate my singing style. His out-of-tune caterwaul was not close to my voice. And while I did not precisely lilt my tunes out, I didn’t bray. So that was it. I got up in a flash, almost overturning the table full of beers. Everyone seemed surprised, but most certainly Rory – who never suspected that I’d turn angry. “Outback. Now.” I told him as I paced to the back, past the restrooms, and out the back door into an alleyway.

Rory came out, all apologetic, and assured me that he’d learned his lesson and would be respectful – “Hey, the next round is on me, Wes!” Willing to be a peacemaker, I shook his hand and turned to go back into the bar. I was about to comment when I felt him grab me from behind. The rest proceeded just as though I was on the mats at the dojo.

Just like in the Dojo

I went slack, letting body weight drag down my attacker, left heel drove into his instep, and the shock allowed me to use the body drop to free my arms. Then, a pivot. I grabbed his shirt, and over my hip, he flew to land in a puddle. We were outside the Harvard Gardens rear door, and the pool was ripe with nasty solid and liquid waste. He’d need more than a shower and cologne to smell clean after that.
Bending over, I relieved him of the knife he was struggling to get out. Finally, I kicked that away. The steady stream of obscenities he’d been mouthing stopped, and he said, “look, you win, I lost. Let me up, and I’ll buy you a round.”

I laughed so hard I almost didn’t follow up with the kick to the ribs; sensei hadn’t taught me that. It was all old Washington Heights, New York City. Now he was gasping, and I relieved him of his wallet. Taking his money first, I carefully deposited his ID and driver’s license on top of what looked like a wet turd. Then, reflecting for a second, I scattered the remaining contents into the pools of liquid he was lying in. I left him huddled there as I marched back into the barroom. “Thanks for the offer, I’ll make sure that I buy one for the house on you.”

The trouble with being only a hundred and thirty pounds when you are five-ten is that you automatically look like a victim. But, of course, nobody suspects that that got figured out a long time ago—three and a half years spent in and out of the dojo twice a week works wonders. Sensei would have called me on the kick, but what sensei hadn’t taught me about street fighting, I’d learned in the Heights.

Thing are not always as they appear. Judging people on the superficial is not just wrong. It can be dangerous.

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Fandango’s Flashback Friday -By Rail

At one time in New England history, to be on the map as a community meant being incorporated into the region’s rail network. The iron rail coiled, twined, and netted the area from the New York border with Connecticut to Maine. We had a modern ( for 1900) and replete public transportation system.
Beyond the railroad, there were the interurban streetcar lines. Using those, you could almost span New England on the cost of a ticket and transfers. I was told of one man who worked in Waltham, Massachusetts, and came home to suburban Portland for weekends.

I’m not sure I’d like his commute. But I marvel at how you could meander about the landscape of the cities and countryside without a car.

This transportation infrastructure was largely abandoned by the end of the twentieth century. Formal abandonments allowed the remaining railroads to pull up rails and turn away from communities. Abandoned factories, grass growing over old tracks; all this formed a sort of pathological appearance to a post industrial New England. The bones of history were left in place, and never removed. So, the old transportation corridors remained, grown up in weeds, and eventually reverting to woodlands, marsh, and meadows.

Rail Trails

Eventually, groups came together to convert these abandoned lines into rail trails. Many of these exist in my area, and my wife and I have regularly hiked them. Last year, this was part of my physical therapy before and after my hip surgery. Walking them became part of my post-operative physical therapy as I reconditioned my body to move with the new replacement hip.

The old railroads measured and laid out their routes for the greatest energy economy possible. Grades were the enemy; you consumed fuel, fuel costs money, and money spent meant less profit. As a result, while they meander, most rail trails are either level, in cuts, or on elevations that keep the grade gradual. Perfect for walking and biking.

This fall, I’ll hit the trail for leaf peeping. I’ll snowshoe across meadows in winter. In spring, I’ll hunt early wildflowers along old embankments—all within seven miles of where I live. And in the trail left by the old steel rails of the railroad.

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Constantly

A Fandango Flashback Friday Presentation- from August 2021

Sometimes find it’s hard to know the difference between love and abuse. In my day, I slipped and stumbled from one bad relationship to another. Some were so bad that comparison to a horrible medical condition, say diverticulitis, is not unwarranted. You become seduced by the idea of love. You see your friends enjoying, or oblivious in, that state, and you badly want some too.

At some point, you begin to realize that there is no cachet to being miserable in relationships and start to mature out of abuse as a form of love. But, of course, then there are those people who don’t.

My friend Tom “got lucky” and “caught” Marcia on the rebound from me. Marcia had been my breaking point. The two AM calls to make sure that I was by myself grew to be too much. At first, I found them amusing, then irritating, and finally almost terrifying. Tom became the recipient of the two AM calls. He found them reassuring, a sort of testimony to how much Marcia loved him. So one night at the Harvard Gardens, we sat Tom down, and several of Marcia’s failed lovers tried to point out the behaviors that she commonly used. As an intervention, it failed. Tom thought her quirks endearing, and soon they married.

My friends and I spent a lot of time talking about Tom and Marcia. We thought he was a schmo for falling for her. Of course, we knew guys with severe control issues, and some of our female friends had fled physical abuse in that sort of relationship. But Tom and Marcia never seemed to slip over into that pattern. Instead, they orbited around each other like an unbalanced planetary pair. It always seemed that they were bound to crash, but then they would whirl away secure in their erratic but common orbit.
They were still married and running a Bed and Breakfast, the last I heard. It’s the ideal occupation for two people who need reassuring contact with one another.

Constantly.

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Motor Mouth

for Fandango’s Flashback Friday – from July 25, 2023

Some cultures view disease not as a disorder of the body caused by viruses or microorganisms. They view it as an illness in the community. An objective of healing is to bring the communal body back to health. Rites and rituals are used to bring about a reconciliation of the fabric of society as well as to heal the individual.

Recently I’ve begun to think of this in reverse. Popular trends, technologies, and media are causing dis-ease, confusion, and turmoil in the communal body. The hook that brings people in is the promise to inform, communicate, and channel the community in specific ways.
More and more, these technologies, media, and trends are becoming disruptive. It’s a phenomenon as old as the Industrial Revolution. We invent new technologies and revel in the potential good of their application, but fail to invest in any study of the unintended consequences.

Instead of taking responsibility for the Franenstein’s Monsters they have created, the innovators shrug their shoulders, walk off, and live in wealth. They are not responsible for the fracas that was created. People simply abuse great tools for petty ends.

That argument makes some sense, as much as I dislike it. The old advisement that we are responsible for our actions comes to mind. And after all, if we can’t control our addictive habits for junk food, alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, how can we be expected to curb our motor mouths on social media?
Guess what I’d change in our society? And banning social media is not it because it is not the problem.

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Slap Shot

For Fandango’s Flashback Friday:

If you’ve read some of my other posts, you may have heard of the cat I refer to as the “Dread Menace”; this is his back story.

In the Beginning

I found him as a kitten while living in Ottawa, Ontario. He started life as a combative kitten and grew into an adult that liked a good brawl. my girlfriend called him our little vampire kitty because he would lick your blood off his claws. After the relationship “went south,” he wound up with me.

Clancy had a favorite musician, Warren Zevon. Clancy especially liked numbers like Werewolves of London, Lawyers, Guns and Money, and Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. When I was in grad school in Philly, there was a beat-up Windsor chair in my Philly apartment, and if I put a Warren Zevon tape on, the cat would jump onto it and challenge me to a duel. He hated it when I gave in too quickly. His preference was a quality combat experience – one with blood spilled – mine. He would sulk around the apartment, mutter to himself, and then attack my leg suddenly, forcing me back onto a combat footing until he tired. 

Cat Hockey

I found one way to distract him, a game we called Cat Hockey. Playing this game requires a multitude of small hi-bounceballs. We had dozens. The play took place in the kitchen using the refrigerator as the goal. He, of course, was the goalie. It was my job to get a ball past him and under the fridge. Clancy took great pride in deflecting my shots, making moves where he’d leave the “net” and attack me, or finesse a shot into the living room. Clancy typically won this game…it was safest that way. He didn’t handle defeat in a sports cat manner. We had so many balls to put off the moment when I had to get on my knees with a stick and retrieve the balls. Clancy had to supervise and crowded my view of the dusty under the fridge goal zone.

Ultimately someone unfamiliar with his proud Canadian heritage would suggest that the game could be cat soccer. At which point, I’d recommend that they came around some night when the Maple Leafs played the Bruins. When the movie Slap Shot came out, it was for sure his type of movie. Clancy would have fit right in with the Hanson twins, Killer Carlson and Ogie Oglethorpe. He loved to “drop the gloves” just like the hockey players of that era.