Icebergs journey slate

http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2014/04/04/simon_harsent_photographs_icebergs_in_greenland_and_newfoundland_in_his.html

Video: Overboard Yachtsman Rescued from Pacific Ocean - gCaptain Maritime & Offshore News

Video: Overboard Yachtsman Rescued from Pacific Ocean - gCaptain Maritime & Offshore News: "A crewmember from an around-the-world amateur yacht race is lucky to be alive after spending 90 minutes in the stormy Pacific Ocean after falling overboard.

The race organizers said that the “Derry~Londonderry~Doire” crewmember, 46yo Andrew Taylor, went overboard Saturday afternoon in rough weather, with winds of 35 knots and heavy waves."




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Digging Deep | America Magazine

My mother -  from whom I learned the love of language -  sent me this beautiful tribute to Seamus Heaney by a parish priest, born in Ireland, now serving in poor Camden, New Jersey.  I've posted the ending below but it's worth reading from the beginning, so click through to it.  Ireland is still a place where masses mourn a poet, and a poet can be President.  - gwc

Remembering Seamus Heaney, weaver of words


His poem “Requiem for the Croppies” touches on the tragic losses suffered by the Irish people in the 1798 insurrection for independence. Here are a few lines:

The pockets of our great coats full of barley—

Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

They buried us without shroud or coffin,

And in August—the barley grew up out of our grave

This poem inspired the peace monument that parishioners at Sacred Heart Parish in Camden, N.J., one of America’s poorest cities, erected in 2009, at a busy intersection near our church. I was honored that they’d chosen it to mark the golden jubilee of my ordination. (I serve as pastor there.) The monument is eight feet high, a huge open seed with the kernel, PEACE, in large letters within it. The base is the earth with barley growing up, and hands reaching up out of it to broken weapons.

“I am moved to know that ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ figures in the peace monument,” Seamus Heaney wrote to us.

Heaney’s last words were written in a text to Marie, his wife, moments before he died: Noli timere (Don’t be afraid). It is good advice for those of us still on this side of the grave. This past fall, I made the journey to St. Mary’s Church and its graveyard, where he lies under the fresh green sod of Bellaghy. His grave is in a corner, under an ash and a sycamore tree. An old wall on two sides has ivy on the unmortared stones, holding their own. It is near the tombstone of Christopher and his parents. I poured blessed water from the Sacred Heart church in Camden on his grave, which will be a destination of inspiration for centuries. It is a place to recall his words:

History says, don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

Rev. Michael Doyle, a native of Longford, Ireland, is pastor of Sacred Heart Parish, Camden, N.J.

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The Brooklyn Bridge from the Manhattan Bridge

Dog days

Philippe Petit vs. James Brady - tight rope walk or jump from the WTC

Not that they were competing but James Brady and his buddies who jumped from the new WTC tower inevitably invoke comparison with Philippe Petit's tight rope walk between the two towers.  The accomplishment of Petite is unfathomable.

A Chesapeake Homecoming - NYTimes.com

Twelve years ago Travis Croxton and his cousin Ryan took over the family oyster beds in Virginia.  Business is booming. on the  Rappahannock -gwc

A Chesapeake Homecoming - NYTimes.com: 

Video



by Julia Moskin

TOPPING, Va. — When Travis and Ryan Croxton first went to New York City in 2004 to market their homegrown oysters, one of the few seafood places they had heard of was Le Bernardin, so naturally they just showed up with a cooler at the kitchen door.

“We really Forrest Gumped it,” said Travis, 39. “We had no idea what we were doing.”

Chesapeake oysters were so rare then that the chefs wanted to try them on the spot. But neither Croxton, both of whom had master’s degrees, knew how to shuck an oyster. “Finally the chef took it out of my hands and did it himself,” Travis said.

Continue reading the main story

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• Recipe: Oyster Stuffing Cakes

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Oysters had almost disappeared from the Chesapeake Bay when the Croxtons, first cousins and co-owners of theRappahannock Oyster Company, graduated from college. And after decades of bad news about pollution, silt, disease and overfishing in the bay, many locals wouldn’t eat them raw. “A whole generation of Virginians grew up without virginicas,” said Peter Woods, the chef at Merroir, the Croxtons’ oyster bar here, where the Rappahannock River empties into the bay. “For oyster roasts, oyster stuffing, all these traditions, you just couldn’t get your hands on them.”

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Following in Dylan Thomas's Wake

The Boathouse where Dylan Thomas lived

Dylan Thomas died when I was eight - in 1953.  A hopeless drunk, he inspired us with his call to his father: Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light.  I kept the New Directions paperback edition of his poems near me and loved the radio play Under Milk Wood which we staged at the Fenwick Theater at Holy Cross.

The tides and topography of Wales call me still - though I've never been there.  Ondine Cohane did take those steps, Following in Dylan Thomas's Wake:

Climbing along a steep coastal path through a forest in southern Wales, with russet red and tawny brown autumn leaves crunching beneath my feet, I reached a crest where the trailhead looked back onto a long estuary lined with salt flats. The River Taf ran through the headlands before me, its glacier-cut course unmistakable alongside the grass-covered cliffs on either side. The sea spread out before me, a moody canvas of blues and gray. White-topped gorse and cherry-red currant bushes gave color to my panorama, the plaintive chorus of sea birds the only soundtrack.
I’d come to Wales, and to this spot specifically, to follow in the footsteps of Dylan Thomas, the Welsh-born poet who made this walk famous in his 1944 “Poem in October.”

inside the shed where Dylan Thomas wrote daily

Is fitbit fit to use?

I'm a convert to.  The Fitbit gives me a goal.  I like that it spurs me to get my 10,000 steps/day. - gwc
Tracking fitness one step at a time
FiveThirtyEightScience
by Carl Bialik

I’ve become a skeptical convert to step-counters. Though they produce imperfect data, some information is better than none at all. And if they give me credit for taking steps when I’m actually sitting down but, say, clapping or pumping my fists? Well, sitting and clapping is better than just sitting.

Kite surfing north of Malibu