Wandering Triumph

( BBC Picture)

When I took my pictures yesterday morning the weather forecasters were threatening deep snow everywhere along the mid Atlantic states. No such luck down here. It was windy though.I left my wife at home working on her computer with Cheyenne's big brown eyes following me out the door. I had a date with the Bonneville.
I am looking forward to the beginning of January when things are supposed to get back to normal; things like commuting, working and snatching time to be with my wife. All this time off and holiday stuff confuses me. Of course having been off with shingles didn't help much either and i wanted to see how sitting on the motorcycle felt after all this time.

It felt cold was how it felt. The wind was honking out of the north and the giant flag at the Ohio Key campground was proof of that:

This is the time of year this place starts to fill up with snowbirds who drive their $250,000 RVs and park here for the winter. Instead they are advertising vacancies for the first time, that I've seen. You too could rent an annual space.
And it seems they even allow dogs. Cool. It was rather cool and windy but I wasn't the only motorcycle out on the Overseas Highway.

With winds gusting to thirty miles an hour it wasn't surprising to see more speed freaks out on the flat waters, sail boarding this time:It was fun being out on the Trumpet once again. My shingles are still itching like crazy but I want to get back to normal and riding the Bonneville will be normal again soon I hope. I love this view from the middle of the bridge between Big Pine and No Name Keys. The slight rise in the middle of the bridge gives a perspective one doesn't often get in these flat islands. I stopped in the middle of the bridge with no traffic in sight and snapped a few pictures.

This stilt under the stilt house caught my eye. I thought the paint was nice but the tile mosaic gave it something a lot more interesting.
And not too far away I found a boat dumped on the edge of the roadway, just like that. Nice no?
I got home, ran up the stairs and my wife greeted me with the words: " Your dog..."when the emphasis is on the your it's clearly a transgression. Cheyenne confirmed my suspicion by nuzzling me desperately as I learned how "my" dog had tried to steal my wife's peanut butter sandwich. That'll teach me to take a moment to go ride the Bonneville in the sun and wind!

Frightful Weather

One gets no sympathy when one complains about a cold front sweeping the Keys. These nasty weather "events" as meteorologists describe them sweep down from Canada on a predictable path and their severity across Florida can be anticipated by the damage they cause Up North. This one is reportedly setting records for snowfall in places not usually snowed under so for me to announce that I tremble at the thought of night time lows below 60 degrees (15C) does not, as it were, cut much ice with the parka crowd in the Great Snow Swept Suburbs.The fact remains I Do Not Like It, any more than the cyclist appeared not to. Yesterday I had to go into town briefly and leave the snug comfort of my home and while there I was caught by the approaching front. Rain squall followed rain squall and when I passed the ridiculous remains of a Fantasy Fest float in new Town the germ of an essay was born. WLRN-FM, Miami NPR (91.5 in thje Lower Keys) has been reporting a foot of rain fell Thursday night across south Florida and there were all sorts of thunderstorm, flooding and tornado watches in effect everywhere. Which all sounds rather dire by local standards but things will change soon enough.Anxious visitors monitor their weather information prior to arrival as though worrying about the weather will somehow secretly change it. I've heard a great deal of miraculous powers attributed to prayer but bending the weather gods to one's will is never one of them.The good news is that this stuff rarely lasts very long and indeed I write these words in the throes of rain and wind and black skies and thunder and all the rest of the drama, but by the time you read them the sun will be out, it will be cold (freezing cold if you count 70 degrees (21C) as zero, as many people do in the Keys) and the day will be bright and clear. The rain is thus nothing but a temporary impediment to enjoying the great outdoors.
Of course motorcycles were nowhere to be seen. Before the advent of Cheyenne (and my shingles, curse the pustules) I would have taken the Bonneville as rain is not a real impediment and hypothermia is not at all likely for the properly dressed rider. However even the moderately adverse weather kept all but the most desperate scooter riders of the road which made this bumper sticker smack slightly, and temporarily, of irony:
I stopped at the bank, dressed in my polo shirt and shorts and pondered the requirement for some people to drag out their jackets and rain gear at the first sign of weather. Lots of people love the cold and the promise of a front sends them cheering to their closets to pull out parks and furry boots and gloves and woolly hats. A modest rain jacket and sandals seems much the best compromise to me.With the south wind blowing I hoped for some wave action drama but instead I found a bunch of kite surfers doing their thing along the waterfront. This guy was tacking in the middle of the spume:
They were zipping along... ... fast enough that some drivers parked and braved the winds to watch:
The reef was doing it's job and keeping the waters flat even as twenty mile an hour winds blew steadily out of the south with gusts to thirty. The pink blob in the background is Key West By The Sea apartments:
My photographer's assistant was feeling cooped up and she knew this was her chance for a walk so she wanted me to take it and was looking longingly over at the greenery of the Bridle Path, inland from South Roosevelt Boulevard:Where the winds could be seen explaining where palm trees got their name. They are supposed to represent a human palm with fingers extended as you can see (?):
Roll on the sunshine as far as I am concerned...
...and I'll root around for some cold weather clothing if my wife forces me out of the house. I'm just glad I'm not facing snowdrifts in the driveway.

Free Money

The Monroe County School District is pondering whether or not to take one point five million dollars offered by Florida in the Race to the Top program. The idea is that the district will get the money to reward teachers who are best and better as a way to encourage excellence. Board member Steve Pribamsky is the only loud voice in favor, and rumor has it he may be leaving soon to inflict himself on St Lucie county in some, no doubt divisive, capacity. The sooner the better, if true. Everybody else is asking to see the small print and wondering what the State will demand in return for the handout. Of course there are time constraints and everything needs to be rushed. Union lawyers are leading the opposition at the moment because they fear Florida, the "right-too-work" state par excellence is looking to use this particular race to dole out money to weaken the teacher's union. And so it all becomes political.

This sort of thing may show us the way ahead. The Government hands out billions in untrammeled money to supporters and lobbyists and doles out with great parsimony and attention to detail the crumbs to the people who could make the best social use of the cash. I don't really see much in the way of social improvement across the US as a return on investment for the tax dollars handed over to banks. I feel the money could have done a lot more good if thrown away in different directions, directions that cannot pay lobbyists to encourage government support. As it is banks are not writing down their weak assets, and in claiming profitability are paying back portions of the Government relief money to free up their bonus schemes from oversight. However their profits are fake, their books are cooked, and the fundamental flaws in the economy are not being addressed. Still, the state is going to make sure it keeps a microscopic watch on the paltry millions it doles out to schools for use as bribes to break the unions. Get rid of the unions and thus get rid of job security, affordable health care and you help to create a yet weaker and more compliant workforce. It's not exactly Henry Ford's principle of paying workers enough to buy the products they build.

I have been reading about the Next Big Scare which is Sovereign Debt Default which is a fancy way of asking what happens when entire countries default on their debts, with the overriding fear of what happens when the US or China call it a day. Consider this: the industrialized country with the lowest deficit to GDP ratio is Canada at 79%. That's right, Canada with its single payer health care system, its government controlled drug prices, it's tightly regulated financial system is doing far better than the US (and Britain) at 95% or Japan at 275%. Australia, another socialist state (in the Tea bagger's scale of atrocious government practices) never even went into recession during the recent crisis. Does anyone think that regulating banks, controlling health care costs and offering workers a modicum of security makes for a weak economy?

One last thought: I found out, in reading about Japanese irritation over the US base on Okinawa, that the US has 47,000 military based in Japan. My question is simply: Why?

Cuban Coffee Queen

There is a new coffee shop in Key West, the 927th variation on well-worn theme; it so happens I rather like it. Location is the guarantor of success we are told by people who study good business practices, and the Cuban Coffee Queen is in a good location, between Waterfront Market and Turtle Kraals, in just the right, almost-waterfront place, to serve boaters and strollers of whom there are lots in this area.There is a little known illness in Key West that tends to afflict people after only a little while in town; travel becomes a chore. Imagine this: Fausto's grocery store has two outlets, one serving Old Town a block off Duval and another a whole mile away on White Street serving the rest of the metropolis. If they closed the White Street location no-one from New Town would bother to scoot five extra minutes to the Old Town location. People who live near Duval routinely decline to go to New Town based on it's distance (the whole island remember is four miles/six kilometers long...) and Stock Island (Mile Marker 5) is in the outer darkness of Deep Space. Thus it is that having a coffee shop and an inconvenience store (those little places with inconveniently high prices) every three blocks is a source of relief for travel-impaired Key Westers.
The Cuban Coffee Queen is more of a concept than a person as far as I can tell. He (clearly not a queen, quite masculine actually) made my coffee quickly and efficiently, while the woman is Hungarian(as I once overheard her telling a patron), which was no impediment to her pulling together a vast and delicious sandwich for me with equal attention to detail. They don't just make coffee either:
And for people confused by buchis (Cuban espresso shots), coladas (several buchis in a large cup to share in thimble sized cups usually) and con leches (liquid candy bars with lots of hot milk, drenching a buchi with sugar to taste) there is a handy, weatherproof explanation of the Cuban Coffee Queen's version: Not content with a sandwich list as long as your arm there is also the all-American blackboard:(I should have tried the mac and cheese now I think about it), and the other all-American invention is the voluntary tax deduction. The top dollar was the one I put in. If you can't afford the tip you can't afford the meal is a good rule to live by in expensive Key West.
They have a scooter for deliveries, this is just a piece of artwork, I'm pretty sure:The rooster is not real happily, though the large con leche is.

There are a couple of benches alongside the coffee shop, but what you see is what you get. All the food and drink comes out of here:The benches did not seem terribly appealing to me, as the food was large and deserved a table if I was to eat it cleanly. An uncharacteristic summer-type thunderstorm had blown over and the sun was shining again.

This was my six dollar sandwich, Cuban roast pork, a slice of ham, a slice of cheese, tomato, lettuce and fried onions. It was enough for two and it did not come in an un-ecological Styrofoam container for a change. My only problem was figuring out where to sit and eat this monster. I thought about Rest Beach, a long way away ( I suffer the travel disease too sometimes...) or possibly a bench alongside the harbor master's office at the nearby Key West Bight. Any sandwich would taste good overlooking the water.I ended up eating half and took the chips and candy cane with the other half to my wife in her classroom on my way out of town. She enjoyed it as much as I did.

That is, in fact half a sandwich!

Diagonally across the parking lot there is the convenience store called Caroline Street Market, but known informally locally as the Ay-rab Store(they are Bangladeshis that run it, but who's counting?) and they make their version of Cuban coffee:Close by there is Harpoon Harry's diner where you can get coffee with the infliction of TV whether you like that or not, and down the street a little further there is the Coffee Plantation that is rather more up market than a roadside hut. Lots of choices so one need never stagger too far to get a cup of coffee, whatever you end up calling it.

Copenhagen Addiction

They are gathered in Copenhagen, our leaders, and every time I read those words (I have no television reception) I think of the round tins filled with that nasty black goo some men like to chew, in the same way their counterparts in the Third World chew narcotic leaves to fend off the pain of reality. I dare say First World leaders at the Climate Change Conference in the Danish capital could do worse than chew tobacco from a tin, or chew coca leaves from a bush, as they ponder how to save us from ourselves. Or how to shoe horn us out of our Humvee addictions and into modest unmanly sedans like the little car on the left: I find it hard to believe that any useful thing will come from the chewing tobacco gathering in Denmark, where delegates are pondering whether to hold climate warming to 2C or 1.5C; I'm rather surprised they haven't passed a motion ordering the tides to comply. Already Third World delegates have walked out in protest, saying First World countries are refusing to give them enough money to offset carbon, those would the be the countries producing the most paying the countries producing the least in case you thought you misheard. I wonder what the Third World leaders are chewing to give them the illusion that they are going to make out like bandits from this conference? Coca leaves? The conference was billed as a way to get everyone on board with Anthropogenic (Human Caused) Global Warming, known for short as AGW, and to figure out ways to reduce carbon output by humans. What the conference is turning into instead, is a grand hand out by the First World to the Third. Which seems counter intuitive to me based simply on the Third World's record of not spending the money where it's supposed to go (Swiss banks are not supposed to benefit from charity donations to banana republic dictators). And if we in the world's most industrialized nation can't wean ourselves off our oil and carbon addictions, how can we expect a country filled with poverty to cut back whatever modest output of carbons they may be responsible for? How many African villagers does it take to produce as much CO2 as this Hummer traveling say, from Key West to Miami?
It beats me, but this Hummer, an overly obvious symbol of First World excess is not alone traveling on the Overseas Highway as you can see. And most of those other vehicles are single occupant rides too, producing their own carbon releases into the atmosphere. Yet back in Copenhagen... ...they are busy shooting each other down, blaming each other and reaching no useful consensus. Just like drug addicts in crack houses anywhere in the world. It's always somebody else's fault.

The thing is these are World Leaders I am talking about, the 21st century Moses leading us out of the wilderness of Sinai to a new promised land, a place of carbon neutrality, of modest consumptions, of local consumerism, of useful industrialization. To be an AGW skeptic is to be a heretic, is to be someone who refuses to face reality and by so doing puts the planet at risk. It's hard though not to be skeptical when one observes the actual behavior of our leaders, who preach change and give us business as usual, who can't curb their own excesses but expect their neighbors too do so. If they know the actual threat posed by Anthropogenic Global Warming and they cannot do anything meaningful about it, what are we the people supposed to do? Quit driving? Take cold showers to conserve propane? Turn off the air conditioning? What? Perhaps we should chew qat leaves:But there again despite the requirement that we disconnect belief from reality we are prohibited from consuming narcotics unless a major corporation somewhere makes an obscene profit off them. Reach for the beer and the Valium not the unprofitable leaves. AGW may very well be a clear and present danger to all of us but you wouldn't know it from the antics of our leaders. Peak Oil is going to double gas prices sooner or later and when it does presumably the cost of producing CO2 will get out of reach for many of us and perhaps then we will be forced to modify our behavior. Until then I guess we all of us in our different ways, remain addicted to our chew of choice, oil, coca, qat, carbon or just the pleasure of wielding meaningless power in a world gone mad.