Key West Bight And Change

Everyone needs a souvenir of their trip to Key West. We are between tourist ugh seasons right now, with the winter visitors gone and the summer families not here yet, so right now you can hear people with odd foreign accents walking around admiring our fair city. Mostly they're Germans, the only people it seems across the pond who aren't yet facing bankruptcy. When their turn comes I wonder who will visit in the off season.

Key West is an amazing town, always finding a way to sell itself, and after going bankrupt in the Great Depression never forgetting tourism is literally it's life blood.

A bight in nautical language is a loop of room or an indentation in a coastline such that boats might take refuge there. The Key West Bight used to be home to commercial boats, first traders then shrimpers and now tour boats. Fascinating stuff for some little visitors:

In order to draw more visitors there is a plan, outlined in the newspaper to hold a tall ship regatta and the organizers had to go public in order to ask for a reduced docking rate to help it get off the ground. Better that than more cruises ships and sailing boats do actually have something to do with Key West's history.

Schooner Wharf has rebuilt the old bit that got burned and is now open for extra waterfront business.

I cannot say I find the extension attractive or thoughtfully done but I expect it will blend in nicely with the hotel that is to be built on the open space next door. It certainly doesn't look like it belongs to the waterfront funk of "the last little bit of old Key West."

This part of the world is going to undergo refurbishment by the city to please the hotel development so things will look quite different quite soon. Gentrification moves apace!

But no doubt it will draw people and bicycles and money and those who grumble about bike paths and flower beds and turning circles will get used to the changes in time and then grumbling will turn to other changes planned.

Change is exemplified by the waterfront market building, supposedly going to become a pub. All part of change that will improve our quality of life, they say. I'll be back to take more pictures as it goes, then I'll look back at these pictures and remember how it was in the "good old days." Harrumph.

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Key West Oddities

How or why someone's fashion wardrobe ended up hanging off a fence on Eaton Street I don't know. But there it was, waiting for the owner to return.

Fish are a common decorative motif in a city surrounded by water, even though a not inconsiderable number of people here rarely get out on the water.

Some people bring stuff back from distant parts to add color to their lives.

I'm not completely sure what a Chickey Coop should look like but this one is apparently one of the better ones. The plaque on the column is a record of the home's inclusion in one of Key West's house and garden tours.

I'd rather drink snake blood than have a bunch of strangers prancing through my home at will, as part of an organized citywide tour...Which should not come as a surprise as I like my seculsion but apparently it is a highly desireable honor to be part of the homes and gardens tour.

I quite like the new generation of hurricane shutters made of see through plastic materiel. You can leave them up all through hurricane season without suffering the light cut off of the traditional aluminum variety.

I'm not sure its proper hotel etiquette, despite or because this is a seaside town, to dry towels on the balcony. The heat has been ferocious lately, an early summer, so I don't doubt the towels dried quickly.

I don't know what to make of a sign that advises you simply that a dog lives here...Is it a warning? Of what? Or a boast? Or a reminder to an absent minded returning owner?

Seahorses live here except they don't because seahorses are now known by some other name that I can't remember. I can feel an old fogey rant coming on about the nature of useless pointless change.

Is there any doubt that the street address here is 717? I am reminded of that billboard I saw in the Midwest somewhere a few years ago on my last cross country road trip. "If you don't know where you are, don't dial 911." Brilliant. However in Key West we get so many calls from people who don't know where they are (you would be amazed) we employ quite a few techniques to get them to help us figure it out.

These three doorbells cracked me up, because I am amused by simple things. How do you know which one to press when you come knocking? None of them is labeled. Bloody awkward three card monte.

At last I am starting to see a glimmer of light at the end of a very long tunnel of winter "No Vacancy" signs. Hoteliers always seem to complain about beingbhorted during the high winter season but this year the city as been packed and Highway One has been congested to a greater degree than years past. That's just conjecture but it was what I experienced this past writer. No doubt someone somewhere will complain they could have done better and had more guests.

Matching rocking chairs ad matching cat food bowls. Hmm...

I a. Getting a little tired of seeing this tacked up Christmas tree outline. Frankly the tree shape itself is getting very tired. Time for a new season to be rung in I think.

As summer heats up I look forward to finding a quieter city to greet me. Encouragement perhaps to go downtown more often. And by the way the reason Cheyenne does not appear is because she was home in the air conditioning. It's that hot already she prefers pre-dawn walks and isn't at all enthusiastic about stumping around outdoors in the heat of the afternoon.

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Cuban Chug

They call them "chugs" around here and they wash up from time to time on the beaches of the Keys. Sometimes they are used as ornamental flower beds, there's one up my street with the faded home port of Habana now invisible but once visible underneath the covering of vines that has overwhelmed the boat over the years.

I came across this one yesterday, washed up on Veterans Park near the Seven Mile Bridge, pulled up by officialdom and safely surrounded by tape as though this tired one trip ship had any energy left to harm a curious American. Sometimes chugs arrive empty, their occupants lost at sea and disappeared forever. Usually there are people waiting for them over here ready to give them a home and a fresh start in the land of the free and home of the brave. Sometimes I get frantic calls from relatives in Miami asking Key West PD if anyone "arrived" in the night. One memorable night there arrived a huge crowd on Southernmost Beach and they shuffled up Duval Street until they met a startled police officer. They stood around waiting to be transported for processing and a new life in Miami. It was that easy for them to get permission- just show up if you can.

I've sailed the Gulf Of Mexico and I've been caught out in some terrible weather and I cannot imagine what it takes for a bunch of landlubbers to throw together a gasoline engine in a home made hull and hope for the best leaving behind everything they know, in the sure and certain knowledge that if they get caught a sea they will be sent back to a life of tight surveillance and universal shame, at best. For some reason political expediency in the US requires that unless the emigrants actually step on dry land they get sent back. This insane policy has led to some wild chases as Cubans within sight of the low tide mark swim to get to safety and freedom. There was a scandalous incident not long ago when Cubans found clinging to an old bridge piling were declared not to have "landed" and were sent back. That policy changed after public outcry.

All this is at a time when the leaders of this country are trying to decide what to do with our continuously failing immigration non-policy. If you are a black Haitian or a brown Central American you get roundly criticized, handcuffed and sent home after a period of imprisonment. If you are a Cuban you get processed, given eight thousand dollars and a fresh start in Miami. Go figure. Oh yes, we hate illegal immigration, we don't trade with Communists unless our corporate leaders can make a buck off them but if Cuban Republicans in Florida tip the electoral balance then our leaders bow down and embargo Cuba creating this appalling trade in misery across the Straits of Florida. Imagine the misery that drives people to risk their lives in these bath tubs just to escape. And they don't have government drones surveiling them over there as we shall have soon enough!

It was in April 1980 that Fidel Castro opened the floodgates and said any worm that wanted to leave the workers paradise could go. Suddenly every Cuban American in South Florida got their boats or paid to get boats over to Mariel, a harbor west of Havana and loaded them up with as many people as they could. Castro chose to open the prisons as well and snuck in a few thousand of his worst offenders, not political prisoners like the hunger strikers currently in Guantanamo, but robbers and thieves of the basest sort. A special gift to the Americans across the way that got the term "Marielito" a bad name in the US when these criminals found themselves over here. I arrived in Key West the next year and grumbling about the Cubans from Mariel, the Marielitos, was rife. Mariel boatlift - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The policy of shutting down trade with Cuba is a left over from sixty years ago when the well heeled Cuban émigrés had to leave behind homes and businesses and start again in Miami. Their bitterness, combined with a solid voting bloc led the US to outlaw trade with Cuba. This combined with failed Communist collectivist policies in Cuba have led to a scarcity of food and periods of hunger, particularly when the USSR collapsed and Cuba lost immense amounts of support. Nowadays Cubans have a pretty good idea of what they are missing out on, color, consumerism, choice and travel and they are tired of life in Cuba as change comes painfully slowly. By turn we in the land of the free are no more allowed to travel to Cuba than they are to come here. Just as they chug across the Straits at some great peril, Americans defy their own government and travel to Cuba via neutral countries (Bahamas and Mexico) and Cubans are desperate enough for dollars that their women prostitute themselves as they did in Batista's day. The wheel of history turns full circle.

Why the embargo continues can only be explained by the solid Republican voting bloc formed by South Florida Cubans. They failed to deliver Florida to the GOP this past election but Dear Leader would be as likely to defy the embargo as he is the NRA so here we are so close, tied by history between Havana and Key West yet all I can do is listen to Radio Rebelde on the radio (620am) and wonder what life would be like were there a high speed ferry to take me and my motorcycle and my dollars across the Straits for a weekend in Cuba. The exiles have also cornered the monopoly for sending parcels to Cuba with Treasury persmission and organizing special charter flights at exorbitant cost. I got blown there once by a storm while at sea but I never checked in, and I have no desire to circumvent the Treasury rules that keep us apart. I wish the well heeled "exiles" in Miami who have made a comfortable life here would take themselves to the Sierra Maestra as Castro did 60 years ago and fight for what they believe in just as he did. The fact is it's time they stopped expecting my government to pull their chestnuts from the fire and got on with their own revolution if they have the guts for it. Foreign intervention has been proved to be a mug's game ever since Vietnam if not before.

It gives some a cheap thrill to imagine this road is closer to the Forbidden Isle than the suburbs of Miami, and while thats geographically true its worth remembering how many have disappeared in an effort to get here, and how many have been turned back and how many profit from this absurd and pointless embargo. I look forward to the day no more chugs wash up over here.

 

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Austerity Is Killing US

I read this analysis of the gross and simple mathematical error  on http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/ which has been used to  justify  the austerity programs that are bringing misery across the world. Oops! Don't expect this to change anything as policy is based on belief not facts.

By Lynn Parramore, a senior editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet.
Somebody has some 'splaining to do! Please savor the following twisted tale of bad math, academic folly and pundit hubris.

Since 2010, the names of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have become famous in politic and economic circles. These two economists, of the University of Maryland and Harvard respectively, wrote a paper, “Growth in the Time of Debt” that has been used by everyone from Paul Ryan to Olli Rehn of the European Commission to justify harmful austerity policies. The authors purported to show that once a country's gross debt to GDP ratio crosses the threshold of 90 percent, economic growth slows dramatically. Debt, in other words, seemed very scary and bad.

Their historical data appeared impressive, as did their credentials. Policy-makers and journalists cited the paper to convince the public that instead of focusing on the jobs crisis that was hampering recovery, we should instead focus on deficits. The deficit hawks jumped up and down with excitement.

But something didn’t smell right.

Progressive economists I knew were shocked at what appeared to be the shoddiness of the research and the absurdity of the conclusions. In their paper “A World Upside Down? Deficit Fantasies in the Great Recession,” Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson observed that R&R had truncated their sample of British data in a way that skewed their conclusions, eliminating more than a century of data in which British debt loads exploded but economic growth raced ahead (see pages 11-13). The always savvy Marshall Auerback called them out in a blog for New Deal 2.0, which I edited at the time, criticizing the relevance of the cases they had used to justify their conclusions.

But plenty of pundits took their suspect arguments as gospel. The editorial board of the Washington Post declared that "debt-to-GDP could keep rising — and stick dangerously near the 90 percent mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth." The economists cited were Reinhart and Rogoff, whom the WP passed off as speaking for the entire field. A new Washington consensus was born, and the public was hammered with the idea that cutting jobs, stripping away vital public services and letting infrastructure crumble was a good was to get the economy going. Most any ordinary person on the street would probably intuit that this made no sense, but there was this Academic Research By Esteemed Persons, so the argument was over.

Enter Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin of University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the heroes of this story. These three researchers kept trying to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results and couldn’t do it. So they asked R&R to give them their data spreadsheet, which allowed them to see how the data was put together. They found a whole host of problems, including selective exclusion of years of high debt and average growth, a problematic method of weighing countries, and this jaw-dropper: a coding error in the Excel spreadsheet that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries.

Herndon, Ash, and Pollin write: "A coding error in the RR working spreadsheet entirely excludes five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark, from the analysis. [Reinhart-Rogoff] averaged cells in lines 30 to 44 instead of lines 30 to 49…This spreadsheet error…is responsible for a -0.3 percentage-point error in RR's published average real GDP growth in the highest public debt/GDP category."
A coding error! Reinhart and Rogoff had been so sloppy in their work that they had not bothered to check their own spreadsheet.
When you fix R&R's problematic methodology and coding errors, you get a very different result that – guess what? – does not support austerity and shows that countries can most certainly cross the phony debt-to-GDP “threshold” and grow.
In their newly released paper, "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff” Herndon, Ash and Pollin show that "when properly calculated, the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0:1 percent as published in Reinhart and Rogo ff. That is, contrary to RR, average GDP growth at public debt/GDP ratios over 90 percent is not dramatically different than when debt/GDP ratios are lower."
Herndon, Ash, and Pollin have set off a firestorm, with those who long suspected that R&R's work was crap shouting hallelujah and defenders scrambling to figure out a way to support deficit hysteria despite the body blow to their theory.
Bottom line: The foundation of the entire global push for austerity and debt reduction in the last several years has been based on a screwup in an Excel spreadsheet and poorly constructed data.
Reinhart and Rogoff have done a great deal of damage to the world. As Paul Krugman has observed, their replies to their critics have thus far only compounded the confusion. They need to come clean, stop talking like their mistakes are minor, and own up to the enormity of their errors.

Key West Porches

Today is Earth Day, which for me is similar to Ride To Work Day. I try to live mindfully, not always successfully, but I am conscious of the reduce, reuse and recycle mantra but at the same time, as obsessive as I am, I try not to get obnoxious with myself or others. Ride to Work day? I ride my motorcycle to work pretty much every day anyway; why wouldn't I? I love to ride and the weather here is perfect, though sometimes people complain about it being too hot or too windy or too uncertain to be on a motorbike... I usually drive when I feel unwell or unfocused and I don't need a media reminder to "celebrate" a made up day to encourage me to get out on my motorcycle.

So instead of celebrating my empty garbage can and overflowing recycling bins I thought this might be the day to celebrate a really nice walk Cheyenne and I took yesterday. It was rather silly but I wanted to drive to Key West to enjoy the city at a time when not too many people were crowding it, and so it was. Early Sunday morning, me and my dog and hardly anyone to be seen. It was lovely, warm but not too humid, the city was washed clean by a fearsome summer thunderstorm that swept the Keys Saturday night with lots of wind and rain. On a whim I decided to photograph empty porches and this, a photo essay is what I found between Olivia and United Streets, walking at random.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An old eyebrow home with an old tin roof and fence decorated as usual with a cheap nasty and pointless plastic sign advising you to beware, keep out, the dog etc...

Key West is a city designed for sitting on the porch and doing whatever you want to you do. And you can do it year round. Nice eh?

 

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Clubbing on Stock Island

It's starting to look good for ocean swimming so my wife and I have been gingerly prepping our 14 foot center console boat to get it out of winter mothballs and ready for swimming duty. While that project develops we are still going swimming at our favorite heated pool at the Key West Harbor Yacht Club, on Stock Island.

This place used to be the grimy but useful Peninsular Marine, where we'd bring our sailboat for haul outs from time to time. The gravel, mixed in with liberal coatings of ground off toxic bottom pant has gone, covered by asphalt and brick paving. Te rue some offices and even more unwholesome toilets, reminiscent of a Turkish jail are gone replaced by a super gentrified clubhouse with sauna, gym, restaurant and bar. I'd like a range of decent modern craft beers but Yuengling will do in a pinch.

Kathy had herself a glass of red wine, while Carol, on the right, stuck with white. My wife favors Mojitos around here and after our strenuous swim, sort of, we ordered lobster pasta, salad and duck breast. And lots of conversation, on the outdoor patio.

it was busy even though snowbirds have been streaming North. This here Yacht Club has nothing to do with the Key West Yacht Club on North Roosevelt, a bastion of Conch power, much disliked because the city rents them their waterfront space for a dollar a year. We should all be so lucky!

Coming here is like taking a small vacation from Key West, a paradox I know for people who consider the city a destination in and of itself. But when you live here this is a nice change of pace, cheerful service, crisp linens, nice views and nowhere to be and nothing to do. Ah!

Gentrification has its benefits.

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