Everyday, some strange shit happens out on a reef. We humans, because of our mortal constraints, can't spend nearly as much time documenting and observing fish behavior as we might like. We can't be all "Gorillas In The Mist" because a) we breathe air and make noise and look pretty silly, and b) wee can't follow fish below certain hard floors of depth.
So divers often observe behavior no one much mentions. Some of it is really pretty intelligent behavior. Some of it is just plain weird.
Yesterday, I made three dives, including one at night. Let me talk about that one first, since it's the easiest to discuss. Nothing unusual happened.
There was a near-full moon high in the sky as I descended around 7 PM. Consequently, I decided to make the dive using as little light as possible. The moon would be my guide for most of this night.
It might sound scary and I confess at times it's a bit unnerving, but it is an experience every diver should try, in an environment where they feel safe and secure in the daytime. They ought to know the reef like the back of their hand. To do otherwise is to take unneeded risks.
Of course, I'm all about that, so I decided that in addition to diving dark, I'd dive solo. That's probably not the smartest decision I'll ever make, but on this reef, someone is always cruising by. SomeoneS, I should say. Still, trouble happens and in the dark without lights, no one can see you scream.
(Nothing happened to me that wouldn't have happened if I took a buddy)
The moon casts a bright light into the shadowy areas, so I felt very safe, very able and aware of my surroundings until I hit about forty feet. The sand patches became fewer. I was truly in the dark. The human mind plays tricks. You start to imagine things. I had to shake off the feeling that I was being stalked, several times.
Until...well, in truth I was stalked. By the local tarpon, whom I like to call Charlie, Dave, and Ed. Tarpon are big, human-sized, with ferocious pouts and are apex predators on this side of Bonaire. The occasional dolphin swims into the inlet, the occasion pod of dolphins, even, and once in a rare while, a shark fin is sighted, but apart from those moments, it's tarpon.
Tarpon seem to be pretty stupid fish, but they are curious and this belies that stupidity. They've worked out that "diver + light = dinner."
Here's what they've observed: a couple of divers drop into the dark and immediately turn on their flashlights, looking at all the pretty fish that are swimming around or sleeping.
All those tasty morsels now blinded by the divers' lights or highlighted like museum pieces, just swaying back and forth in the surge. The tarpon hang back just over and behind the divers until they see something they like, and zoom (literally!) in for the kill.
It's an awesome sight. The tarpon will tilt 45 degrees to the vertical and open its rather impressive maw and try to scoop up the fish. I know this because I almost killed a longsnout butterfly fish while scanning a reef looking for an octopus. The tarpon missed, possibly because I shut my light out when I realized what was going on. The tarpon missed, of course, but then swam right straight up to my mask as if to intimidate me into feeding him next time.
He was intimidating. I was no more than two or three feet from one of the most impressive fish in the ocean. It was hard not to be.
I know I was that close because I had to push him away with my hand.
Last night, it looked like Charlie and Dave were lingering about. I only saw Charlie at first (he's the smallest and has the blandest eyes of the three). He made his presence known by swimming underneath me just as I was experiencing that creepy feeling I mentioned.
Let's just say that I made a small contribution towards global ocean warming at that moment. I looked at him, smiled, and swam to a coral head where I knew a lionfish would be "mooning" itself. I had an idea.
Unfortunately, the crevice between coral heads was too narrow and Charlie hasn't worked out that lionfish can be prey. He didn't rise to the bait, so to speak.
I swam in towards shore a little, trying to see if anybody else was in the water. I came across two of my dive buddies and decided at that point to tag along. Pete and Cathy are both very experienced and accomplished divers. Cathy had her camera rig, complete with modeling light, and so you know Charlie and Dave were salivating.
Errrr, if that was necessary underwater...nothing untoward happened, however. Charlie and Dave got bored on occasion and went off to harass a bunch of other divers who were lit up like a Vegas whorehouse, but they came back to check from time to time, sometimes swimming so close I could feel a tail fin smack me on the tank.
Now for the weirdness.
In two dives during the day, I observed three things that made me wonder if I'd moved to a new planet suddenly.
One I had seen before, twice. In fact once on this trip.
Sergeant majors are common reef fish, identifiable by the yellow markings with five dark bars on their sides. You see them on nearly every reef in the Caribbean. Sometimes, they'll appear bluish or even dark blue.
These are males that are guarding their egg masses, a purplish smear across some surface like rock or metal. They'll swim over them, fanning them to keep fresh water on them, and to post sentry to prevent other fish from eating the eggs. It takes about a week from laying to hatching.
Some are pretty passive in their defense strategies. Some are testosterone-fueled professional wrestlers in roid-rage. I stumbled across the latter yesterday. The little bastard bit my leg. Even now, sixteen hours later, it hurts a little, like a scratch. Not content with that, he started gnawing on my fin like a pit bull on a chew toy.
Think about that for a second: this tiny little fellow, maybe three inches long, was willing to take on a creature 25 times it's length, all because I wandered too close to his nest!
I had to laugh a little.
Other weird stuff happened too. For example, I saw a tarpon exhale.
No. Really. We're all taught that fish extract oxygen from the surrounding water using their gills, which also exchange out the carbon dioxide they're excreting. That means no bubbles since the idea is not to have gas because of the differences in pressure as the fish swims, yadayadayada.
Some fish, however, have a form of primitive lung, a swim bladder, which they can use to regulate their buoyancy. I saw a tarpon...burp! As I watched him swim into more shallow water, a stream of bubbles flowed out of his gill slits.
It was quite disconcerting, seeing a fish essentially exhale.
The weirdest thing, the thing that made me start to think, was tool-using behavior I observed in a yellow-head wrasse (I have pictures). This little wrasse, about an inch and a half long, had found a little snack to eat. The problem is, it was covered in a candy coated shell to think for the wrasse to bite thru.
So it did the next best thing to what I can only presume was either a crab or a baby sea urchin. It picked it up, found the nearest rock and began bashing it against the rock.
Now, we've all heard that tool-using behavior is a sign of higher intelligence: dolphins do it, parrots and crows do it, chimps do it. Fish brains are not supposed to be that developed, certainly nothing beyond identifying prey and predator should stay in that tiny little mass of ganglia.
And yet, I saw this fish bash this thing against a rock, drop it, pick it up and go find another, better rock to bash it against! That's not survival behavior, that's tool use! That's intelligence!
We ought to start taking God's mission to watch over the animals of this planet more seriously, because I think they know who to blame here.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Monday Morning Quarterbacking
First, Go Jets!
Americans really don't get the value of leisure time. We work hard, and we try to shave bits of it here and there, by inventing machines that do some of the tedious and boring work for us: dishwashers, laundry machines, vacuum cleaners.
Instead of fighting for our right to take time away from work, which eats up a lot more of our lives than tasks around the house.
I say this because I'm heading into week two of my vacation, and I'm dreading the return. One week away from work loads up my desk. Two weeks will probably choke it off. This is intentional on the part of my employer. Yes, I have back up, but my supervisor was pretty pissed that I was taking two weeks off, moreso because it brackets a measly little four days he was taking off in the middle, and his boss, the CEO, alreadt warned about overlapping vacations.
Which I know, because I had to cancel my annual leave last August because his precious idle cruise took two days out of the week my group was scheduled to go away. I didn't know he was going away this month until I had already booked and pad for this trip.
Fuck him.
OK, that's off my chest. Onto diving. Yesterday we gathered as a group and wandered up to a site called Ol' Blue. Two of the women in our collection have really bad knees, so we were hesitant to do any north short sites but we were assured from multiple sources this one would do nicely.
And it did, even if the exit was a little tricky. Ol' Blue (Tolo) is a site that's not dived from boats frequently and because it's near its more famous cousins 1000 Steps (actually 72, which you know individually because you've dragged fifty pounds of dive gear up each and every one of them) and Karpata (which curiously only has twenty steps but has a far tougher entry into the water)., is overlooked as a shore dive.
The trick to Ol' Blue is to enter on a sand patch. The trick to getting to a sand patch is to put yourself off balance as you descend an improvised stairway (five steps, thank god). It's Indiana Jonesque in it's elegance and danger.
Once on, there is plenty to be seen: lots of fan coral and gorgonians, spotted drums, porcupine fish, shrimp by the pound-o-butter full...and the occasional lionfish. Of course.
The weather has been so cooperative for us this vacation that we almost forgot that winds from the south (which usually bring warming breezes) can also bring some pretty nasty swells and waves. On our return, I ended up body surfing on the surface, something that's not as easy as I remember as a kid, but then I wasn't a hunchback...
Americans really don't get the value of leisure time. We work hard, and we try to shave bits of it here and there, by inventing machines that do some of the tedious and boring work for us: dishwashers, laundry machines, vacuum cleaners.
Instead of fighting for our right to take time away from work, which eats up a lot more of our lives than tasks around the house.
I say this because I'm heading into week two of my vacation, and I'm dreading the return. One week away from work loads up my desk. Two weeks will probably choke it off. This is intentional on the part of my employer. Yes, I have back up, but my supervisor was pretty pissed that I was taking two weeks off, moreso because it brackets a measly little four days he was taking off in the middle, and his boss, the CEO, alreadt warned about overlapping vacations.
Which I know, because I had to cancel my annual leave last August because his precious idle cruise took two days out of the week my group was scheduled to go away. I didn't know he was going away this month until I had already booked and pad for this trip.
Fuck him.
OK, that's off my chest. Onto diving. Yesterday we gathered as a group and wandered up to a site called Ol' Blue. Two of the women in our collection have really bad knees, so we were hesitant to do any north short sites but we were assured from multiple sources this one would do nicely.
And it did, even if the exit was a little tricky. Ol' Blue (Tolo) is a site that's not dived from boats frequently and because it's near its more famous cousins 1000 Steps (actually 72, which you know individually because you've dragged fifty pounds of dive gear up each and every one of them) and Karpata (which curiously only has twenty steps but has a far tougher entry into the water)., is overlooked as a shore dive.
The trick to Ol' Blue is to enter on a sand patch. The trick to getting to a sand patch is to put yourself off balance as you descend an improvised stairway (five steps, thank god). It's Indiana Jonesque in it's elegance and danger.
Once on, there is plenty to be seen: lots of fan coral and gorgonians, spotted drums, porcupine fish, shrimp by the pound-o-butter full...and the occasional lionfish. Of course.
The weather has been so cooperative for us this vacation that we almost forgot that winds from the south (which usually bring warming breezes) can also bring some pretty nasty swells and waves. On our return, I ended up body surfing on the surface, something that's not as easy as I remember as a kid, but then I wasn't a hunchback...
Monday, January 17, 2011
Sunday Morning Coming Down
There are a few things I've learned to expect on a dive vacation. One is that I sleep less than I normally do, which I have to be careful about because I'm already sleeping so little. Another is sunburn and bug bites, both of which I try to take precautions for and am generally successful in preventing to any serious degree.
The last is that I've found that divers tend to be pretty caring of other divers. Even if you're in a large group, if you see another diver struggling who is not a member of your tribe, you reach out and lend them a hand: carry gear, helped them up a ladder, and so on.
See, we all struggle with the same disabilities: the sudden gain of forty or fifty pounds, the constriction of dive equipment, and those damned webbed feet.
This week's group, so far? Eh, not so much. I get down to the dock to strap on a tank and test out my still camera set up. Two guys are sitting there in civvies, drinking beer. Unfortunately, they're on the bench that's meant for divers gearing up and because of the massive size of their group and the fact the assholes feel they all have to dive at the precise same moment or it's not a dive, the deck is pretty busy.
I ask politely for one to move ("Mind if I take your seat to gear up? Won't be but five minutes.") and grudgingly, he moves, continuing his conversation with both his drinking buddy and their friends that are all around me, gearing up as if the hot sun wasn't boiling the rinse tanks.
This means that people in gear trying to get by, and there were a couple, have to take their laden, wetsuited carcasses and try to mambo around them.
Carry a small barbell on your back and you'll see how difficult that is. Literally, it was like walking through Times Square during tourist season. And forgetting your hunting permit and rifle. Only with a fifth grader tugging you to the windows of the toy store.
OK, but nothing I can't handle, so far. I gear up quickly (I don't wear a wetsuit in the tropics if I can avoid it), grab my rig and head to the ladder.
Where there's a group of snorklers, hanging out on the ladder, chatting to a group of divers hanging at the bottom of the ladder. Now, the resort has a really nice little snorkling entrance just a few yards from the ladder, which has the added attraction of a little shower and a bench all its own.
I call down "excuse me". I call it down a little louder. See, I haven't put my fins on yet (try walking in THOSE on dry land with fifty pounds on your back!) which means I have to put my camera down, put my fins on, and try to back down the ladder.
They make a path of six inches for me to come down. OK, two can play this game. I put my rig down, put my fins on, deliberately swiping them just over the hair of the ass hats sitting there.
They took the hint. I step down a rung or two, and sit back into the water, camera gear cradled and drop down, more because I really didn't feel like dealing with the idiots hanging around the ladder in a small semi-circle. I swim off.
I cruise down to the reef, and find a turtle. I got some great pictures of the turtle. I'm very proud of one of them and once I get it cleaned up...you see, some of these divers had been in already and stirred up the sand fiercely...it might even win an award or two.
Divers. I hate them.
Anyway, as i finish the shoot, I bow to the turtle (always pays to thank your subject), and notice fiuns behind me. Lots of them.
Apparently, the group I dropped in through decided either I needed to be intimidated or that I was a pro and they should follow, since I'd lead them to cool stuff.
I've already found them a turtle, so I'm cringing a little that I didn't check over my shoulder first. I have a good eye for critters on a reef. I could have led them away.
Because damned if half of them don't go chasing the poor little guy, cameras in hand. Now, this turtle is used to divers. He hangs around this reef regularly. I don't know how he handles eight divers zooming after him. We'll see.
OK, so I decided to have a little fun. I cruised very very slowly, and decided I needed to shoot photos of coral and shrimp: you know, the stuff no one photographs because they aren't "cool". Five, maybe ten minutes later, I realize they've all moved on to a nearby wreck, which used to have this ginormous puffer fish living under it, but he was old and sick and I'm sorry to report, dead.
I can still sense a few eyes keeping tabs on me, but I don't care. The stuff I'm shooting, and the really cool fish like the spotted drum, all hang out under coral heads so I can mask the real pleasure of diving by looking bored.
I just thought about my job. Works like a charm.
I get some nice photos, and begin to cruise back to the dock. The snorklers are in the water now, all hovering around the ladder.
There's two octopi under it. With the waves and surge, no one wants to dive behind the ladder, except me and one or two other hardy souls. I got a couple of shots off, and begin to ascend...right into the belly of this overweight eleven year old.
My bad, to be sure. I'm supposed to be looking up as I ascend, but fercrissake, I'm four feet under! Why is the kid snorkeling in an area devoted to divers to let them get up on the dock with their fifty pounds of gear!
OK, octopus, I get it, but someone, let's call him or her a "parent", could have said, "Now, Janie, when a nice man or woman blowing bubbles is down there, please move away so they can get out of the water."
As I write this, it's 7:30. This same group has been up for two hours, it seems, as many of them live in adjoining apartments. The walls are paper thin. I can hear every cough, every fart, every flush and they are not being particularly whispery when they call down the stairs to each other.
Anyway, I come up the ladder and go over to the rinse tank to start soaking my gear in fresh water.
It's filled with snorkeling equipment. The tank is just outside the photo shop, so I turn to the owner and give him a "help me, please" look. He sort of shrugs as if "what can you do?" Finally, one of the adults notices and comes over and takes the gear out.
My god, this is the crap plastic gear they sell at Target for to take to the local swimming pool! Why in the hell is it in a tank to wash life-support equipment!? One of those snorkels gets clogged, you get a straw from the frikkin' restaurant and keep swimming!
OK, I start to get out of my gear, put my rig in the dedicated camera tank (thank god that was empty!) and begin to stow my stuff. I have to pick my way thru yet another crowd of these asshats, because apparently, not only are they flocking, most of them can't dive for shit and end up coming back to the dock after twenty minutes!
I have horrible air consumption but these folks make me look like a world-record free-diver. I elbow my way to my hook. No one's moved my shirt off it, so that much respect for people they have, but I have to lean over three guys gearing up on the floor of the locker to put my stuff away.
Cuz, you know, it's hot out.
This is not going to be a fun week...
The last is that I've found that divers tend to be pretty caring of other divers. Even if you're in a large group, if you see another diver struggling who is not a member of your tribe, you reach out and lend them a hand: carry gear, helped them up a ladder, and so on.
See, we all struggle with the same disabilities: the sudden gain of forty or fifty pounds, the constriction of dive equipment, and those damned webbed feet.
This week's group, so far? Eh, not so much. I get down to the dock to strap on a tank and test out my still camera set up. Two guys are sitting there in civvies, drinking beer. Unfortunately, they're on the bench that's meant for divers gearing up and because of the massive size of their group and the fact the assholes feel they all have to dive at the precise same moment or it's not a dive, the deck is pretty busy.
I ask politely for one to move ("Mind if I take your seat to gear up? Won't be but five minutes.") and grudgingly, he moves, continuing his conversation with both his drinking buddy and their friends that are all around me, gearing up as if the hot sun wasn't boiling the rinse tanks.
This means that people in gear trying to get by, and there were a couple, have to take their laden, wetsuited carcasses and try to mambo around them.
Carry a small barbell on your back and you'll see how difficult that is. Literally, it was like walking through Times Square during tourist season. And forgetting your hunting permit and rifle. Only with a fifth grader tugging you to the windows of the toy store.
OK, but nothing I can't handle, so far. I gear up quickly (I don't wear a wetsuit in the tropics if I can avoid it), grab my rig and head to the ladder.
Where there's a group of snorklers, hanging out on the ladder, chatting to a group of divers hanging at the bottom of the ladder. Now, the resort has a really nice little snorkling entrance just a few yards from the ladder, which has the added attraction of a little shower and a bench all its own.
I call down "excuse me". I call it down a little louder. See, I haven't put my fins on yet (try walking in THOSE on dry land with fifty pounds on your back!) which means I have to put my camera down, put my fins on, and try to back down the ladder.
They make a path of six inches for me to come down. OK, two can play this game. I put my rig down, put my fins on, deliberately swiping them just over the hair of the ass hats sitting there.
They took the hint. I step down a rung or two, and sit back into the water, camera gear cradled and drop down, more because I really didn't feel like dealing with the idiots hanging around the ladder in a small semi-circle. I swim off.
I cruise down to the reef, and find a turtle. I got some great pictures of the turtle. I'm very proud of one of them and once I get it cleaned up...you see, some of these divers had been in already and stirred up the sand fiercely...it might even win an award or two.
Divers. I hate them.
Anyway, as i finish the shoot, I bow to the turtle (always pays to thank your subject), and notice fiuns behind me. Lots of them.
Apparently, the group I dropped in through decided either I needed to be intimidated or that I was a pro and they should follow, since I'd lead them to cool stuff.
I've already found them a turtle, so I'm cringing a little that I didn't check over my shoulder first. I have a good eye for critters on a reef. I could have led them away.
Because damned if half of them don't go chasing the poor little guy, cameras in hand. Now, this turtle is used to divers. He hangs around this reef regularly. I don't know how he handles eight divers zooming after him. We'll see.
OK, so I decided to have a little fun. I cruised very very slowly, and decided I needed to shoot photos of coral and shrimp: you know, the stuff no one photographs because they aren't "cool". Five, maybe ten minutes later, I realize they've all moved on to a nearby wreck, which used to have this ginormous puffer fish living under it, but he was old and sick and I'm sorry to report, dead.
I can still sense a few eyes keeping tabs on me, but I don't care. The stuff I'm shooting, and the really cool fish like the spotted drum, all hang out under coral heads so I can mask the real pleasure of diving by looking bored.
I just thought about my job. Works like a charm.
I get some nice photos, and begin to cruise back to the dock. The snorklers are in the water now, all hovering around the ladder.
There's two octopi under it. With the waves and surge, no one wants to dive behind the ladder, except me and one or two other hardy souls. I got a couple of shots off, and begin to ascend...right into the belly of this overweight eleven year old.
My bad, to be sure. I'm supposed to be looking up as I ascend, but fercrissake, I'm four feet under! Why is the kid snorkeling in an area devoted to divers to let them get up on the dock with their fifty pounds of gear!
OK, octopus, I get it, but someone, let's call him or her a "parent", could have said, "Now, Janie, when a nice man or woman blowing bubbles is down there, please move away so they can get out of the water."
As I write this, it's 7:30. This same group has been up for two hours, it seems, as many of them live in adjoining apartments. The walls are paper thin. I can hear every cough, every fart, every flush and they are not being particularly whispery when they call down the stairs to each other.
Anyway, I come up the ladder and go over to the rinse tank to start soaking my gear in fresh water.
It's filled with snorkeling equipment. The tank is just outside the photo shop, so I turn to the owner and give him a "help me, please" look. He sort of shrugs as if "what can you do?" Finally, one of the adults notices and comes over and takes the gear out.
My god, this is the crap plastic gear they sell at Target for to take to the local swimming pool! Why in the hell is it in a tank to wash life-support equipment!? One of those snorkels gets clogged, you get a straw from the frikkin' restaurant and keep swimming!
OK, I start to get out of my gear, put my rig in the dedicated camera tank (thank god that was empty!) and begin to stow my stuff. I have to pick my way thru yet another crowd of these asshats, because apparently, not only are they flocking, most of them can't dive for shit and end up coming back to the dock after twenty minutes!
I have horrible air consumption but these folks make me look like a world-record free-diver. I elbow my way to my hook. No one's moved my shirt off it, so that much respect for people they have, but I have to lean over three guys gearing up on the floor of the locker to put my stuff away.
Cuz, you know, it's hot out.
This is not going to be a fun week...
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Changing Of The Guard
Saturdays on Bonaire are eventful days. They used to be much more hectic, until the airlines started spacing out their flights.
See, Saturday is the day that the weekly flights from the US and Europe carrying vacationers come to Bonaire. Not exclusively, of course, but most people come on Saturday.
One group makes a ruckus as it sadly packs its things, hoping that still-wet dive gear won't trigger some overweight charge on their flight. In fact, as I typed yesterday's piece at five AM, I was interrupted more than once by people shouting about packing this or forgetting that. The walls are paper thin here.
A few hours of absolute peace and quiet is followed by the clanging noise of people on civilization-time, still carrying the momentum of mechanized living, crashing into the front desk like a tsunami of anxiety: Where's my room? Will my bags be delivered? Can I get a drink at the bar? What time is the dive orientation? Why can't you have it now so I can go diving?
I guess I should explain that last bit a little: each year, by island law, everyone who dives must undergo a "mandatory" (get to that in a minute) orientation with respect to the rules of the road. No gloves on the reef, no touching the reef, no playing with the fish, the protocol for reporting lionfish encounters, and so on. Of course, the resorts all take this as an opportunity to show you around the grounds, especially to places you might spend money.
It's mandatory for everyone except dive professionals who work here. You go thru the orientation because at the end you'll be allowed to purchase a pass that you attach to your BCD (buoyancy control device) that says you're allowed to dive off Bonaire. Believe it or not, I've actually seen this enforced. The STIINAPA (can't be arsed) is pretty vigilant.
And for some reason, me. I was heading down to the orientation when I was told I could give it a miss, just go pay the $25 dollars and they'd give me a tag.
Something to be said, I suppose, for the efficiency of Dutch bureaucracy and the fact that I've been diving this island now 6 of the last seven years. In fact, if I can ever string ten straight years on the island, I can get an ambassadorship.
No! Really! OK, it's not an official ambassadorship with full diplomatic immunity, just a medal from the department of tourism and a free meal. But hey!
Diving yesterday...I made my final dives with my video rig. I've scouted much of the western shore of the island and have found a few unmarked dive sites, sort of nestled in between two other sites. Clearly, they've been dived before, and clearly, the locals prefer I shut up about them.
I did dive one of these sites yesterday and was amazed at how much fun the reef was. Not that diving is never fun. Apart from some crisis, diving usually is. On this reef, however, the fish clearly hadn't seen too many humans and so were swimming right up to our masks. The morays were free swimming, even the groupers were not barking as we passed overhead.
Groupers really do bark and the bigger the grouper, the louder the bark. Google it.
I dived the house reef too, more because with the transition in dive groups on the island, the reef was quiet. Not too many people kicking up crap or harassing the fish. So naturally, I saw things I'd never seen before, like a triggerfish just quietly swimming along, minding its own business. That was an honor, and I got it on tape. The sea does give us gifts, us divers, and this was one.
I'm not sure what today holds in store. It's Sunday, and while I will attend church, it will be the First Church of Our Undersea World. I have to set up my still photography rig (no small task, believe me) and try not to get too annoyed at the newbies doing their orientation dives. I think last week's groups, very large and very young, stressed the resort and the reef out enormously. This week, I'm hoping for a little quiet.
See, Saturday is the day that the weekly flights from the US and Europe carrying vacationers come to Bonaire. Not exclusively, of course, but most people come on Saturday.
One group makes a ruckus as it sadly packs its things, hoping that still-wet dive gear won't trigger some overweight charge on their flight. In fact, as I typed yesterday's piece at five AM, I was interrupted more than once by people shouting about packing this or forgetting that. The walls are paper thin here.
A few hours of absolute peace and quiet is followed by the clanging noise of people on civilization-time, still carrying the momentum of mechanized living, crashing into the front desk like a tsunami of anxiety: Where's my room? Will my bags be delivered? Can I get a drink at the bar? What time is the dive orientation? Why can't you have it now so I can go diving?
I guess I should explain that last bit a little: each year, by island law, everyone who dives must undergo a "mandatory" (get to that in a minute) orientation with respect to the rules of the road. No gloves on the reef, no touching the reef, no playing with the fish, the protocol for reporting lionfish encounters, and so on. Of course, the resorts all take this as an opportunity to show you around the grounds, especially to places you might spend money.
It's mandatory for everyone except dive professionals who work here. You go thru the orientation because at the end you'll be allowed to purchase a pass that you attach to your BCD (buoyancy control device) that says you're allowed to dive off Bonaire. Believe it or not, I've actually seen this enforced. The STIINAPA (can't be arsed) is pretty vigilant.
And for some reason, me. I was heading down to the orientation when I was told I could give it a miss, just go pay the $25 dollars and they'd give me a tag.
Something to be said, I suppose, for the efficiency of Dutch bureaucracy and the fact that I've been diving this island now 6 of the last seven years. In fact, if I can ever string ten straight years on the island, I can get an ambassadorship.
No! Really! OK, it's not an official ambassadorship with full diplomatic immunity, just a medal from the department of tourism and a free meal. But hey!
Diving yesterday...I made my final dives with my video rig. I've scouted much of the western shore of the island and have found a few unmarked dive sites, sort of nestled in between two other sites. Clearly, they've been dived before, and clearly, the locals prefer I shut up about them.
I did dive one of these sites yesterday and was amazed at how much fun the reef was. Not that diving is never fun. Apart from some crisis, diving usually is. On this reef, however, the fish clearly hadn't seen too many humans and so were swimming right up to our masks. The morays were free swimming, even the groupers were not barking as we passed overhead.
Groupers really do bark and the bigger the grouper, the louder the bark. Google it.
I dived the house reef too, more because with the transition in dive groups on the island, the reef was quiet. Not too many people kicking up crap or harassing the fish. So naturally, I saw things I'd never seen before, like a triggerfish just quietly swimming along, minding its own business. That was an honor, and I got it on tape. The sea does give us gifts, us divers, and this was one.
I'm not sure what today holds in store. It's Sunday, and while I will attend church, it will be the First Church of Our Undersea World. I have to set up my still photography rig (no small task, believe me) and try not to get too annoyed at the newbies doing their orientation dives. I think last week's groups, very large and very young, stressed the resort and the reef out enormously. This week, I'm hoping for a little quiet.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Lion In Wait
Today, Saturday, is supposed to be the Great Weekly Lionfish Hunt, where the resort sends out its spare dive masters and instructors with sprearpoles to catch as many lionfish as they can.
Ought to be interesting, if they'll let me film it. In fact, they might need my help, because I seem to have a knack for finding the little shits.
Take laswt night. I'm heading out on a dive with my daughter. On our way in, a dive master surfaces and we start chatting. Turns out she's looking for the three lionfish that were reported earlier in the week, to set markers to aid in the search.
Couldn't find them. Mind you these were the same three fish I had found already this week, including one earlier in the day.
Did I mention I'm diving again? Oh, right. I am. My ear problem seems to have mitigated now. I dropped down to 80 feet on my first dive and my second, this one, was to 65 feet to show my daughter the lionfish.
Night diving is an intriguing experience, particularly when some of the predators have learned that "dive lights = exposed prey". We are taught as divers not to shine our lights on fish in the night because there's always a tarpon, grouper or other big fish looking to snare food.
One night last year I was doing a solo dive at night on this same reef, and let my light linger near a small soldierfish too long. A tarpon tried to swoop in and it was only the quick reflexes of the solider fish that got him out of the way. The tarpon swung in, tried to snap the fish up and missed, swimming directly into my mask.
Literally. He was inches away, close enough that I had to take my light and push him aside so I could continue swimming.
Same damn tarpon that shadowed me on this dive. Anyway, I drop to 65 feet looking for the lionfish. My daughter hadn't seen one yet. She had her own issues to deal with that prevented her from diving.
I orient myself with the landmarks and start to search.
Nothing. Not even the hint of one and this one was big, close to five inches long with an additional fin span of two or three inches. You see, Lionfish have developed their dorsal and other fins into an evolutionary adaptation that allows them to use the fins to intimidate prey and predators, turning them into long, sharp venomous needles.
They sacrifice speed and agility, however, which means they're easy to find once you locate them. This guy, ehhhh, seemed to defy that expectation. Usually they only patrol an area a few feet wide.
We span out and begin to scan, drifting slowly up the reef. I have my video camera rig with me. The hot light for this rig can throw a beam that's actually brighter than sunshine at this depth.
Nothing. Scoot up a few feet higher. Still nothing. We shrug and begin to swim off into the current. At about forty feet, out of the corner of my eye, I see my daughter stopped at a coral head, her light fixed on one spot. Not unusual, except my daughter has about 150 dives, most on these reefs, so there are few fish or animals she has not seen. It's not ordinary for her to come to a complete stop and stare.
I glance over and it looks like she's got her eyes on a brittle star.
Brittle stars are a form of starfish that is photophobic: that is, they tend to come out at night to eat and avoid light of any kind, including dive lights.
Then the tentacles start to move. It's not a brittle star. It's the lion fish, out on a coral head instead of under one. The sucker moved 25 feet in the matter of a few hours. That's unusual, to say the least. I turn on my rig and begin filming. He ducks under the coral head. I swim around and find him in the crevice of a split in the head and film him again.
My daughter still has a ribbon to tag the location of lionfish that resorts used to hand out, so I tie it off to a close-by rock outcropping and note the location to report later. Lucky. It's hard to describe a location on a reef without some clear visual clue, like a boat mooring or a piece of trash.
Meanwhile, that damn tarpon is still hovering close by. I keep my light on, hoping he'll scoot in and grab the lionfish, but because lionfish don't swim in the water column much, the tarpon doesn't recognize it as prey.
We turn to go. I shut my light off.
Diving at night has one very unique moment, one that I urge all divers to try at least once: turn off your lights and enjoy the scenery. Near a resort, there's usually enough ambient light to see pretty well anyway (I take my dive lights only to check my air and depth, and to signal to my dive buddy). Out in the blue, a dark dive is a lot of fun. You can't see many fish except for outlines, and when they come in close, you really get a sense of how small and alien you are in this world.
And your every moment is lit up like Vegas as the bioluminscents swirl around your hands and fins. It really is quite spectacular.
Ought to be interesting, if they'll let me film it. In fact, they might need my help, because I seem to have a knack for finding the little shits.
Take laswt night. I'm heading out on a dive with my daughter. On our way in, a dive master surfaces and we start chatting. Turns out she's looking for the three lionfish that were reported earlier in the week, to set markers to aid in the search.
Couldn't find them. Mind you these were the same three fish I had found already this week, including one earlier in the day.
Did I mention I'm diving again? Oh, right. I am. My ear problem seems to have mitigated now. I dropped down to 80 feet on my first dive and my second, this one, was to 65 feet to show my daughter the lionfish.
Night diving is an intriguing experience, particularly when some of the predators have learned that "dive lights = exposed prey". We are taught as divers not to shine our lights on fish in the night because there's always a tarpon, grouper or other big fish looking to snare food.
One night last year I was doing a solo dive at night on this same reef, and let my light linger near a small soldierfish too long. A tarpon tried to swoop in and it was only the quick reflexes of the solider fish that got him out of the way. The tarpon swung in, tried to snap the fish up and missed, swimming directly into my mask.
Literally. He was inches away, close enough that I had to take my light and push him aside so I could continue swimming.
Same damn tarpon that shadowed me on this dive. Anyway, I drop to 65 feet looking for the lionfish. My daughter hadn't seen one yet. She had her own issues to deal with that prevented her from diving.
I orient myself with the landmarks and start to search.
Nothing. Not even the hint of one and this one was big, close to five inches long with an additional fin span of two or three inches. You see, Lionfish have developed their dorsal and other fins into an evolutionary adaptation that allows them to use the fins to intimidate prey and predators, turning them into long, sharp venomous needles.
They sacrifice speed and agility, however, which means they're easy to find once you locate them. This guy, ehhhh, seemed to defy that expectation. Usually they only patrol an area a few feet wide.
We span out and begin to scan, drifting slowly up the reef. I have my video camera rig with me. The hot light for this rig can throw a beam that's actually brighter than sunshine at this depth.
Nothing. Scoot up a few feet higher. Still nothing. We shrug and begin to swim off into the current. At about forty feet, out of the corner of my eye, I see my daughter stopped at a coral head, her light fixed on one spot. Not unusual, except my daughter has about 150 dives, most on these reefs, so there are few fish or animals she has not seen. It's not ordinary for her to come to a complete stop and stare.
I glance over and it looks like she's got her eyes on a brittle star.
Brittle stars are a form of starfish that is photophobic: that is, they tend to come out at night to eat and avoid light of any kind, including dive lights.
Then the tentacles start to move. It's not a brittle star. It's the lion fish, out on a coral head instead of under one. The sucker moved 25 feet in the matter of a few hours. That's unusual, to say the least. I turn on my rig and begin filming. He ducks under the coral head. I swim around and find him in the crevice of a split in the head and film him again.
My daughter still has a ribbon to tag the location of lionfish that resorts used to hand out, so I tie it off to a close-by rock outcropping and note the location to report later. Lucky. It's hard to describe a location on a reef without some clear visual clue, like a boat mooring or a piece of trash.
Meanwhile, that damn tarpon is still hovering close by. I keep my light on, hoping he'll scoot in and grab the lionfish, but because lionfish don't swim in the water column much, the tarpon doesn't recognize it as prey.
We turn to go. I shut my light off.
Diving at night has one very unique moment, one that I urge all divers to try at least once: turn off your lights and enjoy the scenery. Near a resort, there's usually enough ambient light to see pretty well anyway (I take my dive lights only to check my air and depth, and to signal to my dive buddy). Out in the blue, a dark dive is a lot of fun. You can't see many fish except for outlines, and when they come in close, you really get a sense of how small and alien you are in this world.
And your every moment is lit up like Vegas as the bioluminscents swirl around your hands and fins. It really is quite spectacular.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Ear To The Ground
Lemme see...glands swollen, nose running, throat scratchy...yup! It appears I've caught a cold of some sort! Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be an horrific one so I should be back diving shortly.
Yesterday, I attempted to visit a site that I've dived before by drifting over to it, but that usually meant I was about half-way thru my dive and was about to turn around anyway. I attempted to jump in (so to speak) and drop in on the Cliff site.
Bonaire is pretty unique for a Caribbean island in that it doesn't have deep wall dives, that is to say the coral and reefs slope rather gently down, making Bonaire a very safe place to dive if you worry about falling off into the depth by accident: you just stay a few feet above the reef and you can pretty much go as deep as the PADI police will allow.
Cliff is one of this rare sites that allows you the sensation of flying, even if it bottoms out at about 55 feet. It is a wall to be sure (along with the Small Wall site, practically next door) and so you can get a sense of wall diving in a very safe environment.
Wall diving is different from reef diving in the sense that on a reef, your attention is pretty much forced down in front of you, while on a wall, you're looking out and up mostly. Too, you can "stand" in front of the wall and take some of the load off your back without kicking coral.It just feels more natural, like browiswing a bookstore.
I slipped under the waves and almost immediately an alarm went off in my head: my ear felt like someone pierced it with a hot poker. If you've ever had an earache or ear infection (I have had both), you know the feeling.
A little physics: diving requires the body to be under pressure. At the surface, the pressure on your body is about 14 psi. Your body is adapted to this, and you never notice it.
Also, your body is an ugly ugly bag of mostly water...OK, in some cases of my female readers, not ugly at all. Anyway, liquids are infinitely compressible. I can take a gallon of water as deep as I'd like and it will become as dense at a thousand feet as the surrounding water.
Where humans have a problem is in any chamber of their body that contains gases.
Lungs, sinuses, ear canals. Because we can't extract air from water, we have to carry a tank of it on our backs. Since we could not possibly carry a sac filled with enough air for an hour's breathing, we force the air into a compact container.
As you decrease the volume of a given amount of gas, you increase it's pressure and here's where it gets tricky. The lungs, being flexible bags, usually don't have a problem adjusting to the regulated pressure you breathe underwater (unless you have a cold which creates a dead air space, but you'll understand that in a second).
But because things like the ear canal and sinuses are essentially caverns, you can trap surface pressure air in them as you descend. Meanwhile, the higher pressure water around you is pressing against them, creating what's called a "squeeze". You feel this most intensely in your ears, because the ear drum is all that stands between that water and that under pressurized air, and the water is pushiung hard against it.
Something's gotta give, and unless you can find a way to get equal pressure into your ear canal, your ear drum will pop if you go deep enough.
You don't need a tank even to prove this: go to any swimming pool, take a deep breath and try to swim on the bottom. You'll feel a gentle pressure against your ear drum.
Divers equalize by forcing the higher pressure air they are breathing into those spaces using techniques they are taught in classes. But if you have a cold, a sinus infection, or something blocking the way, you can't get the newer air in.
This is essentially what happen to me at around ten feet. I did complete an hour long dive and did manage to make it down to 35 feet, but I did not do this at Cliff. I swam along the top of the wall until i could slowly descend. Exertion helps your adrenaline clear your congestions, so that was the only way I could equalize at all.
Meaning I missed the dive I was most looking forward to making.
I's OK. Things happen and as it turns out, I have another week down here to get better and do that dive again.
Yesterday, I attempted to visit a site that I've dived before by drifting over to it, but that usually meant I was about half-way thru my dive and was about to turn around anyway. I attempted to jump in (so to speak) and drop in on the Cliff site.
Bonaire is pretty unique for a Caribbean island in that it doesn't have deep wall dives, that is to say the coral and reefs slope rather gently down, making Bonaire a very safe place to dive if you worry about falling off into the depth by accident: you just stay a few feet above the reef and you can pretty much go as deep as the PADI police will allow.
Cliff is one of this rare sites that allows you the sensation of flying, even if it bottoms out at about 55 feet. It is a wall to be sure (along with the Small Wall site, practically next door) and so you can get a sense of wall diving in a very safe environment.
Wall diving is different from reef diving in the sense that on a reef, your attention is pretty much forced down in front of you, while on a wall, you're looking out and up mostly. Too, you can "stand" in front of the wall and take some of the load off your back without kicking coral.It just feels more natural, like browiswing a bookstore.
I slipped under the waves and almost immediately an alarm went off in my head: my ear felt like someone pierced it with a hot poker. If you've ever had an earache or ear infection (I have had both), you know the feeling.
A little physics: diving requires the body to be under pressure. At the surface, the pressure on your body is about 14 psi. Your body is adapted to this, and you never notice it.
Also, your body is an ugly ugly bag of mostly water...OK, in some cases of my female readers, not ugly at all. Anyway, liquids are infinitely compressible. I can take a gallon of water as deep as I'd like and it will become as dense at a thousand feet as the surrounding water.
Where humans have a problem is in any chamber of their body that contains gases.
Lungs, sinuses, ear canals. Because we can't extract air from water, we have to carry a tank of it on our backs. Since we could not possibly carry a sac filled with enough air for an hour's breathing, we force the air into a compact container.
As you decrease the volume of a given amount of gas, you increase it's pressure and here's where it gets tricky. The lungs, being flexible bags, usually don't have a problem adjusting to the regulated pressure you breathe underwater (unless you have a cold which creates a dead air space, but you'll understand that in a second).
But because things like the ear canal and sinuses are essentially caverns, you can trap surface pressure air in them as you descend. Meanwhile, the higher pressure water around you is pressing against them, creating what's called a "squeeze". You feel this most intensely in your ears, because the ear drum is all that stands between that water and that under pressurized air, and the water is pushiung hard against it.
Something's gotta give, and unless you can find a way to get equal pressure into your ear canal, your ear drum will pop if you go deep enough.
You don't need a tank even to prove this: go to any swimming pool, take a deep breath and try to swim on the bottom. You'll feel a gentle pressure against your ear drum.
Divers equalize by forcing the higher pressure air they are breathing into those spaces using techniques they are taught in classes. But if you have a cold, a sinus infection, or something blocking the way, you can't get the newer air in.
This is essentially what happen to me at around ten feet. I did complete an hour long dive and did manage to make it down to 35 feet, but I did not do this at Cliff. I swam along the top of the wall until i could slowly descend. Exertion helps your adrenaline clear your congestions, so that was the only way I could equalize at all.
Meaning I missed the dive I was most looking forward to making.
I's OK. Things happen and as it turns out, I have another week down here to get better and do that dive again.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Milestones Can Be Millstones
Yesterday saw me make my 200th dive. Later this week, I will crack 150 hours underwater. The difference? Air consumption. It's nearly always been an issue for me, and it's a metablolic mystery, much like Sarah Palin's inability to say anything appropriate when confronted with her own ugliness.
Anyway, I did report the two lion fish and was assured that Saturday the dive team will go out, spearguns in hand and hunt them down, along with two others that have been spotted. I haven't decided if I want to witness this, but it might be fun.
The idea is to train predator fish to eat the invasive species by killing them and leaving them on the reef to be picked at. Once grouper get a taste of the fish, the hope is nature will kick it up a notch and work lionfish into the ecobalance.
Lionfish really are lovely to look at, deadly to an unmanaged reef. Of course, the very species that would make meals of them, like grouper and turtles, are the ame species we've driven to near extinction.
Nature finds a way.
The exciting news from yesterday is that sponges seem to be making a comeback after the recent hurricane and other near-miss by one. The devastation the inlet took a few years back during Omar, which basically shot right thru the inlet, was pretty severe to the large tube sponges. Yesterday, we saw a few small buds in the sand and on coral heads.
The rain we've had the past 36 hours...yes, rain, altho it's more the shower variety than the storm kind...creates a murky visibility in the water, and the winds roiled up the sand bottom quite a bit. That, plus a crop of divers finishing their certifications made the diving on the house reef a little iffy, but between injuries and illnesses, it was all we could do to get a group into the water.
By twilight, tho, four photographers and one videographer (yours truly) were in the water, shooting "rush hour" on the reef, the time when the day fish are looking for beds and the night fish are starting to stir.
Tomorrow, we will finally get off-site for most of the diving, splitting up into smaller groups and finding under-dived sites to document the impact bleaching and other natural and man-made phenomena are having on the reefs.
I really should shave...
Anyway, I did report the two lion fish and was assured that Saturday the dive team will go out, spearguns in hand and hunt them down, along with two others that have been spotted. I haven't decided if I want to witness this, but it might be fun.
The idea is to train predator fish to eat the invasive species by killing them and leaving them on the reef to be picked at. Once grouper get a taste of the fish, the hope is nature will kick it up a notch and work lionfish into the ecobalance.
Lionfish really are lovely to look at, deadly to an unmanaged reef. Of course, the very species that would make meals of them, like grouper and turtles, are the ame species we've driven to near extinction.
Nature finds a way.
The exciting news from yesterday is that sponges seem to be making a comeback after the recent hurricane and other near-miss by one. The devastation the inlet took a few years back during Omar, which basically shot right thru the inlet, was pretty severe to the large tube sponges. Yesterday, we saw a few small buds in the sand and on coral heads.
The rain we've had the past 36 hours...yes, rain, altho it's more the shower variety than the storm kind...creates a murky visibility in the water, and the winds roiled up the sand bottom quite a bit. That, plus a crop of divers finishing their certifications made the diving on the house reef a little iffy, but between injuries and illnesses, it was all we could do to get a group into the water.
By twilight, tho, four photographers and one videographer (yours truly) were in the water, shooting "rush hour" on the reef, the time when the day fish are looking for beds and the night fish are starting to stir.
Tomorrow, we will finally get off-site for most of the diving, splitting up into smaller groups and finding under-dived sites to document the impact bleaching and other natural and man-made phenomena are having on the reefs.
I really should shave...
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Face To Face
Well it didn't take long for some harsh realities to set in.
First, any group that hangs out 24/7 is going to have some weird interpersonal shit going on. One spouse dives, the other doesn't and on Bonaire, things get weird because there's really not much to do besides diving. Or snorkeling. Or swimming. Or lying in a chair sipping tropical drinks.
That's fine for a few days, but the wife in question has a little more active mind than that and she's frustrated. Her husband is keeping up with her as best as he can, but he's down here to complete a dive certification, and so he's kind of forced to get wet.
Me, I'm lucky. I just get to dive when I want, where I want and how I want. First dive yesterday was to a site called "Something Special" which is what its name implies. We didn't go deep, one of our group had equalization difficulties, and even so the dive delivered some amazing stuff, including yours truly getting both a manicure AND a teeny little moray eel bite at the same time.
See, cleaner shrimp will come out and trim your cuticles if you want long enough around the cleaning station. So I did, totally oblivious to the baby moray eeel sitting under the same coral head, and a little upset at the intrusion.
Oh well...wish I had my vidcam working but it's a little hard figuring out the angles and lighting under a coral head...
The dive included some beautiful Frecn Angelfish and a goby that kept popping up and spinning around like a dancer.
The second dive, later in the afternoon, saw me come face to face with two lionfish. This is not a good thing. They were within yards of each other, meaning they were probably from the same spawning event and had enough to eat. Lionfish usually do not like imposing on each other's territory.
Duly reported to the proper authorities, of course. I'll post videos when I return.
The Northeast is being hammered by a snowstorm as I write this. Sorry guys.
First, any group that hangs out 24/7 is going to have some weird interpersonal shit going on. One spouse dives, the other doesn't and on Bonaire, things get weird because there's really not much to do besides diving. Or snorkeling. Or swimming. Or lying in a chair sipping tropical drinks.
That's fine for a few days, but the wife in question has a little more active mind than that and she's frustrated. Her husband is keeping up with her as best as he can, but he's down here to complete a dive certification, and so he's kind of forced to get wet.
Me, I'm lucky. I just get to dive when I want, where I want and how I want. First dive yesterday was to a site called "Something Special" which is what its name implies. We didn't go deep, one of our group had equalization difficulties, and even so the dive delivered some amazing stuff, including yours truly getting both a manicure AND a teeny little moray eel bite at the same time.
See, cleaner shrimp will come out and trim your cuticles if you want long enough around the cleaning station. So I did, totally oblivious to the baby moray eeel sitting under the same coral head, and a little upset at the intrusion.
Oh well...wish I had my vidcam working but it's a little hard figuring out the angles and lighting under a coral head...
The dive included some beautiful Frecn Angelfish and a goby that kept popping up and spinning around like a dancer.
The second dive, later in the afternoon, saw me come face to face with two lionfish. This is not a good thing. They were within yards of each other, meaning they were probably from the same spawning event and had enough to eat. Lionfish usually do not like imposing on each other's territory.
Duly reported to the proper authorities, of course. I'll post videos when I return.
The Northeast is being hammered by a snowstorm as I write this. Sorry guys.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Island Time
I think I'm finally into island time. I haven't shaved or changed clothes (except to dive, of course) since Sunday, and actually showered with soap once, last night.
Hey, protecting the environment! They have to pump out the septic tanks, process the merchandise and ship the residue off island. It costs money.
I shot some video yesterday, and tried to wrap my mind around the whole phenomenon of intrusive species. You see, Bonaire is the latest (and most remote) outpost of the dreaded lion fish. Its first prey is a species of really beautiful animal called the Spotted Drum, which likes to linger in the same nooks and crannies that lion fish prefer.
I finally saw a Spotted Drum yesterday, but it was huge, which means old, and I haven't seen any fry.
I'm hoping that, as heavily dived as the house reefs on the hotel strip on Bonaire are, this somehow keeps the lion fish at bay, that thru either fear of the bubble blowers or thru careful management practices (meaning capture, kill and eat) lion fish have been kept away from this part of the island.
Time and dives will tell.
But then the follow up thought occurred to me: if divers have managed to stress out the lion fish, how many other species of fish have we prevented from living a normal life on the reef?
It's not that divers are evil or anything. Most are very careful to respect the reef life and to even put the coral and fish ahead of their own safety. But accidents happen, and then there's the small percentage of yutzes who just have to ruin things for everyone by poking fingers into holes and carelessly dropping stuff, kicking fins willy-nilly and just being assholes.
But even careful divers, like me, how do we affect the reef ecosystem? After all, often I'll glide over a cleaning station where a grouper is having his teeth brushed, and he'll panic and swim off. What if some parasite takes the opportunity to cause an infection? And what if that one grouper who might have ended up spawning the line that finally takes out the lion fish, dies instead?
I can't worry about it much, but it's a nagging thought on the periphery of my consciousness.
Hey, protecting the environment! They have to pump out the septic tanks, process the merchandise and ship the residue off island. It costs money.
I shot some video yesterday, and tried to wrap my mind around the whole phenomenon of intrusive species. You see, Bonaire is the latest (and most remote) outpost of the dreaded lion fish. Its first prey is a species of really beautiful animal called the Spotted Drum, which likes to linger in the same nooks and crannies that lion fish prefer.
I finally saw a Spotted Drum yesterday, but it was huge, which means old, and I haven't seen any fry.
I'm hoping that, as heavily dived as the house reefs on the hotel strip on Bonaire are, this somehow keeps the lion fish at bay, that thru either fear of the bubble blowers or thru careful management practices (meaning capture, kill and eat) lion fish have been kept away from this part of the island.
Time and dives will tell.
But then the follow up thought occurred to me: if divers have managed to stress out the lion fish, how many other species of fish have we prevented from living a normal life on the reef?
It's not that divers are evil or anything. Most are very careful to respect the reef life and to even put the coral and fish ahead of their own safety. But accidents happen, and then there's the small percentage of yutzes who just have to ruin things for everyone by poking fingers into holes and carelessly dropping stuff, kicking fins willy-nilly and just being assholes.
But even careful divers, like me, how do we affect the reef ecosystem? After all, often I'll glide over a cleaning station where a grouper is having his teeth brushed, and he'll panic and swim off. What if some parasite takes the opportunity to cause an infection? And what if that one grouper who might have ended up spawning the line that finally takes out the lion fish, dies instead?
I can't worry about it much, but it's a nagging thought on the periphery of my consciousness.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Sunday Stroll
Yesterday was a day to become re-acquainted with dive gear and to check out important dive matters such as buoyancy and weighting.
See, you don't need weight to get down as much as you need it to stay down. It's important to be neither underweighred (which can have you ascend from your dive too quickly, thus creating a scenario where you could get what's called "the bends") or overweighted, which can cause a different, albeit less fatal, set of problems.
Three dives in the day, one to 120 feet, and my first impression of the reefs of Bonaire is there was some event that has caused mass bleachings. This is not global warming, at least as far as I can tell, because the bleaching was widespread and happened in the course of a year.
If memory serves, there may have been an oil spill either a year and a half or two years ago. Bonaire is reliant on imports by sea, and there's a petroleum processing facility on the same coast as most of the pristine reefs.
Man does the most bizarre things with nature's bounty. The same protection offered to divers and fish makes Bonaire's channel the best place to site piers of all kinds, from cruise ships to tankers to the occasional military vessel.
Drug interdictions, you see.
I can't post pictures to prove the difference mostly because I haven't taken my camera with me yet. Once I've processed some photos, I can show you some startling and direct contrasts. It's very sad to see how many of my old friends have died off with more to come.
See, you don't need weight to get down as much as you need it to stay down. It's important to be neither underweighred (which can have you ascend from your dive too quickly, thus creating a scenario where you could get what's called "the bends") or overweighted, which can cause a different, albeit less fatal, set of problems.
Three dives in the day, one to 120 feet, and my first impression of the reefs of Bonaire is there was some event that has caused mass bleachings. This is not global warming, at least as far as I can tell, because the bleaching was widespread and happened in the course of a year.
If memory serves, there may have been an oil spill either a year and a half or two years ago. Bonaire is reliant on imports by sea, and there's a petroleum processing facility on the same coast as most of the pristine reefs.
Man does the most bizarre things with nature's bounty. The same protection offered to divers and fish makes Bonaire's channel the best place to site piers of all kinds, from cruise ships to tankers to the occasional military vessel.
Drug interdictions, you see.
I can't post pictures to prove the difference mostly because I haven't taken my camera with me yet. Once I've processed some photos, I can show you some startling and direct contrasts. It's very sad to see how many of my old friends have died off with more to come.
Sunday, January 09, 2011
Dispatch From The War On Animals
As I mentioned yesterday, I'm down in the Caribbean for two weeks to document the underwater life of one of the most pristine reefs on the planet.
Imagine a day that started at 2:30 AM, included 15 hours either on an airplane or in an airport, and then arriving to find an island-nation in the midst of a tumultuous change.
That was my day yesterday, and yet I managed to go to bed with a smile.
I'm on Bonaire. Bonaire recently re-formed as a municipality (I have to understand what that terms means better) of Holland. It had first been a member of a class of islands under Dutch control called the Antilles. A few years ago, Aruba broke off, and now all islands in the class have been dismissed to direct control by Holland.
The island also changed its official currency from the guilder to the American dollar, and waived an entry visa for all guests (I think you still need one if you plan to stay longer than 90 days, but that's more to insure you don't take a job from a Bonairean).
Construction that began in 2007, the height of the housing boom, remains unfinished and in some cases, there aren't even signs that completion will ever come. The main industry here is dive tourism, and naturally, Americans are a huge part of that. I guess that went by the boards when the markets crashed too.
That certainly implies that as America goes, so go many smaller countries who have become dependent upon the American economy, tourism and imports.
A chilling sign was the appearance on local television (satellite, I think) of two channels catering to Chinese). One wonders how quickly the focus will turn from Americans to Chinese, as it has in Brazil, Peru and any number of Latin American nations.
including Venezuela, a nation that lies just fifty miles or so to my south as I type this. Hugo Chavez has made noises about wrenching these islands from Dutch control and seizing them for himself, but I seriously doubt he has the resources to do it.
I'm sat on a porch overlooking an inlet from the ocean that surrounds an island about a mile away. That island was owned by Harry Belafonte, who prohibited development while he owned it (he's a resident down here as are many celebrities who want to get aweay from the media). He gifted it to Bonaire a few years back with the same proviso.
So far, they've held steady. Looks like they will for a while.
Speaking of media, the only American "news" network I get with any regularity here is FOX, so I heard about the shooting in Arizona, but figured it had to be exaggerated in some way. Little did I know it would be understated. See, they never reported in the half hour I watched about Sarah Palin's Facebook posting targeting her.
I must undergo a dive orientation today, followed by a "mandatory" check out dive. The orientation is required annually of anyone who wants to dive in Bonaire, along with a $25 annual fee to help with the upkeep of the national park.
Hard to think of an island only 20 miles long as having a national park, but there it is.
I'll write more as jet lag sets out and island time sets in. Until then, ayo!
Imagine a day that started at 2:30 AM, included 15 hours either on an airplane or in an airport, and then arriving to find an island-nation in the midst of a tumultuous change.
That was my day yesterday, and yet I managed to go to bed with a smile.
I'm on Bonaire. Bonaire recently re-formed as a municipality (I have to understand what that terms means better) of Holland. It had first been a member of a class of islands under Dutch control called the Antilles. A few years ago, Aruba broke off, and now all islands in the class have been dismissed to direct control by Holland.
The island also changed its official currency from the guilder to the American dollar, and waived an entry visa for all guests (I think you still need one if you plan to stay longer than 90 days, but that's more to insure you don't take a job from a Bonairean).
Construction that began in 2007, the height of the housing boom, remains unfinished and in some cases, there aren't even signs that completion will ever come. The main industry here is dive tourism, and naturally, Americans are a huge part of that. I guess that went by the boards when the markets crashed too.
That certainly implies that as America goes, so go many smaller countries who have become dependent upon the American economy, tourism and imports.
A chilling sign was the appearance on local television (satellite, I think) of two channels catering to Chinese). One wonders how quickly the focus will turn from Americans to Chinese, as it has in Brazil, Peru and any number of Latin American nations.
including Venezuela, a nation that lies just fifty miles or so to my south as I type this. Hugo Chavez has made noises about wrenching these islands from Dutch control and seizing them for himself, but I seriously doubt he has the resources to do it.
I'm sat on a porch overlooking an inlet from the ocean that surrounds an island about a mile away. That island was owned by Harry Belafonte, who prohibited development while he owned it (he's a resident down here as are many celebrities who want to get aweay from the media). He gifted it to Bonaire a few years back with the same proviso.
So far, they've held steady. Looks like they will for a while.
Speaking of media, the only American "news" network I get with any regularity here is FOX, so I heard about the shooting in Arizona, but figured it had to be exaggerated in some way. Little did I know it would be understated. See, they never reported in the half hour I watched about Sarah Palin's Facebook posting targeting her.
I must undergo a dive orientation today, followed by a "mandatory" check out dive. The orientation is required annually of anyone who wants to dive in Bonaire, along with a $25 annual fee to help with the upkeep of the national park.
Hard to think of an island only 20 miles long as having a national park, but there it is.
I'll write more as jet lag sets out and island time sets in. Until then, ayo!
Saturday, January 08, 2011
Te Aworo
By the time you read this, I will be wheels up on a two week vacation.
I'll be taking my iPad with me, so posting will continue sporadically. See, I'll be wet most of the time...
Anyway, enjoy the middle of winter. I'll be working, sort of, on my photography and videography portfolio. The best thing about visual arts is the rehearsals.
I'll be taking my iPad with me, so posting will continue sporadically. See, I'll be wet most of the time...
Anyway, enjoy the middle of winter. I'll be working, sort of, on my photography and videography portfolio. The best thing about visual arts is the rehearsals.
Friday, January 07, 2011
Nobody Asked Me, But...
1) There's a lot of unnecessary panty-twisting over the remarks made by Antonin Scalia this week with respect to the Constitution. The relevant quote:
Q. In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we've gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?
A. Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that. ... But, you know, if indeed the current society has come to different views, that's fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't.
A lot of people on the left and even the right are interpreting this to mean that Scalia believes the Constitution endorses misogyny, which is an interpretation you have to stretch a bit to include, altho I can see how and why, and even understand the degree of anger. I disagree with that sentiment, however. That does not mean I think Scalia should be NOW's poster boy or that Scalia is not a cad and a bigot.
I think Scalia's original quote was not incorrect. I read it as "The Constitution does not set aside women as a preferred class with respect to constitutional rights, and the 14th Amendment does not, either."
He's right. It doesn't. Aside from slaves, the constitution only refers to "person" as pertains to whom the document covers. Not man, not woman, not black, not white, not brown, not gay, not straight, but person. It does not make any "requirement" (his word) of gender or race.
The Reconstruction amendments (13th, 14th, 15th) attempt to redress the only definition the Constitution has of personhood and that is in the negative: slaves were 60% of a "person".
All other protections, with one notable exception which I'm surprised Scalia did not mention, are gender and/or race blind. The 19th, of course, gave women the vote (and in the context of preventing anyone from being denied the vote), and this was a curious omission on the part of a man who usually is very thorough.
All treatments that the US has applied to redress private and public civil rights wrongs have been statutory. Here, the whims of the people could revoke those rights at any time (else why would we need an ERA, and why would we need to fight to protect Roe v Wade?). What Scalia is responding to is the need for a Constitutional redress of discrimination. This is where people should get angry, in my view.
American history makes it very clear that we have come a long way from the time when women were ornaments and slaves were less than that. I would find it hard to believe that men like John Adams or Thomas Jefferson would not have recognized the value of their wives and friends in terms of intellect and problem-solving. Particularly Adams.
This is why I believe the Constitution was deliberately written with gender neutrality in mind (and race neutrality, beyond the slavery issue). Compare the "person" to the Declaration, which uses the words "man" and "men" as a gender neutral noun. If the Founders had meant for the Law of the Land to be so written, they would not have had any problem doing so. They clearly signaled that the law was to apply to all people, all humans..except slaves.
On that very narrow point, Scalia, whom I usually believe is a douchebag, is correct. In practice, he's still a douchebag.
OK, flame away in comments. I won't be around much to read them :-)
2) Attention my British readers! This is important!
3) The best explanation for the dead birds in Arkansas. You may recall I posted about this earlier this week. It's still spreading.
4) Unemployment dips to 9.4% as the US added 103,000 brand spanking new jobs last week. Stock futures tanked. Why? Well, the private sector added 113,000 jobs, while states and municipalities dumped 10,000 jobs. The estimates were for 120,000 net jobs gained. The private sector falls short by only 7,000 jobs (but beating the average since January 2009 by nearly 20,000 jobs!), while states and local governments dump workers because they've been forced to cut taxes. Yet, the economic royalists get upset. WTF???
5) President Obama named Gene (no Sy, although he could stand a bit of Sy's handiwork) Sperling as his chief economic adviser.
6) Wassamatter, Cryboehner? Afraid you might have to cry on the house floor again? Seriously, for a bunch of testosterone-addicted asshats, the right wing sure has a lot of...emotional disbalance.
7) Like Nixon going to China, only Bob Gates could successfully cut the Pentagon budget with a Republican house.
8) The Naderites really need an enema. He could run another forty times and still not amass enough votes in total to win the Presidency. Grow up, grow a set, and get involved in fighting for the party. Either one. I don't give a rat's ass, but stop with the holier-than-thou shit.
9) I didn't realize the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq have opened a new front in Miami!
10) Finally, for all you folks opposed to the Park51 Cultural Center...two words: Suck. It. Not one of you would head to Mecca to do this at Eid ul-Fitr, would you?
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Well, Now, Another Use For Porn: Predicting The Future!
Some of the methodology of this study is dodgy, but there are some interesting subnotes that bear further inspection:
One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.
The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.
The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.
Basically, what Dr. Bem...and there's a SciFi name if I've ever heard one...did was turn a traditional memory test on its head, in the first phase of this study. He gave students a memory test consisting of vocabulary words, then gave them the list of words to study afterwards. Turns out the students scored higher on words they later studied more.
As I said, dicey methodology, but it advanced to a later study in which subjects were asked to predict which of two computer screens behind a curtain would present a picture. After the prediction was made, a random generator choose a screen. The outcome was slightly higher than that presented by chance (50%, of those of you who didn't do so good in statistics).
Interesting outcome, to be sure. It's hard to get really excited over slightly better odds of choosing in a simple "left/right" scenario, of course, but who's to say?
However....
Still, the participants beat chance, by 53 percent to 50 percent, at least when the photos being posted were erotic ones. They did not do better than chance on negative or neutral photos.
“What I showed was that unselected subjects could sense the erotic photos,” Dr. Bem said, “but my guess is that if you use more talented people, who are better at this, they could find any of the photos.”
Dr. Bem has his critics. For example, a Dr. Hyman in Oregon claims it might all be a practical joke, which would reflect poorly on the Journal.
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
What The Hell Is Going On???
First it was Arkansas. Next, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Maryland, and now Sweden????
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (KTHV) -- Just four days after thousands of dead blackbirds are found in Arkansas, residents in Sweden are cleaning up their own version of the unusual happening.
Officials in Sweden say about 50 birds were found in the southern Sweden city of Falkoping Wednesday morning.
Earlier in the week, another case of dead birds hit Louisiana, leaving those residents just as confused as others.
Now, the accepted wisdom is that somehow fireworks are responsible for the bird deaths, and the fish are dying of unusually cold water (possible effect of global climate change and the shift of the Atlantic conveyor in Sweden? Stay tuned).
Except....it's summer in Brazil. And New Zealand, which is also reporting tons of dead fish washing up on shores.
And fireworks would explain birds dropping out of the sky, ohhhhhh, sayyyyyy, one minute past midnight on the first, but many of these events are happening days after the last fizzles.
There are plenty of conventional, prosaic explanations for any one of these events, to be sure, but that all of them are happening about the same time in the same mysterious manner leads one to suspect there's something greater at work here.
So what the hell IS going on???
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
The Insurance Crisis You Didn't Hear About
Everyone remembers AIG, and how it was too big to fail, since its insurance propped up everything from major construction projects to risky mortgages.
But the insurance industry as a whole was grossly destabilized by the banking crisis. Any risk upsets insurers, and there was plenty to go around.
Including one particularly noxious little instrument: The death bet, or life settlement industry, to use the polite term.
Intended as an estate planning tool, the death bet works as follows. I'm rich. Filthy rich. So I take out a life insurance policy in the millions. It's probably more than I need, but I've got an inflated sense of self-worth.
Oops. Now I need cash. Quick cash. I turn around and sell that policy to an investor pool who agrees to make the premium payments in exchange for an annuity payment to me based on the benefit, plus assignment of that benefit to the pool. (NB This is not the only purpose these policies serve, but it's a good example of how ugly this can be)
The new owners then sit back and begin to cheer every single sniffle I get. The faster I die, the more profitable the policy is.
In the scramble of the subprime mortgage market, insurers, much like Captain Renault in Casablanca were shocked! SHOCKED! to find out that many of the highly profitable transactions were mere gambles on the lives of policyholders!
Since the bust in the market, insurers have portrayed themselves as the victims. They have filed hundreds of lawsuits over the past two years seeking to cancel policies they say weren't intended as estate-planning tools, as buyers purported, but were instead meant to enrich investors speculating on old people's lives. The industry also asked regulators to stop investors from wagering with their products.
Now, some investors are striking back. They are asserting that insurers' own agents and managers encouraged investor-driven sales to boost their compensation, and that the industry cried foul only when faced with big payouts on the policies and bond-market declines that made some policies less profitable than expected.
The investors want the insurers to be forced to honor the contracts, or to refund all of the premiums they have paid. Some are seeking punitive damages. The claims appear in filings in state and federal courts nationwide.
The irony is, of course, that this market was already in a tizzy not because of the financial shenanigans of the bond markets (bonds and annuities are usually the underlying instruments behind life insurance policies and included mortgage-backed securities) but because, well, people are living longer.
See, actuarial tables may be the last bastion of inefficiency in financial markets, because they rely on information after the fact: when a person dies, that's how long you know he or she has lived. The average age of people dying is compared to the numbers of people still living who are that age and that's one way life expectancies are calculated, or at least that's the basis for the calculations.
Radical changes...an epidemic or natural disaster...can appear nearly instantaneously. Subtle changes take months if not years to come to the fore. And there's the problem because these same rich people can afford the best medical care and thus confound the statistics which can adjust for income but have a much harder time adjusting for accumulated wealth. Remember, they've likely retired when they sell these policies so annual income is reduced significantly, but wealth continues to accrue.
So how does this affect you? Well, estimates of the current market for these instruments remains over $10 billion new policies every year. Not much, but if insurers are forced to recapture premiums and refund them to investors, the size of the market could make the AIG bust look like a run on a Bedford Falls building and loan.
And then, if no bailout is forthcoming, your insurance premiums-- car, life, and home-- will skyrocket.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Nobody Asked Me, But...
1) Darn. I bet he was counting on it, too!
2) Flooding. Blizzards. Earthquakes in Indiana. The surest sign of the apocalypse? UConn lost in women's basketball!
3) He won't be boch.
4) MEMO
TO Texas
Get a fucking clue, already, will ya?
5) Neo-Cons will soon get a taste of their own medicine. Foaming up anti-Islam hate will always backfire.
6) It's hard to believe Haley Barbour is actually getting praise for this.
7) It's funny how she hasn't been able to conjure up proof of her non-denial denials.
8) Cenk Uygur: troublemaker. God bless him.
9) What a fucking idiot.
10) This may be taking the green debate to a whole new level. It's really shaving off nits.
2) Flooding. Blizzards. Earthquakes in Indiana. The surest sign of the apocalypse? UConn lost in women's basketball!
3) He won't be boch.
4) MEMO
TO Texas
Get a fucking clue, already, will ya?
5) Neo-Cons will soon get a taste of their own medicine. Foaming up anti-Islam hate will always backfire.
6) It's hard to believe Haley Barbour is actually getting praise for this.
7) It's funny how she hasn't been able to conjure up proof of her non-denial denials.
8) Cenk Uygur: troublemaker. God bless him.
9) What a fucking idiot.
10) This may be taking the green debate to a whole new level. It's really shaving off nits.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Quick Hits
1) Since when do three unnamed "sources" who, if they exist, have a clear axe to grind, become a major news item? Since the conservatives in America want to rape the working guy. Again.
2) Did I just blow your mind? DID I??????
3) How ridiculous are the folks protesting the Ground Zero cultural center? They've targeted Justin Bieber!
5) Two women have served a total of 32 years for stealing $11. Gov. Haley Barbour has magnanimously granted them clemency. So long as one donates a kidney.
The Year In Rearview
Look, for my part, the year 2010 cannot go away fast or far enough.
Between the crappy cynical pandering by Teabaggers to the lowest common denominator of a minority of the American electorate to the health issues I dealt with to the fact that my mom is racing the end of the year to end first, this has been a pretty shitty ride.
So in my inimitable fashion, fuck the bad, let's focus on the good stuff!
1) Healthcare reform -- it was nasty business, it was exceedingly poorly handled, a blind kindergartener could have done a better job of promoting the benefits, but America joined the civilized world.
Sort of. There's a lot of room for improvement there, and one hopes in 2013, we will see it roll in.
2) The laughable joke that passes for "populism" -- From The Wicked Witch Of The West(ern Delaware) to Sharon Angle, the Teabaggers, while generally successful in electing minor candidates to federal posts, had an epic fail in terms of persuading the population that they are a serious political force to be reckoned with. My suspicion is they have blown their only real chance, however it's possible they may end up shooting the GOP in the foot. Sarah Palin, while moderately successful with her carefully chosen endorsements, was not the game changed she hoped to be and her final throes in 2010, trying to refudiate saying "refudiate" while gobs of tape proved her a self-involved liar, only served to nail the coffin shut on her presidential aspirations, such as they were.
3) Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert and The Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear -- A more delightful event could not have been planned by anyone else. While remaining strictly-- perhaps frustratingly-- non-partisan and entertaining...maybe the opening performance by The Roots could have been shorter, but there was probably some stuff going on that we didn't know about...Stewart and to an extent Colbert brought to the near-undivided attention of Americans the, um, divide that presents itself upon the electorate.
Some of this was necessary. Some of it smacked of patronization and even condescension (the attempt to make an equivalence between the teeth-bared partisanship of FOX with the balance of MSNBC was a little discomfiting from Stewart) but the entire event was at once eye-opening, refreshing and reassuring. We are America. We are Americans. From the Muslim selling the newspaper to the Sikh running the dry cleaner to the Korean driving the taxi to the Jewish doctor and Presbyterian lawyer, to the bald guy in the SUV with the gun rack driving next to the soccer mom in her Volvo in the Holland Tunnel, what unites us is truly more important than what divides us, and we ought to honor that.
4) The San Francisco Giants -- I don't plug baseball on my blog much but I am an huge fan of the game, and the Giants were a real American story: cast-offs and has-beens let go by other teams for a song played above their heads and collectively went from mutts to pedigrees. That they play for the gayest city in America is just a plus.
5) The repeal of DADT -- Well, what can I say? Harry Reid found his balls, and gave thousands of soldiers back theirs. And those are just the women!
6) Chilean Mine Rescue -- Really, why did it take a "third world" nation to show us in America how it's done? Good grief, it's CHILE! I know, I know, Chile is actually one of the most progressive nations on the planet, nevermind South America, and has much to show for themselves, but come ON!
7) The World Cup -- South Africa, indeed the entire African continent, deserves high marks for hosting the quadrennial meeting of men in shorts. Not only were the games held safely and securely, not only were old animosities put aside...I'm looking at you, Portugal and Spain!...not only were the Americans embarassed once again in a sport that the rest of the world deems "it", but the energy of the audiences and the nation were stunning enough that you could safely ignore the vuvuzelas.
From time to time.
Y'know, the temptation to round this out to a Top Ten list is strong, so I think story number 8 for good news this year is that I stopped the list at story number 7.
Wait...what?
Have a Happy New Year, my friends, my readers!
7)
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Some Shorters
If America was a Muslim state, Muslims would still suck.
Shorter Tucker Carlson...seriously, can you GET shorter than TC? Anyway...
A President who supports dogkillers like Michael Vick ought to get the dogkiller killed. Right? But it's OK when I fuck up because I'm a Christian. Like Michael Vick.
An Abject Lesson
There's a follow up to the Northeastern Blizzard of 2010: cuts in services followed by deep unhappiness over, um, services:
Now, before I get to the meat of my point, let me dispense with a few conditional factors involved. The storm hit the Sunday after what was pretty much a universal three day holiday weekend with many drivers on the road to visit family or celebrate Christmas. Many people who were coming home were racing to beat the storm, assuming that there would be a work day, albeit a difficult one, the next morning. In addition, many of those people were the very people who would be manning the snow removal efforts, the emergency services, and other vital functions required to get a city the size of New York up on its feet.
Too, I noted an unusual number of cars abandoned in the middle of the street. It's hard to get a plow down a street with a ton of metal between the plow and the other end. We citizens only have our fellow citizens to blame for those.
As I pointed out the other day, the timing of this storm could not have been much worse. Had it happened on Christmas day, a Saturday and a day typical for heavy snowfalls in the city for some odd reason (I blame HAARP, myself), there would have been another 24 hours prep time for the opening curtain to the work week.
But...
Well, to sum up my point in a nutshell, we asked for lower taxes, we got lower taxes, and here's the price we pay. Mayor Bloomberg has been at the forefront of cutting property taxes, business income taxes, lowering city revenues as far as he possibly can, and cutting services to compensate. 300 Department of Sanitation drivers were "retired" during this recent budget slashing to help cover the shortfall. That's 150 snowplows that could have been on the street.
Ironically, the people who benefited the least from the tax cuts are the ones who suffered the most from the budget cuts: the poor and working classes. Just as with the inevitable health complications of this storm...imagine triaging in a major city? It happened!...the people who will suffer the most are the most disenfranchised.
In fairness to Mayor Mike, NYC is under a constitutional requirement for a balanced budget, a leftover from the dark days of the 1970s, when NYC teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Instead of restoring some of the tax cuts, since NYC was not as hard hit by the real estate meltdown as other areas of the country, Bloomberg opted for the coward's way out, trying to right-wing the budget into balance.
There's plenty of blame to go around, of course. The MTA, the folks running the trains and buses, probably could have been more proactive in clearing the tracks, although the blizzard conditions during and after the snowfall made any effort troublesome. People who live here could have take that tax cut and bought a snowblower or invested in a private plowing service for their sidewalks and curbs, and maybe thrown a little extra in the kitty for the street to be cleared.
After all, the function of a government is, according to the Teabaggers, as minimalist as possible, meaning protection of its citizenry and that's it. You may recall the uproar over the fire department that refused to put out a blaze for a house where the residents hadn't paid a stinking $50 annual bill. This is that story, writ large, except we're talking streets plowed, not buildings burned.
The next, obvious step up the ladder will be a statewide crisis. Maybe the levees in California, after all the storming and stuff there, will fill with salt water, depriving 25 million people of drinking water. And after that, we face a national crisis that could have been prevented if taxes weren't so goddamn low...
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Perspective
Buried in this article is a very interesting line of thought for liberals:
Compare these circumstances to those of 1911, a century ago. Even in the wealthier countries, the average person had little formal education, worked six days a week or more, often at hard physical labor, never took vacations, and could not access most of the world’s culture. The living standards of Carnegie and Rockefeller towered above those of typical Americans, not just in terms of money but also in terms of comfort. Most people today may not articulate this truth to themselves in so many words, but they sense it keenly enough. So when average people read about or see income inequality, they don’t feel the moral outrage that radiates from the more passionate egalitarian quarters of society. Instead, they think their lives are pretty good and that they either earned through hard work or lucked into a healthy share of the American dream. (The persistently unemployed, of course, are a different matter, and I will return to them later.) It is pretty easy to convince a lot of Americans that unemployment and poverty are social problems because discrete examples of both are visible on the evening news, or maybe even in or at the periphery of one’s own life. It’s much harder to get those same people worked up about generalized measures of inequality.
This is why, for example, large numbers of Americans oppose the idea of an estate tax even though the current form of the tax, slated to return in 2011, is very unlikely to affect them or their estates. In narrowly self-interested terms, that view may be irrational, but most Americans are unwilling to frame national issues in terms of rich versus poor. There’s a great deal of hostility toward various government bailouts, but the idea of “undeserving” recipients is the key factor in those feelings. Resentment against Wall Street gamesters hasn’t spilled over much into resentment against the wealthy more generally. The bailout for General Motors’ labor unions wasn’t so popular either—again, obviously not because of any bias against the wealthy but because a basic sense of fairness was violated. As of November 2010, congressional Democrats are of a mixed mind as to whether the Bush tax cuts should expire for those whose annual income exceeds $250,000; that is in large part because their constituents bear no animus toward rich people, only toward undeservedly rich people.
The question is, what is "undeservedly rich"?
Warren Buffet and United For a Fair Economy posit that all wealth is derived from society, and indeed, there is much truth there. A business cannot sell unless there is a collection of consumers ready to buy. That business relies on the population for its workers. It relies on the resources of that society, the infrastructure, and the raw materials that it or its suppliers need to produce goods which ultimately are provided for free by Mother Earth...indeed, it is estimated that a fair price for those raw materials, like air and water and minerals, would equal the cumulative gross domestic product of every economy on the planet, thus making world net profit precisely zero.
Clearly, one can make the case that between the raw materials and labor pool, society should devolve the majority of revenues from any business (the value-added tax is an attempt to put this into practice, however marginally). In practice, the individual entrepreneur is the one who stands to most benefit from commerce. In truth, he risks an awful lot too, but that's a different article. We're talking here about the ones who succeed.
I think we'd all agree that a guy who opens up a shoe repair shop and works long hard hours for little money building his business is entitled to some kind of payoff for his hard work. In practice, the truth is very different: success usually occurs more from sheer blind luck than from hard work. You can work really hard and make nothing of a company, but add a little luck, and you have success.
And I think we'd all agree that the guy who makes megamillions from his raw talent at hitting a ball with a bat is probably less deserving. Except we forget he had to work really hard and yes, he plays a game but he plays it well enough to attract fans who pay the club even more money than he pays (here we're back to society as customer), and the money would either go to him or the even richer fellow (or woman) who owns the club.
In truth, both the shoe mogul and the ballplayer owe us a debt, and it is when they do not pay that debt that we get angry. Bailout a banker and we get mad, especially when a banker pays that loan back in a much shorter time that expected. Why did he need bailing out?
And yet, there's this curious construct that has us blaming the guy next door for taking a chance similar to the banker and biting off more than he could chew. The homeowner with the ubermortgage doesn't have the ability to take a loss on his house (like the banker, he can deduct interest off his bottom line, however). If the banker sells a house for less than he mortgaged it out, he can deduct that loss. If a homeowner sells a house for less than his mortgage, not only is he still in hock to the lender, but he can't even deduct the loss off his taxes.
Yet, we blame the homeowner and rant about bailing him out, but the banker may get our contempt, but we still enrich him with the use of his bank and his credit cards!
Tyler Cowen, the author of the article cited above, posits that the people who should be getting our contempt are the people who play with other people's money, and yet we tend to cut them slack because they are more removed from our day-to-day perspectives, yet they make enormous sums of money off our backs with very little risk.
From the mergermania of the 1980s to the recent housing bubble, these speculators have made trillions of dollars doing nothing but playing with our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honors.
You say you want a revolution? I know where to begin.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Snow Joke
Yea, I know...an oldie but very appropriate today.
By now, you no doubt are aware that NYC woke this morning under a blanket of snow. It's not the most snow we've ever had, not even the worst snow we've had in the past three years, but it was, by far, the worst storm we've had in the past decade.
Not so much the snowfall amounts. A foot, foot and a half was the average around the area, with one or two places checking in with closer to two feet.
It wasn't the cold. In fact, it was practically balmy during the day. I was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans to shovel.
It wasn't even so much the wind, which while sustained and gusts averaged into the 40 mph range, was not the worst we've had during a snow storm in this century.
The worst part?
The timing.
It started Sunday afternoon. The day after Christmas, a time when people were hunkered down in holiday hangover, watching football or making a hot meal for the family. The snow started in the late morning, slowly, maybe an inch every two hours. That was easy to keep up with, no problem.
It wasn't until later in the afternoon that the worst of the snow started, coupled with the wind. By five PM, the snowfall rates had doubled and even tripled. I had been trying to stay ahead of the storm by shoveling every two hours. By nine PM, I threw in the towel (you can visit my Flickr account for photos from last night and this morning), literally.
I had already shoveled about six inches of snow, the very fine sugar powder that we rarely get on the east coast during a coastal storm.
I went to bed, confident that I had tackled sufficient amounts of snow to make Monday morning a lot easier.
Fool that I am.
I woke up around 4:30, and looked out the window.
Or rather, I tried. The window was coated with wind-blown snow. I put on some slippers and walked down to the sidewalk. I opened the front door to the building.
There was about a foot and a half of snow piled up against it, drifted in from the vicious wind that was still howling outside.
I closed the door and shuddered, walked back upstairs, had a hot coffee and got dressed. By five I was in my shoveling gear. The tempratures were much colder, well below freezing, and the wind was unabated.
I stepped into the fray. Another eighteen inches had, in fact, drifted onto the sidewalk, and the curious rules of NYC snow removal is, sidewalks have to be clear (that's to the curb, by definition) by eleven AM. Worse, my office had not closed, despite my fervent wishes and frequent curses. I had to go to work. And to add a note of comedy, there was a gas leak in the street, Con Ed had been working on it until the crew deemed it was too dangerous to finish, and so the stench of gas permeated the air around me.
The comedy bit? Some asshat had tried to drive down the street and gotten stuck, preventing the plows from getting thru, preventing Con Ed from returning. I kept thinking it was a good thing I won't need an ambulance, and if there is a God, that driver will get arrested for some crime or other.
So there I am, sniffing air that smelled like it belonged in a fraternity house, shoveling enough snow that I created a mound seven feet high, and still had barely done half the job. In two hours. I was going to be late for work. And I hadn't tackled the really tough job of digging out my garage.
See, in NYC, garage space is hard to come by, and expensive. Landlords know they have it over the renters and are under no obligations to provide snow removal (private-yet-communal driveways off-street). A driver has to dig his own car out if he rents a garage. To top that off, none of the communal landlords ever had the birght idea to pool money and get a plowing service to just sweep thru, thus making what would be a commonsense but free market decision to take care of the problem in one fell swoop.
By eight I had finished the sidewalk. By nine I had another hot coffee and grabbed my shoveling gear and headed to the garage. I was going to be late for work, of course, and called in to let them know. I left a voicemail.
As I climbed over snowbank after snowbank to get to the garage, I had the sinking feeling that, in fact, no one had shoveled any of the garages out, which means even if I did clear mine, I'd never get my car out until spring thaw. Sadly, this was true, but more sadly, I needed to dig my garage out anyway, because it will only get worse as the week drags out, as asshat after asshat drives over the snow (if they even can!) reducing it to solid ice. I won't need a shovel. I'll need a chisel.
By ten thirty, I had finished my work. By noon, I was in the office, doped on oxycodone and still without breakfast.
All for want of a boss with a heart, a storm with a better sense of timing, and me, without the good sense to have moved to the tropics.
Subscribe to:
Comment Feed (RSS)
Posts
