AUTHOR’S NOTE: This column is intended to be entertaining at the expense of truth and accuracy, but I sneak in some good information as well. It is up to the reader to distinguish between entertainment and reality.
Q: How many boats is a “reasonable” number for any one person to own?
A: Under 100 is a good starting point, with flexibility in mind. You might want to consider how much room you have to store them. When considering this, keep in mind that kayaks make an excellent decorative focal point for any room, so you may have more storage space than you think you have. IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP: If married, it is important that both of you come to an understanding about what “reasonable” means in terms of actual numerical limits, as well as what constitutes a “decorative focal point” and “acceptable” storage space.
Q: What is a skwoosh?
A: This is the combination of what you feel and hear when you are getting in your kayak after a break (so not on one of Bruce’s trips) and sit down on the super-sized slug that only wanted to share your seat. Fun Fact: Slugs have an average of 27,000 teeth on a band called a radula, so if you feel and hear that skwoosh, get the hell out of the kayak immediately.
Q: What is a caracara?
Cara-Cara
A: For the benefit of those who were not in our last HCC Zoom meeting in July, cara is “face” in Spanish, so the literal translation of cara-cara is face-face. Cara-cara, in modern regular use shortened to caracara, is the word pair that Spaniards and Latinos use to describe the two-faced totem pole from Bora-Bora, representing the duplicitous god of deceit, Dadu Dadu. All of this fascinating trivia was in the context of a discussion about next month’s speaker, Bob Scaldino, who will be presenting his trip to the Broken Group Islands off British Columbia, where the Tlinget call caracara “kooteeyaa”.
Q: Are there kayaks in heaven?
Heavenly Kayak
A: Let us carefully examine the evidence:
- Heaven has all good things
- Kayaks are good things
- By the transitive property (if A=B and B=C, then A=C), which we all learned in High School Geometry (in case you forgot), there are, indeed, kayaks in heaven, along with dogs.
Q: If there are kayaks in heaven, as you assert, what parts of our paddling world are in hell?
Alligator Gar – Fish from Hell
A: This gets into an area that was covered in a previous installment about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, and how could it be the fault of the ugly creature that he’s ugly, and why, with no inherent fault, is the creature penalized for being himself? Reviewing briefly, almost everyone seems to perceive pandas, raccoons and koalas to be cute and cuddly, and everyone seems to perceive opossums, fire ants, nutria and alligator gar as offensive. There is a biblical precedent with the snake, representing death, destruction, evil, poison and Satan, although this gets confusing when Moses, also known as Moshe Rabbenu, and who can forget his role played by Charlton Heston in the movie, “The Ten Commandments”, was instructed by God to make a serpent of brass and glue it to a tall stick, and “if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived". But I digress. So, ignoring the Moses thing, and going with the other biblical precedents (the Garden of Eden and Yule Brenner’s court), combined with my "intuitive revulsion" theory, it is easy for those of Christian-based faiths to conclude that the ugly, offensive creatures will collect in hell because we most certainly would not want to be around them in heaven, if that is, in fact, where we end up. For my part, I’ve never taken offense to any of the creatures on the list except the fire ants, which is indeed fortunate, because I don’t think I’ll be in heaven with all the boring people anyway.
Another part of our paddling world that will likely end in hell are the Bodson marathons, which are a form of hell on earth.
Q: In the space-time continuum, why was the second Wednesday at 7:00 pm selected as the time for the general meeting of the Houston Canoe Club?
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| Jim Beam |
Jack Daniels |
Samuel Adams
(aka Jim Koch) |
HCC’s Special Relativity to the Space-Time Continuum
A: The short answer is that three of Al Einstein’s contemporaries, Jim Beam, Jack Daniels, and Samuel Adams, started the club using Wednesday 7:00PM as the arbitrary index from which to view the rest of the space-time universe. A longer answer would become too cumbersome for this forum, with considerations of special vs general relativity, gravitational lensing, Poincaré transfers, shiny objects, allowing time to “float” (procrastination), gravitational fabric distortions, the mass of fast-moving things, the uncertainty constant, event horizons, light cones, singularities, entropy, distractions, frames of reference, quantum mechanics, imaginary time, Euclidean space time and gravity well adjustments. Please see illustration above. For the nitty-gritty of how Jim, Jack, and Sam set up the HCC general meeting, you can consult “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking.
Q: What words of wisdom did Leonardo “Lenny” Da Vinci apply to our paddle sports?
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Lenny from Vinci in Tuscany
Before He Finished Anything |
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Lenny from Vinci in Tuscany
After He Finished Two Things |
One of the Things Lenny Did Not Finish - Mona Lisa
A: Lenny was kind of a flake – not the kind of guy you would want to be in charge of your kitchen remodel. In spite of this character flaw, he made a few enlightened observations applicable to our favorite past time:
“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of waters past and the first of that which comes. So with time present, observe the light. Blink your eye and look at it again. That which you see was not there at first, and that which was there is no more.”
"Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man."
"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active."
Q: What is a “Greenland paddle”?
Greenland Paddle
Greenland
A: It’s a double-bladed kayak paddle that can only be built, sold and used in Greenland, which, for those of you who might be geographically challenged, is an autonomous territory within the kingdom of Denmark, located north of the eastern part of Canada. It’s cold there. Anyway, back to the Greenland paddle, export controls and World-Wide Classification systems have “special-listed” this commodity – it’s kind of like the controlled substance of the paddling world. There aren’t very many of them, so supply and demand have forced a high-value illicit trade in the Greenland paddle, similar to elephant tusks and Hello Kitty decals. In fact, I think there is a price-fixing conspiracy centered in Denmark and extending to Greenland paddle suppliers (the Inuit) that is feeding the frenzy to own a Greenland paddle. I myself was the proud owner of one of these treasures for a while before the government came snooping around. When I saw the black Crown Victoria on our street, I knew immediately what they were after, and, on a dark and stormy night, I was able to sneak it out of the house disguised as an assault rifle and sell it in a dingy, unlit ally for the deeply discounted price of $3,586.27 – a real bargain for the HASK guy that bought it. Close call.
MUG OF THE MONTH:
OVERHEARD . . .
