Opua: tugboat
Opua: tugboat
Mostly sunny here and windy. Gusting 20 to 30 knots. It is supposed to decrease later, but I probably won’t go ashore. I made it in yesterday, almost between showers, and brought back water, wine and cheese, so I’m set for a while.
On the way in I was passed by a young man in a dinghy with an outboard. He was not going too fast, and didn’t pass too close. He waved, and I, with my hands on the oars, nodded. A few seconds later I heard his outboard cough and die. As I caught up with him, he was pulling the starting cord without success. I asked if he would like a tow; he said no. I rowed on. He called yes. So I went back, took his painter and towed him the last few yards to the dinghy dock.
One of the good things about oars is that they always start on the first pull.
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1942, my first full year of life, was not otherwise a good one for the world. People were slaughtering each other at perhaps an unprecedented rate. This was the year of the fall of Singapore. The Battle of Midway. El Alamein. Guadalcanal. Stalingrad. And many, many others.
Perhaps because the world was so violent, people wanted innocence, and one of the ways Hollywood catered to this was a film called THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR, directed by Billy Wilder, and staring Ray Milland as an Army major assigned to a military academy, who wants to go on active duty, and Ginger Rogers as a twenty-something who pretends to be twelve to get a half price train ticket back home to Iowa because she doesn’t quite have the full adult fare. If DANGEROUS LIAISONS was sexual tragedy; THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR is sexual farce at its most innocent.
I actually enjoyed it, even Ginger Rogers, of whom I am not a particular admirer.
The movie still runs on Turner Classic Movies. If you see it listed, watch and think of what was going on in the world around the audiences who saw it on first release.
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Today’s TIMES OF LONDON and GUARDIAN both run lead articles about a British couple who have just been captured by pirates, while sailing from The Seychelles to Tanzania on their 38‘ boat. The couple, in their 50s, are described as not being wealthy. One wonders who and how anyone is going to pay their ransom.
I think I can empathize with them. I have great pity for them.
But piracy in those waters is a known hazard. There is a huge area, thousands of miles, from the coast of India and Sri Lanka, south to Tanzania and Mozambique, west to the Med, where until the governments of the world decide to take action, it is not safe to sail.
Anyone who does must be ready to accept the possible consequences of that decision.
Something I wrote in a different context the other day may be applicable: Mistakes, including wars, are often due to failure of the imagination.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009