Cambridge: my people; stuff
Cambridge: my people; stuff
The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), otherwise known as the forlorn hope, has just released its statistics on the world fattest developed countries. The U.S. is number one, with about 35% of adults considered obese; and New Zealand is number three, with about 25% of adults obese. Mexico, not Australia, is number two. But my Australian friends need not feel slighted, for by using a different standard, the WHO (World Health Organization) ranks Australia number one.
By all standards, eight of the ten fattest countries in the world are South Pacific Island nations. For some reason, perhaps war profiteering, Kuwait, is also in the top ten.
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As I have mentioned here before, I return from the boat only with a carry on bag containing computers and cameras, but I usually go back with two forty to fifty pound bags. Not this time. In fact I may not have a bag at all, just an oversize cardboard box in which a knapsack was shipped.
In addition to the knapsack, I have a green 60’ long spinnaker sheet; two LED reading lights; a solar panel regulator; two books; a pair of boat shoes; an external wi-fi antenna; and a new pair of foul weather pants.
All of this, except for the spinnaker sheet, which will save me having to move an existing green sheet back and forth between my two spinnakers--I already have two red sheets and one green one--is replacing stuff broken or damaged during this voyage.
My old foul weather pants proved to be no longer waterproof on the first passage from New Zealand last April, but I’ve been in warm water and weather ever since and it hasn’t mattered. Now that I’m sailing back to New Zealand, it will.
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Sign on a Cambridge book store: ‘Books: Used. Rare. And Well Done.’
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Between Harvard Square and Cambridge Common is a small cemetery dating back to pre-Revolutionary days. The oldest marker I saw was of a Colonel John Vassall, who died on November 27, 1747. I think it had been renewed. Some of those buried there died at The Battle of Bunker Hill five miles east in Charlestown. On one of their tombstones can barely be read, ‘What a glorious morning is this.” And that is why I took the picture. Time has erased whatever was inscribed on almost all the markers, leaving a graveyard of surrealistically blank tombstones.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009