Category Archives: words

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Design and build

The Great Port Townsend Bay Kinetic Sculpture Race has some serious designers. I don’t know if they use a forge, but the sculptures have to go in the 52 degree water and come out a few blocks away. They have to move in the water, not just float. They have to have functional brakes, since they go over a significant hill and they are human powered. They have to get through the mudbog somehow.

Some go for power and some try to go light. This one looked the lightest this year.

Many have been in more than one race and the racers and their support teams are happy to lift the hood and explain.

The two bundles under the hood are lifejackets and floats for the water course. They have to carry all the parts on the sculpture. Each team can have support personnel. Our local school kids’ STEM groups had a Maker’s Fair near the water course. We have a group that has made an underwater robot to fish out lost crab pots. If the pot’s line is lost, crabs and other creatures can be trapped inside to die. The robot helps to fish out the trash that traps creatures.

Wikipedia lists ten locations for Kinetic Sculpture Races. Ours has been going for 35 years. Will someone forge a new vehicle that we start using daily? I hope so.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: forge.

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Storm tossed

The word tethered makes me think of the year and a half on oxygen. I had a standing concentrator for in the house. This means that I have oxygen tubing following me on three floors. I had to have connectors and I got caught on everything. I tripped over it. I wondered why it wasn’t helping and discovered the tubing was unplugged. The kittens chewed holes in it.

The sea plants are tethered too, to rocks, to grow up from the deep. I think this looks like a distressed stranded mermaid. Poor thing, her rock, her foundation has been thrown on shore by a storm. She can’t get home. I took this in May 2021, when I was still on continuous oxygen.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: tethered.

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Farm tour

I realize that tractable is not about tractors, but I still am thinking about tractors and the Farm Tour. I went to five farms and it was really fun. Not many tractors at the farms I went to. Beautiful Arabian horses at one.

The pig farm is quite wonderful. Lots of piglets. This mom maybe is having a nursing break.

These were only five days old.

And there were sheep and flowers and chickens. And skulls, too.

I’m not sure what was going on with the skulls. I did not get any pictures of tractors. I don’t think the large pigs are very tractable, but they are interested in their visitors.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: tractable.

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Empty

Cupid shoots seven arrows from her quiver.
Eons of experience, she hits where she aims.
Six hit in my heart but the seventh in my liver.
Now I can’t eat gluten and wine gives me pains.
I wonder if hearts are like cats’ lives?
I think it’s seven but it might be nine.
The thought of more arrows gives me hives.
I’ve had enough of love to last through time.
I hope it’s seven and the arrows are done
And Cupid wanders by and fails to see me.
I’ll emulate Hestia and Artemis for fun
And Artemis’s hunt stays protective from the the trees.
The love of friends is enough for me.
An empty quiver will set me free.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: quiver. The statue is Galatea, in Port Townsend.

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Nature Song

This is the first song I think of with today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt: onomatopoeia. This song sounds like kids playing and speeds up like kids do and all the laughter, about being outside. Wonderful! I love the Sweet Honey in the Rock kids’ records as well as adult records and my kids did too.

Here is an adult song followed by the kids’ song and circling back to the difficult adult part.

I took the photograph at the Centrum Jazz Port Townsend Concert, the Matthew Whittaker Quintet. Wow, wonderful.

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Purple weather

Walt Kelly was the master of bargleflooping and he could play with language in such fabulous ways! Once Howland Owl and Churchy were trying to make an A-bomb. They had a yew tree and a geranium and crossed them — by them falling over, two small plants in pots, to make Yew-ranium! Which did not explode, thankfully!

My sister and I grew up reading Pogo comics, old books at my grandparents, and memorizing bits and pieces. I still notice when Friday the thirteenth falls on a different day. This poem is one of my favorite bits.

Many happy returns

Once you were two,
dear birthday friend.
In spite of purple weather:

But now you are three
And near the end
As we grew some together.

How fourthful thou,
forsooth for you
For soon you will be more!

But β€” β€˜fore one can be three
be two;
Before be five be four!

_________________________ by Walt Kelly

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: barglefloop. Walt Kelly already is bargleflooping the internet, because I did not remember the correct name of this poem and found it by searching purple weather!

I took the photograph from Marrowstone Island. It’s a bunch of terns enjoying the tern towards purple weather.

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Indiana Jones is a terrible archeologist

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: a 2023 action/adventure film, the last gasp of the Raiders of the Lost Ark series. At least, I hope so.

I saw this with my daughter. I think it is awful, though if you want to see people blown up and killed, well, ok. SPOILERS.

Harrison Ford plays an awful person. A horrible archeologist, since he destroys tombs with no regard for history. A thief. A killer. A bad father, a bad friend, a bad God-father, a terrible husband. He goes to friends for help and barely notices when they are killed, though he is happy to point out to his God-daughter that SHE is not compassionate either.

It’s all justified by saving the world from the Dial of Destiny, only this time we don’t see this supposedly world changing item filed in a warehouse. It’s left sitting on a bedside table at the end. Yeah, maybe in the next movie one of the kids will play with it.

Indiana Jones is so awful that he wants to get away from himself, by staying in the time displacement. The Dial of Destiny is mathematical so it is not magic. Really. Science. Thank goodness it’s not a mathematical anti-aging device so Indy would live on.

They make him younger in the earlier scenes, ok, that’s sort of cool from a technical perspective. Just wait until everyone has that technology for Facebook and dating sites. Running atop the speeding train? Yeah, my suspension of disbelief already done failed, sorry. Tons of people killed in the first ten minutes, but since they are Nazis, we ought to be good with that. Except I am not. And he and his friend walk off with half of the precious potentially world changing power object? Which makes the friend crazy and so Indy ends up with it. Filed on a shelf at a college. Indy can’t keep a promise to a friend, either.

What about the romance? Give me a break. Ick, frankly. So he has to have the perfect female who turns a blind eye to all his destruction and killing and theft and very very bad archeology? Because “he is saving the world”? Ok, maybe she has dementia by now so she’s down with it. The perfect female for this scumbag: I think that search is really the about the anima. The search for the perfect partner is within, and we project that on a person who has some aspects of that internal perfection. That is falling in love. Really loving someone is withdrawing the projection and loving them anyhow. Indy’s movies represent much of our cultural disrespect and scorn for women. He has an undeveloped anima who is a sexy figure who will let him do anything he wants. And welcome him home. First thing I would do is destroy the “mathematical” dial, give him a good kick and leave. My work is done, out of here.

My ending for the movie would have Indy and his God-daughter hauled off to jail and fight in court for the next decade over who killed the people at the university, and all the things that he’s stolen and destroyed catch up with him. Mirror the ending of Raiders by having him carted into a gigantic jail with thousands of cells, to disappear forever. His wife finishes the divorce and she absconds with the young thief. The young thief decides that court and jail really don’t look like much fun and straightens up. Now, that’s a satisfying ending!

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: movie.