Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Caitlin thinks I’m teasing her when I say I’m going to start a blog called “Clever Things Caitlin Said Today”. Although I guess it could be a twitter page. So we’re talking about the cost of living on a boat if your kid is going to a land-school, that the fee of having your boat in the marina is based on the length…

Caitlin: “Yeah, the snip fee, right?”
Me: “The slip fee.”
Caitlin: “Oh, right, the snip fee is what a cutter charges.”

(A cutter being an underground castration specialist)

Bwahaha.

Anyway, I was reading the blog of a live-aboard family that posted in a recent entry here, and was thinking about a little island called “Sandy Cay” between Jost Van Dyke and Tortola in BVI near where Gillian and Clive used to live, and found it on Google Maps:

What’s interesting though is when I switched to the regular map view, the island totally disappeared (inset photo), as if it doesn’t exist (bringing to mind a story I read in some sailing magazine this month about a recent wreck on Sable Island that occurred due to the island not being on a GPS system’s map and a course being plotted right through it)…

This is in a way appropriate, because Sandy Cay is one of probably millions of beautiful places that you’ll never see unless you have a boat (or a float plane I suppose). According to Google Maps scale, the big catamaran in the photo above is probably about 60′ long — I’m guessing it’s a costly charter vacation rather than a cruiser. When I went past the island (in 2003), there were a half dozen boats making it their highly exclusive beach of the day. Here’s the picture I took of it from Jost Van Dyke.

I was there looking at a house — the one in the picture below that looks like a castle (it was full of antique furniture formerly owned by Ernest Hemingway). Asking price was around a quarter million dollars, and the neighbors, the only other people who lived full time in this group of houses, were home schooling their kids. The main reason we decided against the purchase was that at the time there were fairly high condo fees to maintain the building’s private beach.

The beach was really stunning though (that’s it below if it’s not obvious)… A thousand feet, maybe more, of sandy beach with palm trees along its length, shared by a dozen people which guaranteed you’d almost always have it to oneself. I don’t have any “what if” hindsight about it, but I do hope to be able to revisit these islands soon.

Housing prices on Jost Van Dyke and in the BVI in general have gone up a lot since I looked at them in 2003… But I do have to wonder whether the end result of the so-called “world economic crisis” is going to put these houses as well as luxury sailboats back on the market at a greatly reduced price. Part of me hopes so, but if my theory that this is less about economic hardship and more about wealth stratification is correct, I actually think it could increase the prices of luxuries as the rich get richer and seek to control more and more assets for themselves.

In that case, off with their heads and all…

I was reading about Japan pursuing space elevator technology and the article made an off-hand comment about the economics of megaprojects that bugged me (and not just their typos):

Much like the proposed tunnel under the Barents Strait [sic] between Alaska and Chuhotka [sic], the project has not yet been proven feasible from an economic perspective — especially in a difficult period for the global economy. $10 billion though, still seems like small change to achieve the greatest engineering feat in human history.

$10 billion of course is the much tossed around number that reflect the monthly US investment in the military venture in Iraq.

According to the FAO, up to at least 2030 global food production exceeds needs (the problem is distribution and class/cost issues). Global energy production is massive and grows yearly, as does general global manufacturing productivity. Certainly we have issues — water and resource shortages and environmental damage most obviously — but the reality is that humans grow richer every year and have more than enough basic resources to care for everyone on the planet several times over. The only reason that we have an economic crisis is that class inequality has gotten way out of hand and too much money is in too few hands.

I can’t emphasize enough that as a whole we are incredibly rich. It’s simply that we’re squandering what we have giving too much to too few, and are pissing away an awful lot of resources in maintaining that inequitable status quo through war and other tools of the “Illuminati”. Unfortunately the average person is so stupid and gullible that they are willing to murder each other over religion, nationalism, race, and other divisionary illusions that keep us from progressing as we should.

It’s quite obvious, but I’m dubious anything will change.

***

I scored 100% on Simple Man at Expert level, but it’s not a true perfect game because I actually slipped and hit the trigger in the middle of the song playing an extra note, so even though I scored “100%” it has a lower score than my best non-perfect game. Oops.

Cooked some delicious spaghetti sauce for supper. Nefarious is going to visit her mother in New York for the weekend so I’ll have a break from cooking — which isn’t really a chore anyway — and more excitedly, getting up early in the morning! Yay for having a few days to sleep in.

Seriously, it’s quite luxurious!

I got Caitlin a present today and wrapped it. As you may have noticed, there’s some blood stains on it. First Nefarious cut herself on the tape dispenser building something out of cardboard boxes, then Caitlin cut herself wrapping my birthday presents, and now me… I really think that thing has got the taste for blood and can no longer be trusted. I’m not sure what the right way to dispose of a haunted tape dispenser is? Am I going to have to throw it into a volcano or something?

Caitlin got Nefarious the Wii game “Cosmic Family” as a present. It has pretty mixed reviews online, so I thought I’d offer my feedback for those looking for semi-educational games for a five year old (the market is very limited). Nefarious so far has been having lots of fun with it, although many of the games are overly simple even for a five year old… There are some good pattern matching and puzzle games, and some simple drawing and arranging type games as well. For a first game (I don’t really count Wii Sports) it seems to be a hit with her. That said, so was the dollar store recorder!

I read somewhere recently that they’re passing new laws about rating/filtering hardware in televisions because the average kid watches over four hours of television a day… Nefarious watches maybe half an hour a day (after breakfast; before school) of non-commercial kid’s TV. Today she played her new game after school (she decided that she’d rather do that than swim today), and I felt weird enough about that… I can’t imagine allowing four hours of TV… Not I don’t watch more myself!

One of my favorite things in our house is the wall of Ari’s little drawings and school works… She’s started reading and writing a lot more this year to prepare her for “real” school next year. The note says “Ari is hpe [happy] and tiyrd [tired]. luch [lunch] wus [was] good.” I love her drawings but it is interesting that on a technical level they’ve become far less refined over time — although as I think I’ve mentioned before, I was reminded that when I started going to school I reverted to drawing stick figures because “that’s how everyone else draws”.