A Site for Shore Eyes

I have now watched most of The History Channel’s Life segments. There is no doubt that the cinematography and photography are superb, but I found it disappointing that instead of dealing with simple facts, it was slanted toward being politically correct.

Oprah Winfrey narrated all of the hour-long pieces, meaning she read a script written by others. In the part about mammals, she said that polar bears were being endangered by climate change. The actual facts show that polar bear populations are increasing.

The hour devoted to primates was also interesting. She said we started in trees, and kept comparing various traits of monkeys and apes to us. I don’t see the similarities. Only humans, however, run on two legs, but that wasn’t pointed out. Some scientists think that because humans are anatomically similar to apes, they must have once been apes. That’s like saying sweet potatoes must have once been white potatoes or yams. My personal opinion is that Darwin was a crackpot. Weird, isn’t it, that so many monkeys and apes never escaped to the human world? I think Oprah evolved from an Okra plant, because the two names rhyme.

The real corker, though, is that an entire hour-long segment could be devoted to plants without once uttering the term, carbon dioxide! Yes, we learned that plants need sun, water, and other nutrients to survive. We’re told they breathe out oxygen, but are left to our imaginations as to what they breathe in, lest we suspect it’s that nasty greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. When is this global warming/climate change scam going to end? Owl Gore has already made millions, possibly billions from deceiving people. Shouldn’t that be enough?

If all that weren’t enough to stick in my craw, Bill Clinton, of all people, rants about the Tea Party people, comparing them to the Kansas City bombing group, and saying that it’s dangerous for people to protest the government! Excuse me, but is this not the same Bill Clinton who illegally dodged the draft; and burned the American flag while in another country? You know, the Rhodes Scholar who got kicked out of Oxford, and who visited the Soviet Union six times while there. I think my memory serves me correctly.

The big difference here is that the Tea Partiers don’t hate the country; they just want to get rid of some of the morons running it, and bring in those who would uphold the Constitution.

Now, a federal judge has ruled the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional! What’s wrong with these people? If you don’t want to pray, don’t pray – it’s that simple, but don’t rain on everybody else’s parade. Yep, she somehow found that Establishment Clause in the Constitution, which never mentions the separation of church and state. Anyone who studied history knows that the whole idea during the early stages of this nation was to be free from the state telling you what specific religion you could practice, as in The Church of England. They tell me that’s why the pilgrims fled to our shores. Unless congress has passed a law respecting the establishment of a religion, it’s okay to have a national day of prayer. Anyone can pray to any God, or can elect not to pray at all. How is that unconstitutional, and why does it bother some constant complainers?

Speaking of which, I’m finished venting for now. My next blog will be geared more toward happenings at the shore.

Back in the late 50’s and early 60’s I considered flip-flops a great invention. That opinion hasn’t changed. It’s possible that they were invented in the late 19th century, and early ones fashioned from bamboo appeared in Indonesia during the 1930’s, but the ones made from plastics date only to the 1950’s.

I hated wearing sneakers to the beach and getting sand in them. Days later, the grit still crunched around inside the shoes. Some people wore sandals to the beach, but that practice involved straps with buckles, and leather was just not the right material for beach footwear.

Along came the flip-flop, which I noticed some friends wearing. I asked where they got them, and they told me, but the store was sold out, as was every other store that carried what they called sundries. Many stores in resort towns advertised sundries as something they carried, and I understand it means miscellaneous small articles. This should have included flip-flops, I surmised at the time.

I asked my aunt, who lived in another non-resort town to find me a pair, preferably black. They were instead yellow and a bit larger than I expected, but they did the trick.

I soon learned that new wearers quickly suffered soreness between the big and second toes, due to the thong that held the things on the foot. This went away after a few days, but I also noticed it was impossible to sneak up on someone while wearing these contraptions. Yes, they made noise, which explains why they are called flip-flops, although I still hear only one sound repeatedly. Whether it’s a flip or a flop is open to conjecture, but either way, these things should be called either flip-flips or flop-flops.

Running while wearing them was also difficult, but not impossible, and could sometimes be hazardous to the toes, which was not a desired outcome. It also was often hazardous to the flip-flops, because sturdy is not an adjective used in describing them.

This new footwear brought me untold pleasures. While walking the more than four blocks to the beach it was no longer necessary to hurry across the hot tar on the street, and the gravel road leading to the beach no longer hurt the bottoms of my feet. Nor was I concerned any more about the temperature of the beach sand or the jagged broken shells in the sand. After spreading our blanket, it was a simple matter of just sliding my feet out of the sandals.

Yes, I delighted in my flip-flops, but eventually, the thong thing pulled through the bottom of the sandal, making the hole bigger, and the pair had to be replaced. I replaced them many times, but don’t remember ever getting a black pair.

In ’67 I went in the Navy and learned in boot camp that they were not flip-flops, but standard issue shower shoes, and were mandatory when taking a shower, for the purpose of preventing athlete’s foot and other fungal diseases. They posed two problems when worn in the shower, however. The first was that they created suction between the sole and the shower floor, and it was quite likely that the thong would pull through while attempting to lift the foot. Perhaps this was a part of planned obsolescence. The other, and more critical, concern was that they were very slippery, as evidenced by a member of our company who slipped and cracked his head, which required a few stitches. The sliding effect could also cause thong pull-through.

Many of us who served on boats in Vietnam departed a bit from tradition, however, by wearing native-made sandals fashioned from pieces of tire with straps cut from inner tubes. Excuse my lack of political correctness, but we called them gook sandals. It took a few days to break them in, meaning the black color from the straps no longer rubbed off onto the feet. This footwear was by no means flexible, but was very sturdy, and displayed no tendencies to slip in the shower. I never saw any with whitewalls.

I tossed my tire sandals when I left Vietnam, and returned to wearing shower shoes in the regular Navy. These curious shoes remained as shower shoes during my hitch, but once I returned to civilian life they became flip-flops once again.

Despite claims that it’s illegal to drive while wearing flip-flops, most states have no laws against it, probably due to the difficulty of enforcing them. However, it’s not really a good idea.

Flip-flops have now taken their rightful place beside beach chairs and umbrellas as symbols of shore life and relaxation. My late sister had a flip-flop decoration on the back of her vehicle. I bought the vehicle from her estate, and the flip-flops are still there. I bought my wife a gold flip-flop charm. Small flip-flops show up on key chains, charm bracelets, and pendants worn or carried by those who wish to remind themselves of coastal living or vacationing. A restaurant and bar named Flip-Flops opened on the island a couple of years ago.

Flip-flops still make news. An Australian restaurant recently announced it will add a surcharge to the bill of any patrons wearing flip-flops.

When I first started wearing them, a normal pair of flip-flops cost about 69 cents. Now they’ll set you back somewhere around five to ten dollars for a normal pair. More elaborate versions made from various materials with designer accents can cost upwards of 150 bucks! After more than fifty years, however, the ones made from synthetic rubbers and plastic remain as the footwear of choice for those headed for the beach. The Ventures gave good advice with their song title, “Walk, don’t Run. . .”

Laughing gulls not only do not believe in man-made global warming, they laugh at it. Okay, so they pretty much laugh at just about anything. . . Global warming alarmists (GLOWARMS) claimed that migratory birds were showing up in the north early, meaning the climate was warming, even though the temperatures were colder than usual.

I predicted the return of the laughing gulls would be around the first week of April, basing this on the fact that they always seem to show up at this time. I’m not sure what they use as calendars, but they arrived en masse on March 31, just in time to pull a few pranks on the climate change fools the next day. It could be that they somehow know the boardwalk will be open on weekends, meaning French fries, popcorn, and pizza crusts will supplement their diets.

Egrets showed up about a week ago. Yesterday, two fish hawks (osprey) were seen tidying up their nest for the new fishing season and probably to also raise new fledglings.

We always look forward to the laughing gulls’ return, maybe because it’s refreshing these days to hear something that sounds like laughter. More likely it’s because their return is one of the first real harbingers of spring.

It seems that most people understand that changes in climate have occurred for thousands of years, and that carbon dioxide is something required for sustaining plant life (and human life after plants convert it to oxygen), rather than some dangerous poison that’s destroying the planet.

These facts are lost on politicians and deranged individuals who stand to make millions, perhaps billions, of dollars from cap and trade legislation, something our emperor intends to push through just as he pushed through the beginnings of socialized health care.

If these people were really concerned about the effects of CO2 on the environment, they would not support anything as ludicrous as cap and trade. This is simply a measure that allows a manufacturer that exceeds the output of an arbitrary amount of CO2 emissions to pay for a larger amount. If you think this doesn’t make sense, you would be right. Nor does it make sense that water vapor, a true greenhouse gas, which is much more abundant than CO2, is not considered a problem, not that it should be.

In the great man-made global warming scam, it doesn’t really matter whether or not the Earth is actually warming, although it has been proven to have not been warming, at least since 1998. For this reason, the fanatics have changed the term to climate change, meaning whatever is happening is happening, and it must be a result of industries producing goods and people driving SUV’s.

If a stray bird shows up early in the right (or wrong) place, it’s a sign of global warming. If one shows up late, it’s a sign of climate change. If a glacier calves (breaks off) in the Arctic, as happens each year, it’s a sign of global warming. If Europe, the United States, and the southern states experience the worst winter in decades, it’s a sign of climate change. It matters not that the polar bear population is increasing and is larger than it was in 1950, because talking heads on TV say the bears are endangered, even though they have been reluctantly listed as only threatened.

These people obviously know very little, if anything, about polar bears, the only bears that are considered marine mammals. Many polar bears like to keep seals on the menu, and they prefer hunting them from ice floes. However, the largest populations of polar bears live on land, rather than on Arctic ice, and this is by choice, rather than due to so-called climate change. Polar bears don’t hunt from glaciers, but from newly-formed ice floes. Their diet also includes fish, caribou, sea birds and scavenged carcasses of whales and walruses, among other things.

A study by Dr. David Legates, director of the University of Delaware’s Center for Climatic Research, did a study and determined that polar bears are in pretty good shape. Legates says that Greenland coastal stations are experiencing a cooling trend, and average summer air temperatures at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet have decreased four degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1987.

Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans commissioned a study which examined the relationship between Arctic sea ice and air temperature and concluded that the possible impact of global warming appears to play a minor role in the formation of sea ice. The study determined that changing wind patterns are the primary cause of changing sea ice distributions.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has written about the supposed threats to polar bears due to global warming, but their report shows a reverse correlation. Polar bear populations are decreasing around Baffin Bay, which has experienced decreases in air temperature, while populations near the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea, where temperatures have been increasing, also see populations increasing.

Is it any wonder that the laughing gulls are laughing?