now you can see if Bob has a bald spot on the top of his head
This can't possibly work, but maybe, with prayer and luck, if you
you'll be in Earth orbit looking down on where SWMBO and I will be for the next 3 days. So Vleeptron will be quiet and dark.
No pizza, if this link works, it's too easy to get a map with words on it.
posted by Vleeptron Dude | 10:19
5 Comments:
hmmm looks like one could go fishing or hiking there. have fun and enjoy your trip (in the mean time I will try to find out if I can see my little CH village on Google Map)
yeah, you saw, i got lots of hair, before and after the nice haircut at Jewels in Naples. The very nice young barmaid at Brays microbrewery (a GREAT porter!) sent me there, and a lady with a Maine accent -- famous, distinctive, often copies by actors in movies about Maine, they can never succeed, it's called the Down East accent -- expertly transformed me from suspected shoplifter to Solid Citizen.
The big lake in the center of the satellite image is Sebago, lots of rain this season so plenty of water, and yes indeed it is a Very Beloved rich fishing hole, the pamphlets claim all sorts of strange big game fish. I am interested in the Arte of Fishing only in a dry armchair via a book with colorful pictures. Once I was broke but I was in the Very Ritzy Galaxy-Famous Sports Outfitter LL Bean (just north of Portland, the coast city southeast of Sebago) and I wanted to get my fisherman pal (Patrick aussi) a nifty Xmas present, so I pretended I was a fish and decided which of the 100 hand-tied fishing flies (hook lures that look like insects) looked like a very delicious tempting insect, and even they were fairly cheap so I bought him a dozen, and he loved it and when spring came, he said I had done a very effective impersonation of a trout's appetite.
There is a classic in the lit of England called "The Compleate Angler," by Isaak Walton. To gentlemen and ladies whose idea of a good time is casting their line in a river or stram hopping to reel in a Big One, this is considered Holy Writ, like the Bible or Quran or Baghavad Ghita; it must be translated into every language that has streams and people who like to do this thing.
Do you have ice-fishing? In January when the lake or river freezes over, men get very drunk and park their asses on chairs, with a kerosene heater, and drop their lines through a hole they cut in the ice with a chain saw, and they spend most of the day doing this. Every year several fall through the ice -- their heater helped thaw it -- and drown.
The great Maine wilderness starts just about at Sebago and as you go north of that it just gets less and less populous and more and more mostly evergreen woods. Some of the great straight tall pines were the masts of sailing ships in ye dayes of Iron Men & Wooden Ships. Maine is a huge state, as big as the huge Western/Rocky Mountain states. You can get lost in the Maine woods and die very easily, especially if you sprinkle your expedition with one of the dozens of wild whitewater rivers, or wander around in the mountains -- certainy not the Jungfrau or the Matterhorn or Die Altekaker, but just enough mountain, with sudden weather change, to kill an idiot from the city wandering around thinking his LL Bean $90 GPS handheld is also effective at saving him from bears, -10 Fahrenhneit, and his own stupity. "Against stupidity, the Gods struggle in vain." I think maybe this was Schiller.
I am by no means trying to project myself as some sort of Daniel Boone, but every summer when I was a kid my rents exiled me to an expensive Happy Stalag on Long Lake, north of Sebago, and adults who actually knew what the fuck they were doing taught us a lot about the Maine Woods -- basically How Not To Die in them. I've been quite hither and yon in the wilderness of Maine and the White Mountains of New Hampshire -- including Mount Washington, a very sneaky deceptive mountain that has probably killed as many unprepared surprised hikers as any notorious Alp. At the foot of the trail, your last opportunity to Think Twice, is a big sign with the Names and Dates of the Dead, with brief comments, like Rockslide, Froze to Death, etc.
There are rumors wolves have returned, over frozen rivers from Quebec, after 90 years, to the Maine Woods. And I learned something -- wolves and coyotes occasionally date and make babies. I never thought they did that, they're such different kinds of canines, their parents would never approve.
Oh also I am what in Sienfeld the TV Show they would have called A Canoe Nazi. My instructors taught Little Bobby How To Canoe Properly (exactly as the great [poem hero Hiawatha paddled the Great Lakes), and ever since, if anyone has been foolish enough to climb into a canoe with me, I impose a Discipline Aboard My Canoe, all must be done Perfekt, oder 20 lashes with the cat-o-9-tails. Captain Bob gets the canoe to its desination with no drowning. If you want to buy the world's best wooden canoes, I would come to Maine first. Is there a local Swiss traditional lake and river paddle/oar kind of boat?
Also up and down the Maine coast they are still building remarkable wooden ocean-going sailboats.
More later, it was unbelievably beautiful, refreshing, interesting, and also I got a nice haircut. If you happen to have a Lear jet or can borrow one, a very big ambitious Blues Festival begins Friday night at taverns all around Sebago Lake and lasts the week, it should be very pleasant stepping-out & microbewery fun, and when you leave the bar you get the smell of balsam and pine in your nose, and you feel like a lumberjill or a lumberjack doin' the down on a Saturday night. During the day you can cure your hangover by taking a plunge into one of these brisk and bracing freezing cold lakes that The Big Ice Age Glacier left behind. A feeling unlike any other -- is this Pleasure or Pain? You decide.
Yrs Sincerely
Paul Bunyon, Maine's Most Famous Lumberjack
& Babe the Blue Ox
Eureka!
"Mit (der) Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens."
- Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, III,6
Boy, I wish I sprache like that.
the diacritical marks and umlauts and etc. do not travel across the ocean very well. i guess you could figure out Friedrich was trying to say
"Mit (der) Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst vergebens."
put 2 dots .. over the a and the o.
The Compleat Angler is a classic indeed. My father owns a copy, and he bought me my own for my 16th birthday. I got to drop a line this week into the Isis...an immediate tributary to the Thames river flowing here through Oxford. I caught a rather sluggish and long-in-the-fin old trout. He was quite grateful when I slid the hook out of his lip and lowered him gently back into the river. I used to fly-fish regularly in Vermont. I wish I had more time to do so now. My father goes almost every week.
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