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Stillman (South of Market, San Francisco): photo by Robert Schneider, 9 March 2014
It's been uphill all the way
you can't blow your own sail
but you can still blow your own horn
you can't blow your own sail
but you can still blow your own horn
so long as no one's around to hear it
you can blow your lid
you can blow your wig
you can blow your top
you can blow your brains out
you can blow your cover
you can blow your cork
you can blow your lines
you can blow your one big shot
you can blow your nose
you can blow your whistle
you can blow your fuse
you can blow your cool
or maybe not
so now you know
3X (+2) (San Francisco): photo by Robert Schneider, 4 March 2014
Pedestal (San Francisco). Ashbury Park, once considered the geographic heart of San Francisco: photo by Robert Schneider, March 2014
Uphill (Diamond Heights, San Francisco): photo by Robert Schneider, March 2014
A friend of ours has been renting a boat that was recently sold. She barely makes enough to live, and so has been looking for other cheap alternatives. Her best option so far is another boat in the marina, a dilapidated houseboat that the harbormaster bought cheap at auction. It's old and neglected, with brown shag carpeting inside and a cracked stained window depicting flying geese on the door. The boat's name is half rubbed off, so it just says, in neon green comic sans font:
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is
Nora,
ReplyDeleteAnd indeed it is that.
A friend here was self-employed as a painter of names on boats. He did this work with art and skill and devotion. He drove down to the marina every day with his beloved golden Lab. In the dog's last years this involved gently lifting him in and out of a VW bug.
He had many tales of the boat owners and their idiosyncratic name choices for their boats, their exacting demands and expectations.
He was proud of his work, and would have been saddened to see it rubbed away.
And talking of boats... a serious study of physics went into the making of this post. (But then when does that not happen around here?)
ReplyDeleteIn any case, having reviewed a good many experiments involving earnest (and maybe some not so earnest) attempts, made by people using all sorts of gizmos including fans, propellers and the like, to both prove and disprove the adage "you can't blow your own sail", I remain a doubter concerning all offered approaches to a solution on this problematic issue.
Only one thing seems certain.
If you are an upward mobile woman CEO of a business with an awesome upside you can blow your own sail with impunity. Newton's Third Law be damned!!
Male entrepreneurs as well as any stray "laymen" in the audience might be relieved to know you can simulate all the abovementioned interesting experiments in the privacy of your own rumpus room. All you'll need is a skateboard, some WD-40 to keep the dynamics fluid, and a sackful of tennis balls to fling at high velocity -- et voilà -- blow your own sai!!
Living with this all day accretively (first the post, then Nora's comment, then your two, especially the final one) leaves me more than satisfied on the one hand (that I've had a valuable artistic experience that is tied to real life as I know it) and in an "Abandon All Hope" state of mind, on the other. (Obviously the experiences aren't mutually exclusive.) Through a friend and client (who was a college classmate), I'm exposed to a lot of "content" similar to the first "blow your own sail" link. I say nothing -- discretion is the better part of valor in that situation. I'll show Jane the second link tomorrow. Physics and Mythbusters both motivate her. Curtis
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