Whitcomb: Saving Shellfish; Big D.C. Dinners; China’s Climb; Paper Maps
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Saving Shellfish; Big D.C. Dinners; China’s Climb; Paper Maps
“We listened to the lowing black.
We giggled, kissed. We possumed dead.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTWe woke as flesh and straggled back
like beasts for parlor, dressed, then read.’’
-- From “Trailer Park Etudes’’, by Conor O’Callaghan (born 1968), Irish poet
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“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation.’’
-- Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), British neurologist, naturalist and writer
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“The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.’’
-- Paul Johnson (1928-2023), English journalist
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“The most beautiful makeup of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.’’
-- Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008), French fashion designer
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Some of the woods look suffused in a multicolored haze amidst the flowering of trees. But dark green will soon take over. And you can probably put the tomatoes out.
We spend an increasing amount of time these days visiting sick and even dying friends, which in turn evokes a lot of memories and various kinds of summing up. No, don’t send get-well cards to people who are dying. But do gain what wisdom you can from their final stories. And they’re a prod to live every day as if it’s your last.
Former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, whose pancreatic cancer is terminal, reminded us that we’re all under a “death sentence,’’ everyone is “on the clock’’ and will be “pushing up daisies eventually.’’ Seems obvious but we tend to avert our gaze as the ghosts from our past gather in thickening numbers.
Quahog Chronicle
All hail a research program at Roger Williams University aimed at expanding Narragansett Bay’s population of those delicious hard-shell clams we call quahogs, derived from the Narragansett Indian name for them -- poquauhock. The plan, EcoRI News reports, is to “help expand hatchery production, strengthen disease monitoring, and accelerate quahog restoration.’’ It’s about time: Harvests of the shellfish have been declining.
Yes, this is aquaculture, but not like oyster aquaculture, which is mostly farmers growing the shellfish in tightly defined areas. Quahog aquaculture primarily involves hatching young clams and transplanting them to cleaner waters in open areas. Quahogs are burrowers that grow in or on the seabed sediment, while oyster aquaculture mostly involves cultivating the oysters in the water column using floating gear.
(Extreme animal-rights people needn’t unduly worry about harvesting shellfish: The creatures don’t do a lot of feeling or thinking!)
Here’s a history of quahogging:
Hit this link for the EcoRI News article:
I remember the summer joys of eating quahogs and oysters we’d pull out of a sand bar in front of my grandparents’ house on West Falmouth Harbor, on Cape Cod. Too lazy to try to pry them open, we’d usually just smash them on the granite-block dock, squeeze lemon on the flesh and maybe eat a dozen of them. Adults grasping beer cans would watch us from the sloping lawn.
But a big fuel-oil spill in Buzzards Bay in 1969 closed the harbor for shellfishing for 20 years as the oil contaminated bottom sediments. Still, refugees from Southeast Asia after 1975 ignored the ban and showed up every few weeks with pitchforks to dig up the creatures. The oil spill was awful, but ecologists learned a lot from the disaster that was used to develop long-term monitoring of shellfish safety.
Ah, the joy of what comes from clean salt water (including turning it into fresh water) and what may come in the future. Hit these links:
https://newatlas.com/energy/nanogenerator-harvests-electricity-evaporating-seawater/
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-01-high-solar-evaporator-rapidly-seawater.html
Those Washington Dinners
I was surprised that the alleged shooter at the (black tie) White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD), Cole Allen, got as far as he did in the Washington Hilton, allegedly with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives. I attended a somewhat similar annual event, if fancier (white tie and tails) -- the Gridiron Club dinner at the Capitol Hilton -- a few times in the ‘90s and early 2000’s and found the security very thick indeed.
The Gridiron Dinner, like the WHCD, meant as a celebration of the news media and the First Amendment, might be even more than the WHCD an orgy of schmoozing, social maneuvering, dealmaking and lobbying, social anxiety, and even a little sincere congeniality amongst the elite of journalism, politics, government, and business. (A lot of professional journalism, at least the very disciplined and professional type, has disappeared since I attended Gridiron dinners. Social media has taken away the advertising base that funded most of it, while stealing a lot of its copyrighted material.)
There are a lot of people with rictus smiles looking over your shoulder to find more important folks to connect with.
Of course, this being America, where the Republican Party and the National Rifle Association are one and the same, a shooter would have little difficulty loading up as Allen is said to have done.
All this assumes that the WHCD apparent near-disaster wasn’t staged. But given the nature of the current regime, you can understand why many think that it was staged and continue to suspect (with stronger reasons) that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself in prison but was murdered.
Trump, however, at first (apparently) rattled, reveled in getting even more hyper-attention that night than usual. Oh, yes, he’s also put his picture in new passports. He’s beyond the fondest dreams of narcissism. It gets more and more intense.
And yes, political violence in America has become increasingly normalized. You could say that Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech inciting a mob to invade the Capitol and assault people there made it permissible to do so if your views coincided with those in power. Once the Orange Oligarch returned to the Oval Office on Jan. 20, 2025, he pardoned or commuted the prison terms of the violent insurrectionists. Some of these people have gone on to be arrested for new crimes.
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Oh, to have more small-c conservatives, as Abby McCloskey writes in a Bloomberg column. She says:
“We are all feeling the effects of conservatism’s decline. Populists and progressives, Christian nationalists and liberals, even libertarians — recall DOGE and Project 2025 — Americans of all political tendencies increasingly favor sweeping, disorienting political change. It’s small-c conservatives who favor incremental reform; who are wary of concentrated power, government overreach and demagogues.’’
They’re properly leery of utopian schemes, of the right or left.
The big-government, kleptocratic and cult-of-personality regime is Washington is not “conservative,’’ small or large c. It’s laughable that they get away so easily with the lie that it is.
A good example of a small-c conservative: Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Here’s Ms. McCloskey’s column:
On Their Way to Number 1
Trump’s war against Iran has been a bonanza for China in several ways. A big one is that China, as the most important producer of renewable-energy products, can take advantage of intensifying shortages of oil and natural gas and their rising prices and swiftly sell more solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines.
The crazy war is a reminder of the insecurity of fossil fuels in general and from the Middle East in particular. This will lead many countries and companies to make very long-term deals with the Chinese energy sector while they build up their own renewable-energy sectors. None of this will be good for America’s fossil-fuel sector, which Trump worships, in part because they give him so much money and because much of his thinking is stuck in the ’50’s.
Then there’s global warming. Remember that?
Most of the rest of the world is aghast that people like Trump and his entourage could end up leading a developed country of 335 million. At the rate that American ignorance, corruption, unreliability, wild gyrations, and political and policy incompetence are going, China, a disciplined dictatorship that looks far ahead, could soon become world power Number 1. Part of this is that it promotes scientific research even as the Trump regime has been slashing federal funding for science. That has huge implications for economic competitiveness.
No wonder other nations are increasingly cozying up to the Middle Kingdom and reducing their ties with the United States. Of course, another U.S. administration could start to turn things around, but some of the damage will be permanent.
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Too many people don’t realize that what happens to Ukraine is far more important than what happens to Iran.
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Perhaps King Charles and Queen Camilla took anti-nausea pills before meeting with the Trumps.
Pleasures of Paper Maps
It’s the age of satellite navigation systems (Google Maps, etc.), but paper maps are making a bit of a comeback. They provide a warm sense of your surroundings – both natural and manmade – that you don’t get from maps on cold screens. And paper maps can be very artistic, with drawings of buildings, hills and streams and so on. Or, if you’re using an old map along a coast, maybe a drawing of a spouting whale!
Also, obviously, paper maps are good to have if our electronic-dependent systems break down because of terrorism or something else.
Paper maps’ resurgence reminds me a little of the popularity of vinyl records, with their colorful covers.
Anyway, it’s good to supplement your GPS maps with multi-colored paper ones as backups, which also serve as reminders of memorable trips.
I notice that I get a lot of responses when I post maps from the Lapham’s Quarterly website on my assorted social media (yes, I have to use them) and my Websites. People love maps!