How to win young hearts and minds the NYPD way, TechDirt makes a comment of import, and Kunstler makes an excellent point on what Obama's job should be (the money quote is "His job was to lead an epochal re-set of the economy to a very different disposition of things, smaller, finer, more local.")...
My mention yesterday that I thought that electric windlasses were a bad idea apparently shocked a couple of people but I'll stand by my feelings that if your ground tackle is too big/heavy for you to deal with using a manual windlass, it's just your body saying you should be looking for a smaller boat (or maybe some exercise with a personal trainer).
Brian Toss has an excellent little article on the subject of lazy jacks over at Three Sheets Northwest and he touches on the whole electric winch thing...
"An increasingly common consequence of people failing to do this is that they come to rely more and more on electrics and hydraulics, and then find themselves unable to make things work when the machinery fails. Machinery also tends to isolate us from events, so that we can become both less appreciative of the beautiful things that are happening and similarly, less likely to notice when things are going wrong. In the latter connection, I could just about fill a book with (often horrific) stories about interesting side effects of electric winch use."One of the reasons I like a manual windlass is the fact that when I am using it the chain tells me stuff... Chain talks to you and it vibrates a certain way when the anchor has set, vibrates in a different way when it does not, and tells you what sort of bottom you're in but all of that is lost when you have a motor in the mix.
The other reason I'm not a huge fan of electric windlasses is that they are at best a problematic system and we know far too many people who have this sort of ongoing saga where electric windlasses are concerned...
Listening to Skadaddyz
So it goes...
