Not that Ned Ludd didn't have a good point or two...

This is good news, apparently any strategy is better than none, and it's good to see that our reps in Washington are taking the unemployment problem seriously...

I just finished watching "House of Cards" (the Netflix series) and it is a pretty exceptional exercise in film making. I mention this because we can sit at anchor, pretty much anywhere in the world, and partake in such great entertainment anytime we desire to...

That is just so frelling cool!

I've had more than my fair share of emails to the blog accusing me of being a Luddite in terms of things cruising and sailing, of wanting to turn the clock back on boat design but that's not exactly the case. Simplification when married to progress is no bad thing at all...

Sure I like a lot of older sailboat designs and, as they seem to work very well, they do make a lot of sense. That said, I don't really see the need for a designer to do yet another CAL 34 (for instance) as what would be the point? Now, on the other hand, if some designer were to design a 34ish foot sailboat that IMPROVED on the concepts that made the CAL 34 such an awesome boat that, my friends, would be a whole different story...

The same goes for sharpies... Everyone and their brother knows I just love sharpies but why bother to design yet another same old same sharpie sort of boat because there are already a plethora of good sharpie designs unless you can bring something new to the table when you do it?

I'm waiting...

Progress, I might add, is not always a bigger/better sort of thing. Real progress is, more often than not, a series of small improvements and refinements that when taken together makes a difference in an evolutionary manner. My gut instinct, living in a world of declining finite resources, tells me that real needful progress is going to be based around doing more with less and paring things down to essentials rather than the sort of boats Cruising World and Sail Magazine tell me are the new hip expensive thang.

Sadly, what we mostly get these days is just the same old same in a new dress or bells and whistles with a sales pitch. I have to admit I'm just not seeing a lot of real progress in 99% of all that pimpage and what little there is, is often so watered down in the process as to be nothing more than window dressing.

So, in my defense, it's not that I'm anti-progress but simply that I just don't see a whole lot that fills any real needs...

Listening to Curtis Mayfield

So it goes...