Month: June 2014

On Friday it was the D-Day anniversary. We indulged in our personal tradition of Six June, which consists of watching the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan with the sound all the way up. This is pretty much the closest we can get to understanding the unimaginable sacrifices those guys made in the name of Liberty during the Second World War.

This year was somewhat different – before we popped the DVD in, we had heard NPR talking about Uber boats. For those of you who don’t know, Uber is the car service that is the greatest invention since online liquor delivery. It is designed to be better than having to take cabs. The bane of working and/or living in an urban setting is the taxicab. They are notoriously crappy (except in Japan where the drivers are ninja-intense, wear white gloves and spray air freshener in the back seat before you get in and there are doilies everywhere. Japan is weird). Cabs always seem to smell like a pile of discarded jock straps, are driven by dudes talking intermittently to you and random other people on their Bluetooth headsets so you can’t tell who they’re addressing at any given time and sort of maybe show up when you call them, but probably don’t because rando sorority girls waved money outside a bar.

Thanks for the ride, Jimmy.

Uber changes all that. Uber isjust dudes with their own nice limo-type black cars and SUVs who show up when you push a button on your app and then charge the credit card you registered with them, and it’s sometimes not even more expensive than a cab. The cars are always clean, the drivers are more in the Japan-style of things and it’s all very simple and nice and of course the cab drivers hate it and want to make it illegal because everyone should have to smell jockstraps when they are trying to go out to dinner with a client.

I had to sign my credit card slip with a Hello Kitty pen.

But Uber Boats? What the frick is that? We didn’t get to hear the whole story because children were whining, but apparently they are going to do the same thing with boats in Boston Harbor as a water taxi service. This changes everything.

Think about it, Gloucester. It’s Saturday afternoon and you’re out in East Gloucester where you live and you find yourself having to drive your daughter to the soccer team volleyball game at Stage Fort. Yes, you are as confused about this as we are, but we have learned to just roll with it. This means you have to navigate epic traffic just to get yourself to Rogers Street, not to mention the likelihood that the bridge will be just about to go up as you are behind a car with Rhode Island license plates slowing down to take an iPad video of The Man at The Wheel. But Uber Boat Gloucester would change all that.

Now, we fully expect to get comments telling us that there is already a water taxi. THANKS PEOPLE FOND OF POINTING OUT OBVIOUS THINGS ON THE INTERNET! We know that. It’s pretty awesome. But the drawback the water taxi is that once you get there you have to walk, so it’s great if I want to say go from one seaside restaurant to another, but it’s not very fucking useful in getting me to The Basket is it, now? We want Gloucester UberBoat to be comprised of LSTs.

Back to Saving Private Ryan- remember those blocky boats they landed on the beaches of Normandy with? The ones with the big fold-down front door? They are called “Landing Ship Tanks” or LSTs. That’s what we want. Where are there a bunch of those the military wants to sell cheap? You just drive your car up in there and they take you by sea right around the clot of minivans with little families stenciled on the back windshield.

Think of how awesome this would be. We’re buzzing down E. Main and see Sayward is backed up. We hit the Uber Boat button and right at Cripple Cove comes an LST (we’d have to build a ramp). I drive my Subaru up in there and the driver buzzes us over to the Stage Fort. We drop the girl off, then over to Dun Fudgin he yells, ‘God be with you’ (he would be required to be dressed in WW II battle regalia at all times) and we’re off to face my personal Normandy of trying to get cold cuts at The Basket on a weekend.

Load me up, I need to get to Ace Hardware posthaste!

And think of how this would change going to the beach. Instead of cramming everything into the car only to unload it .3 miles later, you load the kids, the coolers, the chairs and all that and just have them drive straight up onto Good Harbor, drop the door and yell “Go! Go! Go!” as you drag all your crap up onto the sand. How awesome would this be?

We, for one, can see ourselves doing it in highly-dramatic slow-mo, realizing we’ve left a man (or nine year old boy) behind, bogged down  by the weight of his equipment (lawn chairs mostly) and unable to continue, and having to carry him across the beach to safety, dodging seagull feces-missiles.

Anyway, if anyone has access to one of those LST deals and wants to start an Uber service in Gloucester, please contact us care of this webzone. We also have a plan for getting past Fiesta using dirigibles, but we’ll save that for another post.

Just watch out for the fireworks.

Okay, Gloucesterites. We have to talk. We really need to sit down and have A Serious Discussion about something, and I want you to listen up – but we both already know the truth here, don’t we? It’s the elephant in the room. Our deep dark not-heroin-or-pregnancy-related-for-once secret.

We’re a city full of TERRIBLE DRIVERS.  Just awful. On the best of days, it feels like driving in a post-apocalyptic nightmarish cityscape where if a man flinches, the churning hordes will innately sense weakness and rend him asunder. On the worst of days, there’s beach traffic.

DRIVING DOWN CENTENNIAL

Because I’m a deeply introspective person who tends to think of the macroenvironment surrounding my collection of dented vehicles, I set out on a spiritual journey to understand WHY we drive this way. And by “set out on a spiritual journey”, I mean I cracked open a beer. What I found on my Vision Quest (Sponsored by Downeast Cider) may explain our curious driving habits. Let us begin.

– The abysmally narrow roads. In a normal city like Somerville or Mumbai, a road twenty feet wide would be either two-way with no parking, or one way with parking on one side of the street. In Gloucester, twenty feet wide means two way traffic with cars parked halfway on the sidewalk in both directions, but you have to pull over where you can and let opposing traffic pass. Or they have to pull over.

Plenty of room to park, seriously.

Or, you have a “Gloucester Traffic Standoff” which is like a Mexican standoff but with cars and beeping and sometimes a gentle mist of swearing. Apparently, according to a neighbor who turned her car around, followed me to my house, and openly berated me in my driveway, you should also cede right of way to the person who has lived in Gloucester the longest. I could not make this up if I tried.

– It’s a constant monster truck rally. I’ve been here for a decade, my entire twenties, a third of my life. Still, to this day, I am dumbfounded at the subset of Gloucester drivers who carry on as if the roads are their own personal demolition derby. Large, somewhat illegal pickup trucks are a dime a dozen ’round these parts. They come equipped with exhausts that sound like whooping cough, and they screech their tires at any available opportunity like a mating call for the perpetually dense. Almost predictably, these classy stallions of the motoring world are driven by white guys under the age of 35, sometimes shirtless, usually wearing a baseball cap.

BRB honey, off to get trashbags in my perfectly reasonable mode of transportation.

Let me regale you with a tale from ye olde last week, when my other half got into a very minor traffic accident. He was driving up the mountainous terrain of Commonwealth Ave at a reasonable speed and on the side of the road one is socially obligated to drive on, on his way to pick up our preschooler. Suddenly, a wild truck appeared, cresting the hill. Naturally, the driver thought, “I can’t see the other side of this hill, so it’s a great idea to just drive in the middle of the road as fast as possible! Wee hoo, let’s see if we can catch air at the top!”

Since my spouse has an innate survival instinct, he pulled to the right as much as possible to avoid being smashed like a beer can on a frat boy’s forehead. Unfortunately, he clipped a mirror, and dented our car a bit more. Of course, the offending truck continued blissfully on its path of dumbassery, blind to the consequences of DRIVING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GODDAMN ROAD, so now our insurance will go up because that guy’s a moron.

– Infrastructure designed by sadists. It appears sometime in Gloucester’s past, we may have hired a thorazine-addled Ray Charles as our city’s street planner. Nothing makes sense. We have swirling masses of one-ways that can pull you in over on Washington street and spit you out by Burnham’s Field when you had a preference for ending up on Main. We have fake-rotaries where no particular rules apply and from which a set of makeshift laws governing them have been handed down from generation to generation, an oral history never committed to DOT approved signage.

All roads lead to this.

And for some reason, we have a multitude of completely unsafe, blind, terrifying street intersections and it seems to not even bother people. There’s nothing like the thrill of pulling out of the end of a street where you can’t see more than 15 feet in either direction, and despite “thickly settled” being an understatement, the traffic is going Ludicrous Speed. It’s like a roulette wheel! Most of the time you can get out safely if you whip your head back and forth enough to check both directions without devolving into an epileptic fit, but once in awhile you get nearly pegged by a National Grid truck whizzing around the corner.

– People who never leave the island. When I first moved here, I had heard tales of those who never left Cape Ann. I imagined these people as a simple, yesteryear folk who believed trolls, socialists, and hell existed beyond the bridges. And now I am one of those people who barely leave. I am totally part of the problem. I work here, I live here, I shop here – I once went 5 weeks and 2 days without leaving Cape Ann entirely accidentally. But this means that without much outside stimuli, we as a people have our societal habits break down. We forget what it’s like in the big, outside world where you can’t park 2 feet from the corner of a major intersection or take up both lanes of a two lane road because it’s Not Cool elsewhere.

– Tourists. In the interest of complete fairness to my people, it isn’t entirely our fault. We have a huge annual influx of visitors, which is wonderful, because our economy needs it to survive and it makes Gloucester awesome. But sweet fuck, tourist drivers are just as bad as the rest of us, if not worse. They don’t use blinkers, don’t wave people through at difficult intersections (THAT’S HOW WE SURVIVE HERE, IT’S THE ONE THING WE DO RIGHT!), and they make sudden movements, like frightened rabbits. They drive 10 under the speed limit all the way to Lanesville because like gosh, Jeff, look at this view, isn’t it just precious? When I see an out of state plate, I have to assume the person behind the wheel has an IQ of “baked potato” and will brake suddenly and swiftly whenever the breeze blows.

All in all, we have a ways to go as far as our vehicular behavior is concerned. It’s an “all of us” problem – I won’t excuse myself from making questionable-at-best driving decisions (constantly misjudging curbs is my weakness). But with a little humor, and a lot of patience, we can make the roads more tolerable. And by “tolerable” I mean I only shit my pants once in a rolling 24-hour period. We can work towards that. I believe in us, Gloucester.

Brooke Welty is the Clam’s Chief Marketing Executive which has a hefty paycheck of “nothing” and is responsible for trying to get us more than 4 twitter followers with her elite social media skills. In her virgin offering to the Clam, she explains what she has learned so far as a newcomer to Cape Ann. 

1. Gloucester is a very old town, with very old roads. The roads will make every effort to destroy your shocks, and your spirit. Also, Grant Circle is pretty much Thunderdome. Equip your car with some weaponry, spikes, and something which shoots flames, and you’ll be all set.
   

   This should be sufficient. “Should”.

   Gloucester is also is full of terrifying lawless zones known as “intersections.” These include the confluence of Railroad, Maplewood and Prospect, marked by a big green buoy (I think?) which looks like someone haphazardly jammed it into the road, leaving the city planners to say “Fuck it, we’ll stick some signs on it, people can drive around it.”

2. What the hell is a “bomb” sub? I had a conversation that went like this:
   Me: “What’s in a chicken bomb”
   Her::”It’s the bomb sub, but with chicken.
   Me: “Yes, but what’s in it?”
   Her: “It’s just the regular bomb, with chicken.”
   Me: “I’ll have the chicken fingers.”

According to Google, this is the answer I was seeking.

3. People on Eastern Point hate interlopers. The roads are festooned with signs trying to make you turn around, get lost, and then give up. It’s the equivalent of the big stone faces in Labyrinth shouting at Sarah to try and scare her away, only with nicer hedges.

The guard on Eastern Point will look menacingly into your car, like a squinty eyed police detective, trying to decide if he should let you pass or not. I want to ask him if he has a checklist to help him decide. I bet he has a skin tone paint color swatch to check against the interlopers.

4. There is no decent fried chicken to be found…anywhere on Cape Ann, it seems. I mean, you guys fry oysters like no one’s business, and damn those are delicious. Try doing that to a chicken.

5. THERE IS NO INDIAN FOOD I KNOW WE JUST WENT OVER THIS BUT STILL. Which is surprising, given how people in this town love beer. Indian is natural drunk food.

6. There are a shit load of antique/junk shops. If you want to find that perfect knickknack that makes you feel like you’re back at grandma’s house, you’ll be all set.

7. There are also a metric butt-ton of niche touristy specialty shops. How many handcrafted jewelry pieces can one gal own, anyway? And with the amount of breezy scarves you’d think we all dress like the Golden Girls. (I secretly covet Dorothy’s power shoulder pads though.)

Welcome to KT’s Kinda Shitty Wicked Tuna Recap, where I try (and usually fail) to understand how tuna fishing works by watching this show. If you’d like to check out my previous recaps, click here.

This week we start off with the Hot Tuna and its crew of twenty-somethings with questionable haircuts. Something called “the green stick” is going to be used this episode. Hold me, Clamonauts, I’m scared. “We don’t usually green stick in Gloucester,” apparently. We don’t usually value sobriety in Gloucester, either, but that’s a story for another post when I’m not drinking (which will be never).

Over on the F/V Lily, we’re told “Haaahpoon season is comin’ to an ehnd.” Tragic, really. “When you can’t see the fish, you can’t throw at them to hit them.” I have realized much of this program is explaining basic physics to the camera.

So Captain Hollywood decides that he’s pretty much boned because the fish are too deep to spear with a sharpened arrowhead like it’s 1590, and his only hope is following a giant trawler to catch stragglers which he’s not supposed to do. The other boat seems pretty pissed about the whole thing.

A THREAT ON THE OPEN SEAS! AHOY HOY!

This maniacal plan works though, and the Lily nets itself a fish, as the screen cuts to ANOTHER GODDAMN SLOW MOTION SEAGULL FFS. Do people in inland states find seagulls beautiful or something? Stop making them look majestic, they’re fucking assholes. Assholes who shit on your car and rip your trash apart.

Over on the Hard Merchandise, they talk about lightweight fishing lines and my eyes glaze over because I don’t care. In the next scene, Dave’s cigarette is impossibly long and it irritates me that he hasn’t flicked it YOU’RE GOING TO DROP HOT ASH ON YOUR HAND AND BURN IT OFF AND THEN HOW WILL YOU FISH?

GOD FORBID FISHING FOR A LIVING TAKES AWAY FROM ALL YOUR SMOKING.

They reel a fish with the lightweight fishing line which is “the equivalent of bear hunting with a BB gun.” I think bears might be a little angrier and bitier than the tuna, but minor details. There’s a lot of grunting and screaming and someone almost takes a dunk in the ocean (like my high school experience!). This lightweight “shy gear” setup thing requires whoever is reeling to don an incredibly phallic piece of gear and crank. Yep.

SOMEONE MAN THE STRAP-ON!

In the end, the tuna dildo (also my nickname in high school) doesn’t work, and they lose the fish. Finally, they catch a fish with the non-dildo fishing reel, all while Dave is (surprise) smoking another cigarette. At this point I don’t think I’ve seen him without one during any episode of this show.

Over on the Miss Sambvca, there’s all kinds of boy fighting, because they have literally caught one fish so far this season. There’s a tantrum over a blanket, and Fahkin’ Accent Guy is being a veritable ding-dong. His brother, who has given up his normal job to help his brother (and probably get on tv), is So Fucking Done with the guy and ragequits.

I had the same tantrum when they stopped selling Mint Skittles.

After more interminable fishing and screaming and yelling and fishing, the tuna.com catches another fish, and the show finally ends, and NOT ONE SEAGULL HAS TAKEN OFF WITH A HOT DOG. WTF.

I LOVE THE WIND IN MY BEARD

And on that note, see you all next time for another edition of FISHING AND YELLING.

Disclaimer: Despite poking gentle fun at the captains and crew of this show, we actually admire them very much – not only for their hard work, but for helping Gloucester get on the map for something interesting. Please don’t slash our tires.

HEY CLAM BLOG READERS! SPORT HORSE BACK. SO MUCH TO TALK ABOUT, RIGHT? WHERE ONE EVEN BEGIN?

OKAY SO FIRST OFF MY BRO CALIFORNIA CHROME NOT WIN TRIPLE CROWN. SPORT HORSE BET FOAL’S EDUCATION FUND ON THAT HORSE, SO NOW THEY HAVE TO LEARN FAMILY TRADE OF PULLING CARRIAGES OF ASSHOLE TOURISTS AND SHITTING IN THE MIDDLE OF STATE STREET.

WE ALSO DINOSAUR COSPLAY

ANYHORSE, I WAS THINKING THO WE NEED SOME GLOUCESTER-RELATED HORSE RACING NAMES. I MEAN HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE? I ASK CLAMTRIBUTORS TO HELP ME WITH NAMES AND WE COME UP WITH THESE:

• UNHEALTHY FULLER SCHOOL OBSESSION
• EASILY THWARTED PAYWALL
• NARCAN SUNRISE
• NORMAN’S WOAH
• FIREBALL
• SEABISCUT CAPSLOCK
• SKETCHY BAIT VAN
• ISLE OF FOALS

OVER IN NBA NEWS, GAME 1 OF NBA FINALS BETWEEN MIAMI HEAT AND SAN ANTONIO SPURS BORES SPORT HORSE, BUT LEBRON JAMES LEG CRAMP WENT CRAZY VIRAL RIGHT? LISTEN, IN SPORT HORSE WORLD, LEG CRAMPS BAD NEWS. IT NOT JOKE. MY FATHER HAD LEG CRAMPS AND THEY TOLD ME HIM GO TO LIVE ON A FARM UPSTATE AND WE NEVER SAW HIM AGAIN. I DO NOT WANT LEBRON TO GO LIVE ON FARM HE WOULD NEVER SURVIVE I MEAN LOOK AT HIM.

LET’S TALK HOCKEY NOW!

OKAY SO RANGERS BEAT MONTREAL (AHAHHAHAHAHAHHAAH) AND ARE FACING THE LA KINGS IN STANLEY CUP FINALS. NO LIE SPORT HORSE ADMIRE BOTH TEAMS.

FUN FACT: THIS ACTUAL SIGN SPORT HORSE MAKE. YAHOO SPORTS LOVED IT.

SPORT HORSE WATCH GAME TWO. TIRED BECAUSE GAME START LATE ON WEST COAST AND GO TO GODDAMN DOUBLE OVERTIME. NEED MORE COFFEE HONESTLY. THIS SERIES AWESOME TO WATCH – KINGS KEEP COMING BACK FROM GOAL DEFICITS TO WIN. I SUGGEST ALL CLAM READERS WATCH GAMES.