Category: Uncategorized

by Josh Turiel

Good morning, Clam Nation. Most of you know me here as the Clam’s representative from Over The Bridge. Well, besides that and my work as a Actual Elected Official™, I am also a member of the boating community – being the proud owner of an ancient 25’ powerboat that I keep in my home port of Salem.

As a boat owner, one learns the etiquette of how to behave properly while boating. For instance, you should learn the boundaries of a harbor’s no-wake zone and always keep your speed below 5 knots (a knot is a mile that took steroids to add bulk). You should always give way to a vessel under sail, or one that is less maneuverable than you are. Blasting your horn once when leaving a dock is proper, and three short blasts indicate backing up (mainly ignored by small boats).

In my travels for fun and the pursuit of fish, I’ve learned certain rules also apply in different areas. Today I’d like to share a few of the things I’ve learned about boating in and around Gloucester Harbor, with explanations as needed.

Rule number 1: WE REALLY NEED THIS FISH!!!

Explanation: Not only are commercial fishermen and people who think they are commercial fishermen all over the place, they’re in a hurry. Some of them have decided that the next great catch is right in the middle of the channel, too – and they couldn’t care less that you’re trying to transit.

Rule number 2: Kayaking is a great and healthy fad.

Explanation: It is customary in Gloucester to speed up when you see kayaks nearby, in order to provide a wake for them to enjoy. This textural element eliminates the boredom kayakers experience when paddling on an otherwise smooth ocean, and their shouts of “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” are not sarcastic at all.

Rule number 3: Make fellow boaters aware of your presence.

Explanation: It’s been explained to me by a reliable native that one should approach at a high speed, whilst standing nude on the bow and broadcasting “Ride of the Valkyries.” Also be drinking. Sounds reasonable.

Rule number 4: When cruising at night, don’t forget to blast your music.

Explanation: Since you’re out on the water and away from everyone, you can really pump out every decibel that boat stereo can produce without worrying that you might wake the neighbors. After all, if you can’t hear them yelling from shore to turn it down, they can’t hear you. This also has the wonderful effect of making yourself noticeable at times where being nude on the bow just doesn’t work.

Rule number 5: Bridges were made to be open.

Explanation: There’s no reason to queue up at the Blynman Bridge. Motorists in Gloucester love to wait 20 minutes so you can slip in all by yourself. Think of the things that they throw at you while you pass as the confetti of love and welcome.

Rule number 6: The Inner Harbor is a welcoming place.

Explanation: People in working boats like nothing more than to be visited by Muffy and Skip while they are busy loading or unloading, or trying to get in or out of the harbor so they can work. They love to stop and explain their chores to the passers-by, and the larger the yacht that pulls up the bigger the tip should be given for their enchanting sea tales and salty language.

Also, a few hints about the sights you’ll see there: the beautiful sailboat with the screams coming from it is not a secret sex dungeon. It’s just the residence of one of our favorite local entrepreneurs. Be aware of drones flying near Rocky Neck (it’s science!) or any time there’s a local event of note. The Clam has a number of drone enthusiasts among us. And a tip on fuel – come well-stocked. Marine gas is always more expensive than mainland gas. And Gloucester gas is the priciest of all.

And one last thing to bring up about procedure. I consulted with Clameditor Jim Dowd as I prepared this piece. He told me that the proper way to enter Gloucester Harbor was to, and I quote:

“Come in under flying topgallants, Salute the Fort with starboard guns, dip flag, display pennants, pipe aboard the Mayor and her retainers. All ratings in dress uniform, man-jacks in Sunday wear.”

I’m no googin, but I’m pretty sure that’s about 90% made up. Or it may be a Gloucester thing. I’m not certain.

Keeping this local knowledge in mind should help you greatly in your navigation of scenic Gloucester. I encourage more tips in the comments, so we can produce an updated copy of this later on.

Nerdy Clams Need to Know, Part Two: MC Lars
by Len Pal, Clamrespondent and Co-Host of MC Hawking’s Podcore Nerdcast

It’s been a while since the first installment of “Nerdy Clams Need to Know”, in which I discussed the novel Ready Player One, the Fluxx series of card games, and the music of MC Frontalot. I promised that in the future I’d talk about Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series of books, a game called The Resistance, and the music of Schaffer the Darklord. And I’ll still do all of that eventually, but not today.

Today I want to talk about MC Lars.

MC Lars created a style he calls “post-punk laptop rap”, using punchy guitar riffs and punk samples to drive his energetic lyrics, but the factors that really make Lars stand out in the nerdcore genre are his frequent use of literary themes and his extremely positive, upbeat attitude. Today’s hip-hop artists frequently rap about drugs and alcohol, violence, and sex. Lars raps about growing up, learning, counterculture, and quite frequently about great literature.

Yes, I said literature. I’m sure you’ve seen movies where some clever teacher manages to get inner city kids to appreciate Shakespeare by reading it to a beat as if it were a rap. Bonus points if you watched Free Enterprise all the way to the end and saw William Shatner’s rap adaptation of Julius Caesar. The idea of lit-hop isn’t all that new, but there’s a difference between doing it and doing it well.

MC Lars does lit-hop extremely well. Like, “get your kids listening to it in middle school” well. After listening to Lars sing Hey There Ophelia, they’ll want to read Hamlet. Listening to Ahab will inspire them to read Moby Dick. And of course MC Lars’ favorite is Edgar Allen Poe; he brings several of Poe’s poems to life, and his track Flow Like Poe provides the best explanation of iambs, diameter, tetrameter, and pentameter I’ve ever heard, deconstructing rhythm and meter in simple and fun terms.

But there’s more to Lars than just lit-hop. As a true DIY indie artist, MC Lars raps about the music industry in tracks like Signing Emo, Download This Song, Straight Outta Stockholm, and What Is Hip-Hop? In Hot Topic Is Not Punk Rock, iGeneration, No Logo, and Hipster Girl, he raps about trends and subcultures. And what nerdcore artist doesn’t rap about video games? O.G. Original Gamer and Guitar Hero Hero lovingly illustrate that you can take gaming a little too seriously. Nerdy enough for you?

“Sure, Len – good enough. But why are you telling us this right now, instead of that other stuff you promised?” Well, two reasons, really.

First, because his newest album, The Zombie Dinosaur LP, will be released on October 6^th.

I’ve been listening to The Zombie Dinosaur LP for about a week now. It has everything you want from an MC Lars album: Sublime with Rome (Is Not the Same Thing as Sublime) calls out the music industry for sending out what’s left of bands after the loss of key band members. Hipster Mom is a follow-up to Hipster Girl, showing how family can impact the hipster lifestyle.

Now that you’re addicted to lit-hop, you’ll enjoy Dragon Blood (inspired by Game of Thrones), Forgot About Jack (about Kerouac and On the Road), and Never Afraid (about being an avid reader since childhood). Triforce is a Legend of Zelda inspired introspective look at growing up and embracing power, wisdom, and courage. And If I Were a Jedi (That Would be Hella Awesome) and The Ballad of Hans Moleman will appeal to fans of Star Wars and The Simpsons.

And second, he’ll be playing at Thunder Road in Somerville, MA on October 11^th.

You have between now and then to fall in love with his music, see the show, and probably even take a selfie with him afterwards! I saw MC Lars last year at The Middle East (along with mc chris and Spose) and can honestly say it was one of the most fun live shows I’ve ever attended. This is The Joyful Smiles tour, and I’m certain it will live up to its name.

So what now? As I’ve said before, I can’t really sell you on a musician just by listing song titles. You’re going to have to take the next step yourself. Go onto YouTube and search for MC Lars. Scroll through the results and find some of the titles I mentioned above, and then some I haven’t. If you like it (as I’m sure you will), go to iTunes and buy his albums. (Nerdy rappers gotta eat.) I’ll be back again with more nerducation in the future. Until then, stay out of trouble, you Nerdy Clams.

There has been an ongoing semi-serious discussion in one of the Clam’s secret chat-lairs around how to attract media attention to the Mayoral Race here. It has all the elements of a hit reality show: Big personalities, political intrigue, Star Trek fandom, lunatics. The only thing holding us back from reaching out to a producer is finding a sure-fire mechanism to keep the per-episode fee from the city’s “Free Cash” fund, which has made the budgeting process a living nightmare.

Instead, as a public service and without endorsing anyone, we though we’d provide a handy guide to some of the more amusingly questionable campaign decisions made by the folks running for Gloucester’s highest office and in return you can help us out when, in retribution, the next mayor re-zones the lots behind our house as a “Beach Seaweed Compost Site.” Deal?

Great, then let’s Clamsplore!

Greg Verga

Greg is running a generally mellow campaign. He’s an out Trekkie and we like that. But he’s running against the Roman Legionesque ground game of Sefatia Romeo Theken and will need to convert a lot of her voters to win. Question: does the Starship Enterprise truck being driven outside the confines of the Horribles Parade help or hinder? Discuss.

We’ll give him credit, he nailed the “bold” in “To boldy go…”

UPSIDE: Characterizing the opposition as “The Romeoulan Empire” would be epically awesome.

Paul McGeary

Paul has held the position of interim mayor on and off for a few years and president of the City Council. He knows the job and is pretty wonky, which is good. But he’s never run an opposed campaign and all over town are these:

The Flintstones are confusing enough, but can someone explain the gecko here? Anyone?

No dis to whomever does the handmade signs, we firmly believe they are a folk-art native to Gloucester and are fascinated with them as such. But do they make more people want to vote for Paul? Magic Eight-ball says: “Reply hazy, try again later.”

The upside: Demonstrates fiscal responsibility by saving on printing costs.

Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken

I would not be at all surprised if the physicists at CERN someday use the Hadron Supercollider to discover a ‘Sefatia Particle,’ which in the standard model will be the carrier of the “strong vote force.” If you look at historical totals the woman attracts votes the way my navy blazer collects pet hair. Her greatest weakness was the decision to break her promise not to run for mayor this cycle, thus putting her trust into question. Therefore, was the following image a good idea?

Um, Your Honor? Ms. Mayor? We’re back here…behind you.

Most often campaigns choose to show the front of the candidate where the face is typically located. Additionally, seeing the back of the candidate arms outstretched to a crowd gives off an…um…we don’t know…

Anyone else? Just us?

Upside: Gloucester could do with some loaves and fishes right about now.

Francisco Sclafani

Oooh boy. Where to start? So, we’ve lived here a couple of decades and have to admit never having heard of this guy until this year. We actually saw the picture of the last mayoral debate and had to ask, “Did a guy heading to the reception hall from a wedding accidentally wander into the Sawyer Free Library trying to buy some smokes, somehow winding up at the candidates’ table?”

All the way on the right. With the corsage.

This guy is a treasure trove of whack. Check out this 2007 GDT article on his for a summary of the cray.

Your beloved The Clam intends to do an entire post on the bulk-freighter of lunacy that is this particular fringe candidate, including excerpts from from his absolutely loonboots 400+ page memoir “Breach of Faith” which we will quote at length and you will collapse into a drool-soaked coma from laughing, trust us.

Note to readers: Do you have a full copy of this book? Get it to us and we will read it in its entirety and post about it, probably while drunk!

Upside: If you are one of those men who just wants to watch the world burn, look no further.

Dan Ruberti

Mr. Ruberti has been running for mayor as long as I can remember. We used to love seeing his floats in the Horribles, which would always somehow incorporate his K-Car and some up-cycled scrap he’d found like an old carousel or a UFO he’d made from auto parts. His running for mayor became less funny a few years ago when it forced an unnecessary run-off election costing the city tens of thousands of dollars. I’m all for quirky, but that was pothole-repair and textbooks the city lost just to support his perennial joke candidacy.

“It’s not a joke!” you say? “How dare we?” you say? Well that leads us to Mr. Ruberti’s highlighted questionable electoral decision for election 2015. Apparently candidate Ruberti confirmed he’d be attending the September 3 debate at the Sawyer Free, but never showed up.

Clint Eastwood debating Dan Ruberti

Look, we’re down with the rogue candidacy bit. But it’s not cool to have people accommodate you in the actual process that real candidates use to define how they would lead our city and not even bother to show up. We hate to say it, but if we are going to have more than one novelty candidate per cycle we need have to have a separate debate for them in a bar or something. There they can yell about chemtrails or how the red Chinese are infiltrating our water supply or how jet fuel can’t make steel burn or whatever, but at least not impede the rest of the process.

Upside: The Clam volunteers to moderate.

Markus Persson who sold the videogame Minecraft to Microsoft for 2.5 billion dollars tweeted how unhappy he is now. 

Markus,

Saw the tweets from last week and felt it was important to reach out from the geek-o-sphere-at-large. In the past I’ve always read “Billionaire not happy” stories with a combination of bitterness and schadenfreude, but reading Twitter last week made me nothing but bummed. I’ve met enough successful people in the tech space to know how challenging it is to go from nothing to everything at a fairly young age. But to know this is happening to you, someone who’s brought so much awesome to the world, is a massive crap sandwich.

This sucks. I’m sorry.

I hope I’m not the first one to let you know it looks like you’re dealing with not just Sudden Wealth Syndrome (which is real) but also some tangible form of depression. I know this has been an issue in your family. I’m hopeful with the knowledge you have the intelligence to identify it and the resources to treat it. Have you seen the Big Black Dog parable? It’s helped a lot of people in similar circumstances.

The depression is a real thing real thing and would be there money or no. Wealth is just a complicating factor, not the root cause. I was at the funeral of a friend who succumbed to his illness years ago, his fiance came up to me and said, “Depression is the worst disease because it convinces you you don’t have it.” She was right. At least fucking cancer has the decency to make you sick.

Reach out, get help, get on a program and stick to it. Because we need you.

We really do. And not just hanging around enjoying life, taking up some kind of extreme oddball rich-dude sport like turbozeppelin polo or whatever. We both know nothing is more obnoxious than the 1% pursuing some extreme bullshit for no good reason. And you’re right in saying the long-bomb ‘Musk’, (solving some real-world huge problem) will just expose you to those assholes again. I get it.

Although this looks pretty epic

So let’s go back to basics: A few years ago you started something that opened a door for millions of people, a door that hadn’t been there before. It allowed them to create, play and most importantly communicate on a level playing field, many for the first time. Adults, kids, girls, boys, trans, cis, aspergers, geeks, introverts, and a good swath of levels of income (so long as they had regular computer access) flocked to this place. Since it’s been used by artists, scientists, educators, doctors, social workers and my son. Mostly by my son, it seems.

A quick few things my ten-year-old learned on Minecraft:

• He knows the basic concepts of quantum physics because of the qcraft mod. Soon, when we need technologists who can think in qbits rather than traditional bits, MC will have gotten him there a decade ahead of everyone else.
• He’s read books on creating circuits and machines so he can build similar things in MC.
• He learned to write Java making his own mod through a weeklong program at MIT this summer. He would NEVER have had the patience and attention span to do that without MC. He loved it. “I’ve never been able to pay attention to anything for so long,” he said after a long day coding.
• A couple of years ago on a private server he once griefed someone’s castle and was rightly banned by the moderator. He was very guilty and upset so I had him write a contrite letter to the admin. He was allowed back on under the condition he return any items taken, that the castle was rebuilt and he was to apologize in-person to the owner. He did so and was greatly relived. This was a life lesson in the digital space and I can’t imagine it happening on another platform.

He made you this, “Because Notch is awesome.”

Minecraft tore a big hole in the wall between digital and “real” life. But it’s only going to get ripped apart further. Minecraft was just the first big salvo. So you now have a responsibility to the real humans who’ll be caught up in this transition.

What the fuck am I talking about? Let me explain:

Questions:

1. To what extent were the Wright Brothers as responsible for the Enola Gay as for Apollo 11?
2. GPS gets the fire department to my house as well as bombs onto someone else’s. Is it a bad thing?
3. TNT was invented by Alfred Nobel, a guy who spent the bulk of his life trying to make sure he advocated for good in the world as well as making it easier to blow up parts of it.

Do inventors bear responsibility for their creations? How much? And what do you, a game designer, have to do with all this? The answer is “some” and “everything.” No one can predict how a new platform will be used, Wilbur and Orville Wright assumed once militaries had the ability to detect each other’s movements from the air, war would become obsolete. Orville lived to see the use of the airplane in the Second World War and was horrified.

As for your innovation: what will become of humanity as the barrier between digital and organic life becomes increasingly thin? Is it a utopia or a nightmare? Will it be a way to empower workers or exploit them? Will we find new ways to communicate and understand each other or new ways to attack?

History says at first we will struggle, but on balance good will win out. But it takes brave individuals to make that happen. People with credibility.

You have that credibility. And, having read your history, I know you are brave.

What you support, whom you befriend, how you proceed from here is meaningful to literally millions of people. How many wind up in digital ghettos or acropolises, how many kids are encouraged to create and engage opposed to being taught how to just fill out tests more efficiently, who gets to play and who pays the bills, all that will  be decided in the next decade. Mistakes are going to get made. How big those mistakes are, how long we allow them to continue depends on what we do from here.

People will listen to you.

We need your voice. We’re with you.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Oliver Sacks, the noted neurologist who died last week at 82:

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; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.

We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in