Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Ha! Man Throws Away Library!



For a while I thought I was going to have nothing to post about today. Ha!

Okay, before I get to the good stuff—before I get to the guy who threw away a library!—here are a couple of little things related to earlier posts.


Tennis

Maria Sharapova has gotten to the semifinals of Wimbledon.

The big story at Wimbledon this year is on the men’s side, with Andy Murray having a chance to get a title for Britain. I wish him well. He’s a strange player, sometimes fun to watch, sometimes awful to watch, but he has beaten—once or twice—everyone who remains on the men’s side and, of those remaining, Murray probably has the best game for grass. So, I won’t jinx him by wishing him luck, but I’ll be watching his remaining matches.

Maria Sharapova is in a situation similar to this year’s French Open. All the remaining players are youngsters. She is by far the favorite to add another Wimbledon title to her record. Again, I won’t jinx her by wishing her luck, but I’ll be watching her remaining matches, too.

Thinking Of Mountains Redux

Tennis, French Scumbags, Classic Science



Nuclear Accidents

I should have included this yesterday but—believe it or not—I just kind of forgot about it [?!] when I was typing up the post.

The sociologist wrote that people are swayed by images and there is an ‘appeal’ to analogies. Well, one very bizarre and interesting similarity between Fukushima and Fort Calhoun is that they both had helicopter crashes within a few days of each other. The Fukushima crash was a small, remote-controlled drone that crashed onto a reactor roof. The Fort Calhoun crash is stranger. The ‘official’ story is a copter company from Iowa was contracted to fly over the Fort Calhoun scene—even though there is a no-fly zone there—to ‘survey electrical lines.’ (Those thin lines stretched against the sky!) Anyway, the copter developed what was simply reported as mechanical difficulties and crashed. It was reported as an emergency landing, but look at the picture, it looks like a crash:



Who knows what the hell is going on in Nebraska?


*


Okay.

Now, about this guy who threw away a library...


First, everybody who loves books has noticed, for years, that libraries all across the nation have been throwing away good, old, content-rich books and acquiring ridiculous, demographic-driven, worthless, modern so-called ‘books.’

[Edit today, Wednesday, for two serious notes: 1) This, of course, is really a global issue: The University of NSW is throwing away thousands of books and scholarly journals as part of a policy that critics say is turning its library into a Starbucks.. 2) The way modern “professionals” have been dehumanized into kind of free-floating, generic cultists, generic ideologues, is the topic of a book by a physicist [!]: Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives.]

Things Libraries Throw Away

Everybody hates the practice, nobody supports the practice, but it’s the 21st century, it’s the Jetsons’ world, nothing makes sense and decisions are made by ideologues who have allegiance to Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones.

Or something like that.

Anyway, libraries suck now, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.


Unless you buy a library and convert it into a monster-hunting lair!


Let me take just a half-step back.


Just a few days after I did my last Loch Ness post—Loch Ness Apocalypse—there was a pretty good sighting of the “monster” by some Loch Ness regulars. Here is that story:


FOYERS shop and cafe owner Jan Hargreaves and her husband Simon believe they caught a glimpse of Loch Ness’s most elusive resident — Nessie.

It was while taking a break on the store’s front decking — looking out to the loch — when Mrs Hargreaves and kitchen worker Graham Baine spotted an unusual figure cutting a strange shape through the water.

“We were standing looking out and saw something that looked bizarre,” said Mrs Hargreaves.

“I said to my husband to come and have a look.

“We stand here all the time and look out and we see boats and kayaks but it didn’t look like anything we have seen here before.”

Despite the unidentified creature being quite a distance from their vantage point, 51-year-old Mrs Hargreaves said it had a long neck which was too long to be that of a seal and it was black in appearance.

“It went under the water and disappeared for probably 30 to 40 seconds and then came back up again,” said Mrs Hargreaves.

“It was around for a good four to five minutes. It was just so strange.”

Keen to stress she is not seeking publicity, Mrs Hargreaves does firmly believe what she saw was the Loch Ness Monster.

“It was so exciting,” she declared.

Since August last year, The Waterfall Cafe and Foyers Stores with post office, opposite the village’s famous Falls of Foyers, has been run by Mr and Mrs Hargreaves.

Nessie hunter Steve Feltham, who lives in a former mobile library turned research centre on Dores beach, said he heard about the possible sighting when he popped into the store last week and believes because it was from residents rather than tourists, it is more credible.

“I’m excited by the fact it was locals who had seen it,” said Mr Feltham.

“It’s quite a distance from the shop to the water and they watch everything that goes on there.

“For them to be impressed then there is a possibility it could have been Nessie.”

What particularly excited Mr Feltham was that it was from the exact same vantage point where Tim Binsdale shot the best footage of the legendary creature back in 1960.


(More at the link)





When I read that, I saw the great quote about the old monster hunter who lives in a converted mobile library. Here is his picture:



And—bravo, monster hunter!—here is his story, as reported a few years ago in Britain:


Steve Feltham gave up his girlfriend, his house and his job to search for the Loch Ness monster. Seventeen years on, does he have any regrets?


To say that I am a patient man would be an understatement. Seventeen years sat watching and waiting on the shores of Loch Ness for one decent sighting of the monster has to be considered dedication in anybody's eyes. To me, however, it is more a dream come true: this subject has fascinated me since a family holiday in 1970, when I was seven. It was then that we visited the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau, a team of volunteers who each summer set up a makeshift camp on the lochside near Urquhart Castle, from where they mounted round-the-clock surveillance in the hope of filming Nessie. What really caught my imagination was the platform they had built, on which they had mounted a cine camera and tripod; the lens alone must have been a metre long. Grown men looking for monsters? Fantastic.

Noticing my interest, and knowing that it would be a long drive back home to Dorset, my father bought me the bureau's information pack, a folder that I still have, filled with copies of sighting reports and reprints of iconic photographs. I was hooked. Over the next decade my interest grew, fuelled by classroom debates and several more family holidays to the Scottish Highlands.

I would return to the loch many times, first as a child and then, when I was an adult, on two-week "expeditions", armed with a very basic camera and my grandfather's second world war binoculars, fully expecting to be able to solve the mystery before I had to return to work. Little did I realise that it could take a lifetime.

I might have been content to visit the loch periodically, get my fix of monster hunting, then return to work, had I remained in the creative occupations that I pursued for the first eight years of my working life, first as a potter, then as a bookbinder and finally as a graphic artist. However, by 1987, when I was 24, I had a house and a steady girlfriend, and when it was suggested that I join my father setting up a company installing burglar alarms, I jumped at the chance to make some serious money.

Pretty soon, I realised I was in the wrong job, but the thing that got to me most while working in people's homes was the number of retired folk who would say, "Oh, I wish I'd gone and lived in America when I was your age", or climbed Mount Everest, or whatever. What would I regret not having done when I reached 70?

It was obvious: I knew where I was at my happiest, and what I was most interested in. So I quit the relationship, and put the house on the market.

To make absolutely sure that what I was planning was right for me and not just a pipe dream, I loaded up the works van and, in the summer of 1990, went on a three-week hunt to the loch. I had the time of my life. The day the cheque from the sale of my house went into the bank, I told my parents I would be leaving the, by now, lucrative family business. "Oh, and by the way, I'm going to search for the Loch Ness monster instead."

"Told you," my mother said to my father.

I needed something to live in. Within days my brother had located the perfect thing, a 20-year-old former mobile library, wood-lined and with a potbelly stove. In this, I would be able to move around the loch between vantage points, and follow up any new sightings.

On June 19 1991, I arrived at the loch and became a full-time monster hunter. I had never been happier.

To fund myself, I hit on the idea of making little Nessie models out of modelling clay, sitting the monsters on rocks gathered from the shore. I was sure that tourists would buy them, but in the first year I found it hard to sell any. The problem was that nobody knew what I was doing, or why.

Fortunately, while planning this quest, I had phoned the BBC for advice about which video format I should use if I wanted my results to be broadcast-quality. I was put through to the team making the Video Diaries series. Spotting the potential for a good story, they kitted me out with enough equipment and batteries to film the whole of my first year in my new life.

As soon as this programme, Desperately Seeking Nessie, was aired in August 1992, I knew that everything would be OK. People started turning up wanting to buy a model from the guy who had given up his comfortable life to follow a dream. I still get visitors who remember it.

I never set a time limit, but I suppose I thought that within the first three years I would surely see and film something. I now know that was a wee bit optimistic. The loch is more than 23 miles long and, realistically, one man can only be looking at about a mile of it at any time. I have tried other methods of hunting over the years; using a boat with some fairly decent echo sounders on board I have had contacts with objects in mid-loch that appear to be much larger than the resident fish. But an echo sounder will never reveal what it has found, but just give a rough idea of how big it is. I have also got a good friend who owns a microlight, but it is not much use when you are looking for a very dark object in very dark water.

So nowadays I watch and wait mostly from the shoreline. I would love to have my own boat, but to generate enough money to buy one, I would first have to film Nessie.

For most of the first decade my van remained mobile, which gave me the chance to move between three or four lochside villages. However, I increasingly found myself drawn to the village of Dores, on the south shore, from where I had the best view of Loch Ness that anyone could wish for.

About 10 years ago the van failed its last MOT, and so I decided it was time to become static. The Dores Inn car park was perfect, backing on to the beach as it does and, thanks to the owners' kindness, I had permission to spread out a bit, build some decking out of old pallets, and incorporate a large piece of driftwood to display my models on. Utopia.

Now I have my perfect lochside base, as well as my own postcode and council tax bills. There is no running water or electricity, but the pub has an outside tap, and car batteries charged by a solar panel enable me to run my lights, radio and laptop. My shower consists of two buckets of loch water and a saucepan heated on the stove. The loch deposits driftwood for my stove right outside my door, (much needed, as I've seen temperatures reach minus 17C) and a great big concrete patio table on my "decking" makes sitting out on a summer's day my favourite pastime. I breakfast at this table, put my models out for sale, and wait to see what adventures will turn up.

Tourists arrive to ask me questions, friends come to sit and chat, then maybe there is a Mediterranean-style buffet, an evening campfire, a starry night sky, and, best of all, sometimes the northern lights. Then, when everyone has gone and I have the loch to myself again, I stand at the shoreline and feel the energy that pours off the place, before retiring to watch the night sky through the skylight above my bed. That, to me, is a perfect day.

The Highland weather does not always permit such joys, in which case I find that I can keep myself admirably busy inside my van. I make a few models, possibly do a watercolour painting that I can later sell, read, listen to the radio, maybe even watch the occasional osprey feeding right outside my door. As soon as I feel boredom coming on, I change tack, and anyway I have long since realised that in this life the unpredictable is never far away, be it the Chinese State Circus dropping by for a photo shoot or Billy Connolly inviting me to be a guide for half a dozen of his A-list chums for a day.

Film crews and journalists from all over the world turn up on a regular basis, and I answer all their questions, but they are invariably focused on one subject: is there a monster, or isn't there? Which is perfectly understandable, but it frustrates me that I never have the chance to get an equally important point across: that if you have a dream, no matter how harebrained others think it is, then it is worth trying to make it come true. I'm living proof that it might just work.

Have I ever regretted my decision? Never, not for one second.























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