Filed under: Education, life, maritime | Tags: GQ, Murray Fisher, Nautica, New York Harbor School, The Gentlemen's Fund
Great news! Here is a picture of the new home of the New York Harbor School.
It’s been a longtime coming, 10 years in fact, but the school is scheduled to relocate to a renovated Coast Guard hospital on Governor’s Island off the southern tip of Manhattan in the fall of 2010.
Justin Pope wrote an great article titled Special school makes NY harbor its classroom while awaiting a waterfront home which appeared in the Los Angeles Times on September 8, 2009. If you have any interest in kids, education and things maritime, you must read this article. 
I’ve posted about the New York Harbor School several times here because I believe it’s one of the most amazing maritime youth education success stories going. Please check out these old posts. 
While projects like these are really dependent on so many different people and organizations, this one is lucky to have Murray Fisher at the helm, a leader with vision, passion and a penchant for hard work. And now he has the chance to join the ranks of Adam Green of Rocking the Boat as a NYC maritime educator/fashion icon.
Each year GQ magazine asks readers to nominate “an agent of change striving for the betterment of society through charitable work, volunteerism, and/or community involvement—someone who is working hard to make this a better world.” GQ selected the five best submissions as finalists and readers will determine the winner by popular vote. Murray Fisher is one of the five finalists and for his sake, the Harbor School’s benefit and the benefit of maritime education in general, please visit website and vote for him and ask your friends, family and strangers to do the same!
Murray’s currently tied for second place but we can make a difference and if we do he’ll be featured in the pages of GQ, be honored at The Gentlemen’s Ball in New York City in October, $10,000 will be donated toward the accredited charity of his choice and he’ll receive $2,000 cash & $1,000 Nautica® gift card. (Come on, the Nautica gift card naturally should go to a guy in maritime education. Could you imagine a better sponsorship than Nautica of the Harbor School?)
Please help me help Murray, the Harbor School and maritime education! Vote and spread the word! Thanks!
Filed under: Education | Tags: A. P. Moeller, A.P. Moeller School, C.F. Moller, Maersk, Monocle
Here’s some shipping money put to good work. Check out this short Monocle video about a gift from A.P. Moeller and Chastine McKinney Moeller Foundation (Danish website) to the young people of Schleswig bordering Denmark and Germany. Looks like a nice place to learn.
The architect C.F. Moller website with additional pictures and info about the school.
Filed under: Education, Moby-Monday, maritime, storytelling | Tags: Amy Sedaris, Meg Guroff, Moby-Dick, Stephen Colbert
News that the 1956 film version of Moby-Dick had been named a “great acid movie” by blogger Erich Kuersten sent me to Hulu to find you a link. Till recently, you could watch that psychedelic Gregory Peck vehicle in its entirety on the site for free. Sadly, no more.
Instead, searching for “Moby Dick” on Hulu yields a clip from a year-2000 episode of the weirdly hilarious Comedy Central series Strangers with Candy, in which Amy Sedaris plays Jerri Blank, a washout who returns to high school in her 40s. In the clip, teacher Mr. Norbet Noblet (played by Stephen Colbert) tries to make the illiterate Jerri read the first chapter of Moby-Dick. Needless to say, she misses the fart joke completely. Still, Jerri offers a bold new take on the text. If you want to see the whole episode, it’s here. There are no further Moby-Dick references, but the Miracle Worker reference is priceless.
Margaret Guroff is editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
Filed under: Education, Moby-Monday, maritime, storytelling | Tags: Abraham Lincoln Elementary School, Debra Perry, Meg Guroff, Moby-Dick
Not since “On Top of Spaghetti” has one little sneeze caused so much trouble. According to a group of New Bedford fifth graders, the fateful chomp that launched Captain Ahab’s quest for revenge against Moby Dick was caused by a bad head cold.
“I sneezed, and when I did, I accidentally bit Captain Ahab’s leg right off!” says the hero of Moby-Dick Through the Eyes of the Whale, a new book written and illustrated by students at Abraham Lincoln Elementary School. “Believe what I’m telling you,” the whale continues. “It tasted horrifyingly gross!”
The book, which was published through Nationwide Learning, Inc., is a project of the school’s Moby Dick Club. The eight students read a junior edition of Moby-Dick and met weekly to discuss it under the tutelage of teacher Debra Perry. Now that they have created their own version of the story, the club is reading it to first graders at their school.
Is there a minimum age for hearing Herman Melville’s brutal tale of vengeance, obsession, havoc, and death? Not in New Bedford, an old whaling town that is, after all, where Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, hooks up with bosom buddy Queequeg. According to Perry, the ten- and eleven-year-olds chosen to read Moby-Dick in the club all knew the book’s ending already.
Margaret Guroff is the editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
Photograph by Allan Foster, licensed through Creative Commons.
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Filed under: Book review, Education, Moby-Monday, maritime, social media | Tags: Adam Koford, Dan Coulter, Meg Guroff, Moby-Dick, publicdomain, Twitter
“How many tweets would it take to tweet all of Moby-Dick?” cartoonist Adam Koford mused on Twitter last July.
The answer, it turned out, was 12,849, or about 45 Twitter posts per day for nine-and-a-half months—as programmer Dan Coulter, a Twitter follower and prior collaborator of Koford’s, discovered after he took the cartoonist’s question as a challenge.
Coulter’s robotic Moby-Dick Twitter feed started on July 28 and ended last Wednesday, May 13. While it was running, the robot (a script Coulter wrote in the PHP computer language) spit out one paragraph of Melville’s beloved and dreaded tome every hour during the business day, with the text sliced into Twitter’s signature 140-character-max dispatches. The account—with Twitter handle “publicdomain”—has attracted 418 followers, and today it begins blurting its next out-of-copyright text, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
Why start with Moby-Dick? Koford says he was inspired by Twitter’s “fail whale,” the blissed-out white cetacean that appears onscreen whenever the micro-blogging network is overloaded. Though he had never read the full book on paper, Koford says, he’d read an “amazing” graphic adaptation by Bill Sienkiewicz. He had also endured an audiobook version narrated by actor Burt Reynolds. “He basically screams the whole book,” Koford recalls in an email. “Looking back, I’m not sure how I made it through that.” Still, Koford says, he loved the book.
Programmer Coulter was less enthusiastic. “I’m not a Melville fan,” he confesses. “I tried reading Billy Budd once, and I got about five pages into that. The language and the pacing has never been able to grab my interest.”
Reading 140 characters at a time, however, Coulter made it through Moby-Dick. And with the text in that format, he was able to appreciate Melville’s artistry with language. “It surprised me how poetic he could be at times,” Coulter says. “Stuff would come through that was really amazing.” Even more than the poetry, though, Coulter appreciated the humor inherent in the medium. “Twitter turned the book into this weird series of non-sequiturs—things that, taken out of context, were absolutely hilarious,” he says. “I don’t know that I would ever want to read Moby-Dick as a book, but as a Twitter feed, I really enjoyed it.”
A list of Coulter’s favorite funny Moby-Dick tweets appears in a wrap-up he posted to his blog last week. Fans of the book may recognize a few lines that are as amusing in context as out. This July 31 tweet, for example, follows narrator Ishmael’s first encounter with Queequeg, the Polynesian harpooner: “But I don’t fancy having a man smoking in bed with me. It’s dangerous. Besides, I ain’t insured.”
Margaret Guroff is the editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
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Filed under: Education, Experiential education, life, sail training | Tags: Experiential education, sail training, Tall Ship Education Academy, Tall Ship Semester for Girls
From the Tall Ship Education Academy blog:
The Tall Ship Education Academy, like many wonderful non profits, has been losing significant funding over the past year of economic turmoil. Because of this, our Board of Directors recently made the tough decision to suspend operations of the Tall Ship Education Academy for the next year or two.
During this suspension, we will not run our programs: Tall Ship Semester for Girls, Girls Summer at Sea or Women’s Challenge. We will become a fully volunteer organization and close our office at SF State.
This year, we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the very first Tall Ship Semester for Girls. As many of you know, the Tall Ship Education Academy began with a pilot project in 1998 run by Caitlin Schwarzman as part of her Masters Thesis at SF State University. Due to its success, Mercy High School supported Caitlin in expanding the one week pilot to a full semester program. In the spring of 1999, twelve girls explored the California and Mexico coast aboard the Californian. The next year, Nettie Kelly joined the 2nd Tall Ship Semester for Girls, as an instructor and the following year became the director of the program.
We are very proud of the work that we have done in providing a life-changing experience for over 125 girls. Our continued contact with these girls shows that they are confidently pursuing education, participating in their community and exploring the world. We will look to this core group of people to be a part of our research efforts in the near future, and as integral members of the next phase of this organization.
In ten years, the Tall Ship Semester for Girls has evolved into a Western Association of Schools and Colleges accredited non profit educational organization. We are recognized for providing powerful developmental experiences for Bay Area young women. We are truly a community based organization, depending on the support of individuals, organizations, foundations and institutions for our existence. The suspension of our programs is in some ways a symptom of the health of our community.
We want to thank you for your interest in and support of the Tall Ship Education Academy. We have done our work because you have been a part of our vision for girls’ education. We hope you will continue to play that vital role in our community.
Hopefully their suspension will be short-lived because this is exactly the type of program which we should be encouraging, promoting, supporting and celebrating. It’s where sail training can do it’s best work.
This is what will be missed.
YouTube – Tall Ship Semester for Girls
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Filed under: Education, Oceans, life, maritime | Tags: American Museum of Natural History, blue whale, Fail Whale, New Bedford Whaling Museum, Twitter
If you’ve been part of Twitter for any period of time, you have to be familiar with the most famous white Cetacean since Moby-Dick, the Twitter Fail Whale. Even Captain Ahab would have cursed the sight of this dreaded monster of the world wide web.
For Internet eons we’ve believed that the name “Twitter” was derived from something to do with the noise small birds made or something. But leave it to the scholars at the New Bedford Whaling Museum who have the waterfront covered when it comes to whale research to dredge up the following reference on page 197 of the dusty “Report of the Commissioner for the year ending June 30, 1902 : Aquatic products in arts and industries : fish oils, fats, and waxes. Fertilizer from aquatic products” by Charles H. Stevenson.
“The term ‘twitter,’ which has been previously referred to as applied to the thread-like or membranous substance ranging through the contents of the case, is also applied to the lining of that reservior. This is from 2 to 3 inches thick, glutinous, and extremely tough. In decapitating the sperm whale, especially in severing near the bunch of the neck, a very sharp spade is required to cut through this tough and elastic formation. Although it is very difficult to manipulate, an economical whaleman never throws this substance away. Since it can not be boiled out with the case, for the reason above given, it is saved and run through the pots with the fat-lean after the case and junk have been cooked.” (New Bedford Whaling Museum post)
Eureka! The crack staff of New Bedford Whaling Museum has done it again in discovering another pearl in the world of whaling wisdom (www), and now Twitter. While it all makes much more sense and the Fail Whale has new meaning, it does beg the question of how did they get to page 197 and stay alert enough to notice the word “twitter.”
But all is not calm seas in the www (world of whaling wisdom). It seems that the American Museum of Natural History’s Blue Whale’s tale is a little bent out of shape over this breakthrough as can be seen from its bitter tweet yesterday.
Whaling has not occurred in this country for over 100 years, so I hope that @NatHistoryWhale can migrate to a happier place and learn to forgive and forget.
Now that you know that “twitter” is not named after bird sounds but rather a “thick, glutinous, and extremely tough thread-like or membranous and elastic formation from a decapitated sperm whale” I’m sure you’ll want to be part of it. If you join make sure you follow @NatHistoryWhale, @whalingmuseum and me.
In case you want some real Internet reporting on this topic, the great Read Write Web had a comprehensive post on The Story of the Fail Whale – How An Unknown Artist’s Work Became a Social Media Brand Thanks To the Power of Community and Caroline McCarthy covered this story yesterday on cnet’s The Social blog in a post titled Oh, the irony: ‘Twitter’ used to be whaling slang.
Finally, if you’re into whale stuff, and you should be if you read this blog, the New Bedford Whaling Museum launched a blog a few months ago which is pretty awesomely educational. Check out this video which they brought to my attention on the important debate underway about whale education.
YouTube – The Onion: Are Our Children Learning Enough About Whales?
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Filed under: Education, Oceans, life, maritime art, storytelling | Tags: cephalopod, Santa Monica Pier Aquarium
It was no April Fool’s joke, but rather a malicious act by an sneaky cephalopod. On February 12, 2009, the site of the crime was the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium. Here’s what happened:
Turning lemons into lemonade (which is probably better than turning octopus into fried calamari) the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium is running The Octopus Flood Art & Story Contest. There are 2 categories Grades K – 2 and 3 – 5 and lots of valuable prizes are at stake. So join in the fun and spin a yarn about this cephalopodic misadventure. Entry deadline is April 15, 2009.
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Filed under: Education, maritime, maritime heritage, sail training, tall ships | Tags: Erie Maritime Museum, maritime heritage, Mystic, tall ships, US Brig Niagara
Some very bad news for tall ships, maritime heritage preservation and professional mariners today.
Plans for U.S. Brig Niagara’s sailing season could be sunk by Kevin Flowers for the Erie-Times News March 25, 2009 (download copy)
Foreclosure For Tall Ship Mystic by Joe Wojtas for The Day (New London) – March 25, 2009 (download copy)
I’ll be writing more about this later.
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Filed under: Education, FotoFriday, photography, social media | Tags: Christiaan Conover, Flickr.com, Foto Friday, Massachusetts Maritime Academy, photography
This week we calling it Flickr Friend FotoFriday. WTF!
Here’s a shot by fellow maritime blogger and Massachusetts Maritime Academy cadet Christiaan Conover.
On Tuesday we posted about this historic USCG Boat House being temporarily relocated. (Historic Coast Guard Boat House Gets A Lift) Christiaan saw the post via Twitter and snapped this pic from his room at Mass Maritime at the tug and barge and boat house enter the Cape Cod Canal. Nothing like learning from experience!
Christiaan has a great blog and you can follow him on Twitter too!
