There is so much Rococo revival glop in the Flagler mansion in Palm Beach it makes you want to poke your eyes out, or at least go to Ikea and stare at cardboard boxes till your vision recovers. That was the drawing room, with the art case Steinway grand piano. The music room has it’s own organ. Flagler was a partner in Standard Oil, and then went on to build a railway down the East Coast of Florida and invent…
They look tanned and healthy enough, but I’m pretty sure that most of the population of West Palm Beach is undead. They are too tanned to be vampires so my money is on zombies. How else do you explain the huge flock of vultures circling over the town center… … and roosting on window ledges. You can see it in their eyes, that blank, fashion conscious, Fox News watching, undead stare. Who else but zombies would be tearing down an…
St Augustine is the oldest European town in the USA, founded in 1565, 20 years before the Roanoke colony and 55 years before the Pilgrim Fathers landed. However, it has been blanked out of American history books, because the people who founded it spoke Spanish and not English. The Spanish got corn tortillas and beans from the Native Americans, while the Pilgrims got turkey and sweet potatoes. If we really understood American history we would all be eating tacos for…
This, my friends, is the business end of a Saturn V, the rocket that took men to the moon. After all these years, and in spite of the best efforts of the Russians, the Chinese, and Elon Musk, the Saturn V is still the most powerful rocket ever built. It could deliver 140 metric tons to low earth orbit. That’s more than twice the Falcon Heavy’s payload, six times the Space Shuttle’s, bigger than anything the Russians ever had, and…
The passage from Florida to Grand Bahama and back is one of the shortest and cheapest cruise ship journeys anywhere. In fact when times are bad, millions of spam messages appear giving them away “free” (except for taxes, port fees, drinks, portholes, and anything you do on Grand Bahama that actually involves having fun). The cruise ship terminal is in an industrial port, with a big container transshipment facility, dry dock, oil storage, and limestone quarry. One of Grand Bahama’s…