2069 Bits

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Many years ago, probably in the late '60s, I visited Mystic, Connecticut, where I saw what was described as recreations of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. They were tiny!

I asked if that was the actual size, or if these were scale models, and the costumed male docent assured me these were the actual size. I asked how many crew members each carried, and the docent told me 6 on the Nina, 9 on the Pinta, and 13 on the Santa Maria. There was no room in the holds, so the crew slept on deck. The Nina was so small that even 6 men sleeping on deck was crowded.

I believed him.

For the past 40 years, when I've seen those ships represented in movies, and the large crews they carried, I snorted. Historical inaccuracy!

Well, the docent was wrong. I don't know if he was stupid, or just teasing me, but what he told me, and what I believed for so many years, was simply not true. Here is the actual crew list. The Santa Maria carried 40, the Pinta 26, and the Nina 20.

Happy Columbus Day. Unless you're native American.

------------------------------

With all the moving I've done, and all the looking at houses when Daughter and Hercules were house-shopping, I've seen many bathrooms where the tub/shower has been placed against an outside wall, with a window above the tub.

Inevitably, the window sill rots from shower water, water gets into the wall, the wall softens, and you get moldy insulation and falling tile.

I have never understood why people allow this, when it's so easy to avoid the problem.

Some people cover the glass with a stick-on translucent covering, but people rarely put a curtain on the window, because "it gets wet".

Well, duh? Why don't they put a plastic curtain there, wider than the window and extending lower than the window sill? No more problem with shower water. Depending on the height of the top of the window, or the force of the water hitting the side of the curtain, an even better solution might be a second rod and shower curtain on that wall, cut short or installed high, reaching just past the top of the tub, so that when it's open it doesn't interfere with baths.

There's still a condensation problem. People think that if you have a window, you don't need an exhaust fan. Wrong. You need an exhaust fan because there's a window that will attract condensation, and the window should be double-paned to lessen the attraction.

So why are there rotted bathroom walls? They shouldn't exist.

(Many European bathroom showers don't have doors or curtains, or even enclosing walls. The shower head comes out of the wall, and there's a drain in the middle of the bathroom floor. It's actually kind of nice, but I've wondered about the soap scum problem involving the entire bathroom. On the other hand, it's easy to rinse the whole room down after scrubbing. You can even throw buckets of water around.)

------------------------

I'm still having problems with feeds. http://thesilkentouch.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default hasn't shown any posts since October 2, and http://www.blogger.com/feeds/19031106/posts/default had a burst of twelve posts last Friday, but nothing since. Bloglines insists this blog URL doesn't exist. I checked with several verifiers, and they all say there's nothing wrong.

I don't understand....

Later - I just discovered I'm not getting Bloglines feeds from OTHER blogs, either. The last post I got through Bloglines from http://www.shoeboxblog.com/ was September 29. They normally post several times a day. Feeds from http://svensto.blogspot.com/ also died on September 29. There are many others. Now I wonder if it's just me, or is it happening for others, too. Anyone else missing feeds? Bloglines "help" seems unaware there's a problem.

Something in Bloglines is broken - at least for me it is.