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2015 July

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

The-Coconut-Telegraph-w-Coconuts

Since 2002. Published Wednesdays and Saturdays

Submit anything of a positive nature, unless it’s breakthrough stuff to island@bigpinekey.com
(Ed: Although all advertisers’ contracts have expired I’m still going to display their ads for free until they get used to the new CT. Hopefully they will all want to keep advertising.)

big show town fireworks[Fourth of July Fireworks on July 3 instead] The Big Pine and Lower Keys Rotary Club hosts the annual Independence Day Fireworks at the Big Pine Community Park, at 31009 Atlantis Road, activities include live music headlined by Haywire, food and ice cold beverages accompanied by games and activities for both adults and kids. An expanded fireworks show is set around 9 p.m. Admission is free, but no coolers, pets or personal fireworks will be allowed. Gates open at 5 p.m. and a rain date, if necessary, is scheduled for Sunday, July 5. (What bird brain holds the Fourth of July fireworks on some other day? Oh, that’s right, this is Big Pine.)
munson-low-tideNights and days came and passed
And summer and winter
and the rain.
And it was good to be a little Island.
A part of the world
and a world of its own
All surrounded by the bright blue sea
Joni Mitchell suffered a brain aneurysm and is still unable to speak, according to fellow folk music legend David Crosby. Link
confederate flag poleHeck of a week for gay rednecks. They can get married, but they can’t leave the wedding reception in the “General Lee”.
Now more then ever work force needs affordable housing, the landlords have gotten greedy, with pipe line workers getting the rents to inflate, the landlords act like they are doing you a favor to rent you a place and do not care about the condition they are in. I’ve been living and working here for 25 years now renting a place that has mold and many other problems and this landloard who bought to flip does not seem to care. I would move if I could find something I could afford. Who do I report this to?
heaven1[Heaven For Sale] This really needs to become a song.
[Cars] “Low Rider” Remember? Not bad song, nice chicks, cool cars. Video
trumpet99This angel trumpet flower tree was at it’s peak Thursday at Octapussy Garden in Big Pine Key.
[“Name that poop”] Looks like ‘coon. If it happens during the night only, that would be a clue.
bouganvilla99Apple blossom bougainvillea in front of the Big Pine Key hardware store. (Ed: I somehow lost the beautiful picture the poster sent in so I’m posting this other one instead. I apologize to the poster)
[Keys Services] The attached document is a listing of social service providers located in Monroe county from Key West to Key Largo and into Florida City.  This document also includes a description of services provided and contact information.  There are several forms and applications at the end of the document that may be useful to you – Special Transportation Services and the Monroe County Special Needs Registry form. KeysServices v12a Binder1
pump-dollarsThe City of Key West recently did a survey of 376 participants that costs over $17000. That is $45.21 per respondent! I would have done it for just a thousand.
The AARP Calendar for July is here. Full Menu > Ongoing Events
GrillScrapings1
[“Name that poop”] It looks like raccoon poop and the berries were eaten by the culprit off a nearby palm (not coconut) tree. I had the same thing on my roof and saw raccoons up there. The berries were off my palm trees. The pile was very stinky. It’s either that or the poop is from a human after eating black beans and rice at the local diner.
buyer beware1[Crooks] Citizens Insurance wants to lighten their load, so they have allowed all these bogus insurance companies like Southern Oak and Tower Hill to take over your policy automatically if you don’t sign the waiver. A little research shows these companies are scams, and will not have enough money if a hurricane hits. Buyer beware.
[Marriage] As for the dissenting Justices who decried the 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision holding gays and lesbians have an inherent right to marry, may I remind the dissenters that gays and lesbians have existed probably since humanity was created, or crawled up out of the slime, or was seeded here by ETs, or however it came about. And may I also remind the dissenters of this from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”I assume even the dissenting justices agree that women, too, are endowed by their creator with the same unalienable rights.
scuba divers3Underwater music festival at Looe Key Reef. The event is scheduled July 11 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. For information, visit Link or call 305-872-2411.
The surprising ages of the Founding Fathers on July 4, 1776. For the Journal of the American Revolution, Todd Andrlik compiled a list of the ages of the key participants in the Revolutionary War as of July 4, 1776. Many of them were surprisingly young: Marquis de Lafayette–18, James Monroe–18, Gilbert Stuart–20, Aaron Burr–20, Alexander Hamilton–21, Betsy Ross–24, James Madison–25This is kind of blowing my mind because of the compression of history, I’d always assumed all these people were around the same age. But in thinking about it, all startups need young people. Hamilton, Lafayette, and Burr were perhaps the Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg of the War. Some more ages, just for reference: Thomas Jefferson–33, John Adams–40, Paul Revere–41, George Washington–44, Samuel Adams–53.The oldest prominent participant in the Revolution, by a wide margin, was Benjamin Franklin, who was 70 years old on July 4, 1776. Franklin was a full two generations removed from the likes of Madison and Hamilton. But the oldest participant in the war was Samuel Whittemore, who fought in an early skirmish at the age of 80.
rainbow-white-houseWhite House celebrates court ruling with rainbow makeover. Link
[Back From The Other Side] From personal experience, I can tell you that being in a coma is a wonderful thing, completely peaceful, no pain, no struggle. it’s only the people waiting for you to recover that have the stress and worry. Link
forks9This person really know how to set a table.
[A Violation Of The Public’s Trust Editorial] In the Oxford dictionary, “Fearmongering” is defined as, “The action of deliberately arousing public fear or alarm about a particular issue.” That sure sounds like what Kirk Zuelch, executive director of the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority, has been doing recently — making outrageous and false claims, all to divert the public’s attention from the real problems with the Cudjoe Key Wastewater plant.Zuelch wants to throw the open switch on the plant as soon as possible, dragon under the landfill be damned. According to Zuelch, the delay in opening the plant is causing homeowners to dump raw sewage directly into canals, which is blatantly untrue. He also stated that the delay is primarily the fault of those who have filed lawsuits against the agency over environmental concerns. But at no time has he or any member of the FKAA Board taken responsibility for the poor decisions they’ve made from the beginning that has landed them in this predicament.So what if the FKAA is going to have to put in a deep well and wait for testing on the shallow wells before the plant can open. Had they not been in such a hurry to push the plans through in the first place, perhaps this court-mandated issue would already be resolved. Unfortunately, the fear-mongering is parroted by county officials, one of who stated in a radio interview Friday morning that homeowners are not able to get Certificates of Occupancy to move into brand new homes because the plant isn’t operational. Unfortunately for the com- missioner, county staff said they have no knowledge of anyone waiting for a CO, saying they even have temporary solutions for homeowners without septic systems until the plant goes online if anyone finds them- selves in this position.

The bottom line is that the public’s trust has been violated. The public has not been dealt with in an honest and open manner regarding the plant from the beginning. Until there is definitive proof that the plant is safe to operate, until the shallow wells have been tested and the public can be assured that there is no risk of contamination, the plant should not open. No further discussion necessary. Instead of making blatantly false and misleading statements over the air-waves, maybe Zuelch and staff should be spending their time assuring the public that environmental safety and public health are their primary concerns. Perhaps it’s time for a clean sweep of the FKAA board, starting with the director. Or have our elected officials become so inured to falsehoods and half-truths that they no longer understand that those in positions of power over the public’s money are expected to be honest. — The Citizen

coke99Support the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation drink excessive amounts of sugar!
[Dining in the Keys] Yes folks they do taste like chicken–iguanas. They are an invasive species and should be dealt with as required–killed. All you bunny huggers get a life. If you want to do something positive stop the government from euthanizing kitties & puppies. Back to imported pests. There are no laws protecting these reptiles. It is shown that they eat eggs of endangered species and also protected plants. They also spread disease. They should be killed. If you don’t want to eat them give them to your commercial fishermen friends for bait.My preferred method for cooking. Cut off the tail & skin it. Next rub it vigorously with key lime, sprinkle it with sea salt, & put it on the cooler side of the grill & slowly roast till your level of doneness. Remember if you over cook it it’ll end up like a flip flop. Then a couple of shakes of Louisiana Hot Sauce, and pop a cold beer and monge. This recipe is courtesy of US Army Special Forces field survival course.
hula family danceA long time ago, Hawaii was a mystical and magical place (and still is today in many ways). What made Hawaii especially magical in ages past was that there were shamans called Kahunas that lived on its emerald islands. It is said that these individuals experienced the true nature of Reality, in which they realized several critical, defining things. These principals were then later taught to others in order to help guide humanity towards a more fully realized state of being.In the early 20th century, with the rise of New Thought, there was an individual by the name of Max Long who linked the teachings of the Kahunas to a theory of metaphysics he was developing. The result was the 7 Huna Principals, Long’s integration of the two.The 7 Huna Principles:
Ike ~ the world is what you think it is.
Kala ~ there are no limits.
Makia ~ energy flows where attention goes.
Mana wa ~ now is the moment of power.
Aloha ~ to love is to be “happy with”.
Mana ~ all power comes from within.
Pono ~ effectiveness is the measure of truth
GrillScrapings1
[Sloan] Is it coincidence that Sloan falls for a homeless jailbird and within a month he chooses to be homeless too?
iguana-dogsiguana-dead9These two Rat Terriers are top-notch iguana hunters!  The two iguana’s were killed within four days of each other and were each over four feet long.  They were much bigger than the dogs, but never had a chance as the dogs know exactly where to bite them!
America has turned into a nation of kissy-face-huggy-wimps. The do-gooders have been brainwashing us to go along with their turn the other cheek bullshit for so long that we have become the laughingstock of the planet. Let’s look at the score. Back in the day before the Whimps took over it was like this. WW1 victory, WW2 victory. Then the whimps took control. Korea loss, Viet Nam loss, Granada victory, Middle East loss (still in progress), Afghanistan loss, the dollar loosing big time. What will it take to turn around this downward out of control spiral? Too bad the Americans don’t have the balls to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and tell the world screw you, we’re Americans, quit worrying about what others think about us and get on with building America into the great country our Founders intended. God blessing America is the only thing that can save us because we don’t have the motivation to save ourselves.
mcdonalds9Here’s McDonald’s answer to those who want $15/hr pay. McDonald’s first “self-serve” being tested now.
Music of the American Civil War. Video
van halen guitarVan Halen: My playing style really grew from the fact that I couldn’t afford a distortion pedal. I had to try to squeeze those sounds out of my guitar. The first real work I did was in my bedroom. I added pickups, because I didn’t like the sound of the originals. I couldn’t afford a router–I didn’t even know what a router was–so I started ham­mering away with a screwdriver. That didn’t work at all. Chunks of wood flew off and there was sawdust fly­ing all over the place. But I was on a mission. I knew what I wanted and I just kept at it until I finally got there.Necks: Most guitar necks are too round on the back, so I took sandpaper and reshaped the neck to be very flat. I actually re-fretted a few guitars early on because I wanted to shave the fin­gerboard down and make the neck even flatter. The flatter it was, the farther I could bend a string without fretting out, or choking the sound when the string hits a fret higher on the neck. The other issue, with Fenders, at least, was the clear lac­quer they’d put on the neck. When you sweat, your fingers either slide all over the place or get sticky. I couldn’t stand that, so when I built my first guitar, I used natural wood. My own sweat and oil would soak in to make it smooth. It took a lot of playing to get it that way but, eventually, it just felt so much better than any synthetic product you could put on there.Whammy Bar: Vibrato bars (also called whammy bars or tremolos) just didn’t stay in tune. The problem was the nut-the string guides at the end of the guitar neck. On the first album I used a standard, non-locking Fender tremolo. The string is angled down from the nut to the tuning pegs, cre­ating tension that, after the string slides back and forth when you use the whammy bar, keeps the string from returning to its original slot. I made my own nut with really smooth indentations-big and round like the bottom of a boat. I put a drop of 3-In­-One oil in there, too, so the string would be extra slippery. On top of that, instead of winding the string down on the tuning peg, creating an angle and causing that tension, I would wind it up so that, from the nut all the way back to the bridge, the string was level. Otherwise there could be hang-ups in the nut that would make the guitar go out of tune when you went crazy on the whammy bar. The only problem this caused was when you hit an open string, where your fingers aren’t holding it down. Without that tension, the string would pop out of the nut slot, so I’d have to remember to put my finger on the far side of the nut to hold things together.

Amps: If it was movable, or turntable, or anything that resembled something that could go up or down, I would mess with it to make the amp run hotter. I opened the amp up and saw this thing. I found out later it was a bias control, which controls the power to the output tubes. I’m poking around, and all of a sudden I touch this huge blue thing and my God, it was like being punched in the chest by Mike Tyson. My whole body flexed stiff, and it must have thrown me five feet. I’d touched a capacitor. I didn’t know they held voltage.

The Marshall amp I brought home from the store where I worked was only good if you turned it all the way up. Any lower and you’d lose the distortion. I needed that, but it was impossible to play anywhere with the volume that loud, so I tried everything, from leaving the thick plastic cover on it to facing it backwards to putting it face down. I’d blow a fuse twice an hour. Luckily, I stumbled onto the Variac transformer soon after. I’d bought another Marshall amp, and I had no idea that it was actually a European model. I plugged it in, and I’m waiting for it to warm up and thinking, I got ripped off here, there’s no sound coming out! Pissed off, I came back an hour later to give it another shot. I’d left the amp on the whole time. I didn’t know it was set on 220, so when I turn my guitar on it sounds like a full-blown Marshall, all the way up, except really, really quiet. That was when I realized there was something going on with the voltage. There were these cheesy light dimmers in the house, and I hooked it up to one of those. Of course I wired it backwards and shorted out the whole house, so I went down to a place in Pasa­dena and asked if there was some kind of industrial-size variable transformer that would let me adjust voltage, and they introduced me to the Variac. It’s just a huge light dimmer. I plugged it into the amp and controlled the voltage from that. That became my volume knob. I would set the voltage depending on the size of the room we were playing, getting all that feedback at any volume.

Pickups: My first real guitar was a Les Paul Goldtop. I was a total Eric Clapton freak, and I saw old pictures of him playing a Les Paul. Except his had humbuck­ing pickups, and mine had the soapbar, P-90 single coils. The first thing I did with that guitar was chisel it out in the back and put a humbucker in. When we were playing gigs, people kept saying, “How is he getting that sound out of single-coil soapbar pickups?” Since my hand was covering the humbucker, they never realized that I’d put it in.

When my guitar was black and white, I cut out my own pickguard so it would cover the holes from the pickup I’d removed. But when I painted red on top of the black and white, which is how it is now, it didn’t look cool with that black pickguard. It covered most of the paint job. I decided just to take the switch and cram it in the middle and put a nonworking pickup in the front because I didn’t use it. I wasn’t trying to trick anyone. Bot­tom line is, I didn’t know how to hook it back up.

The last real step for me was adding paraffin wax to my pickup. Pickups can have this really high-end squeal, like the an screech of feedback you sometimes hear when someone speaks into a microphone. I thought maybe what was causing that with a gui­tar was the coil windings vibrating. So what I did—and I have no idea where this idea came from—was buy a hot plate and bricks of paraffin, and borrow a Yuban coffee can from my mom to put the wax in. Of course I ruined a lot of pickups, because the plastic frames would melt before I had a chance to yank the pickup out. But finally, when I had a chance to really keep an eye on it, as soon as I saw the pickup start to heat up and shrivel a little bit I’d yank it out. Man, the first time I put that in—between the Variac, the beast that Marshall was, and now the pickup not having unwanted feedback—the combination was just ideal. That was heaven to me. When all those things came together, it was like, okay, I’m going crazy with the whammy bar, I got my Marshall with the Variac, there’s no stopping me

bill-monkeys
[Deaf Ear] In light of all the problems that have been brought to light regarding the BOCC, the FKAA, and the CRWS and the latest editorial in the KW Citizen something must be done. For a public agency to use extortion to force select property owners into giving up their property rights when they have already made use of the existing vehicle (easement) to install their water lines, meter boxes, and now sewer piping. I hand delivered a letter to an FKAA rep. requesting FKAA to explain why they won’t use the existing easement to put the grinder pump and included a SSEA, however in their arrogance they just blew me off and never responded. Who does the FKAA think they are? They are a public agency answerable to the People.Therefore I propose mandatory drug testing for all public officials, employees, and contractors. This also includes elected officials and boards of directors. The testing should be twice yearly randomly taken and shall be done by analyzing hair samples so as to identify users of illegal substances other than, but including marijuana, which lasts longest in urine samples. So there, now let’s hear it from the elitists who feel they’re above it all. Those things only apply to the peons.
library43[Stairs] Iowa State Law Library
[Rip-off] I went to the Happy Hour last week with my son at Looe Key Tiki Bar and we each had a couple of rum and cokes, then decided to get an order of the happy hour hot wings that were on the menu for $0.50 each. We ordered one dozen, but when the bill came we were told the menu was wrong and had to pay double the price! How long has this practice gone on? I guess I don’t usually order wings, but my son is visiting from college and likes them.Warn people at the time they order about the menu “change”, not when the bill comes. Guess they thought we were just tourists, but it will be remembered. The same kind of thing happened at The Wharf just after the same new owners took charge.
zipper mouthSometimes, my greatest accomplishment is just keeping my mouth shut.
We landed in Key West airport (EYW) in Florida, this was not one of the regular airplanes but the small aircraft that carries people around for pleasure. A very exciting aerial view indeed, saw many small Keys or Cays during this flight although I’ve added only a few in this video.
amen glass[Holy] Form your own opinion about what Jimmy Carter says. Personally, organized religions scare me. Link
Because it is season, none of the restaurants are buying and serving top quality grub. Gee, thanks locals for sticking us with that off season garbage and raising prices Spam is starting to look good!
beer bottles pile mugThe first thing on my Bucket list is to fill that bucket with beer!
[Captain Doom and Gloom] What really scares me is how the media is spinning us into oblivion with their advertising, twisted news broadcasts, and brain bending entertainment. Their methods of madness use religion, sex, race, money, greed, hate, horror, war and any other attention grabbing ploy to spin our minds towards their goal to change this planet from a true free world into a world full of air-headed dreamers, mixed race breeders, and holy roller followers who have lost any ideals or goals that are not orchestrated by the NWO (OWO) Rulers. We were warned years ago, that the media would do this and how dangerous it would become, but did we listen? No! Because we are too weak mentally to recognize what has happened to us. Only the older generations might see what has turned our planets over-breeding masses into fodder. Dog help us because we are not going to make it like this.
cuba flag girlPresident Barack Obama will announce Wednesday that the U.S. and Cuba have finalized an agreement to reopen embassies in each other’s capitals, a major step in ending hostilities between the Cold War foes. Yeah!
[Yeah Number 2] The Miami-Dade County Commission approved a proposal Tuesday to let police issue $100 civil citations or the equivalent of community service hours for possession of up to 20 grams of marijuana.
ftr from the right 75h
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Submit anything of a positive nature, unless it’s breakthrough stuff to island@bigpinekey.com