A narrowboat (all one word) is a craft restricted to the British Isles, which are connected all over by a nerve-map of human-made canals. To go up and down hills, the canals are spangled with locks (chambers in which boats can be raised or lowered by filling or emptying them with water.) As Terry says above, the width of the locks was somewhat randomly determined, and as a result, the British Isles have a narrow design of lock - and a narrowboat to fit through them. A classic design was seventy feet long and six feet wide. Starting in the 18th century, and competing directly with trains, canal “barges” were an active means of transport and shipping. They were initially pulled along the towpaths by horses, and you can still see some today!
Later, engines were developed.
Even after the trains won the arms race, it was a fairly viable freight service right up until WW2. It’s slow travel, but uses few resources and requires little human power, with a fairly small crew (of women, in WW2) being capable of shifting two fully laden boats without consuming much fossil fuel.
In those times the barges were designed with small, cramped cabins in which the boaters and their families could live.
During its heyday the narrowboat community developed a style of folk art called “roses and castles” with clear links to fairground art as well as Romani caravan decor. They are historically decorated with different kinds of brass ornaments, and inside the cabins could also be distinctively painted and decorated.
Today, many narrowboats are distinctively decorated and colorful - even if not directly traditional with “roses and castles” they’ll still be bright and offbeat. A quirky name is necessary. All narrowboats, being boats, are female.
After a postwar decline, interest in the waterways was sparked by a leisure movement and collapsing canals were repaired. Today, the towpaths are a convenient walking/biking trail for people, as they connect up a lot of the mainland of the UK, hitting towns and cities. Although the restored canals are concrete-bottomed, they’re attractive to wildlife. Narrowboats from the 1970s onward started being designed for pleasure and long-term living. People enjoy vacationing by hiring a boat and visiting towns for a cuter, comfier, slower version of a campervan life. And a liveaboard community sprang up - people who live full-time on boats. Up until the very restrictive and nasty laws recently passed in the UK to make it harder for travelling peoples (these were aimed nastily at vanlivers and the Romani, and successfully hit everyone) this was one of the few legal ways remaining to be a total nomad in the UK.
Liveaboards can moor up anywhere along the canal for 28 days, but have to keep moving every 28 days. (Although sorting out the toilet and loading up with fresh water means that a lot of people move more frequently than that.) you can also live full-time in a marina if they allow it, or purchase your own mooring. In London, where canal boats are one of the few remaining cheapish ways to live, boats with moorings fetch the same prices as houses. It can be very very hard for families to balance school, parking, work, and all the difficulties of living off-grid- but many make it work. It remains a diverse community and is even growing, due to housing pressures in the UK. Boats can be very comfortable, even when only six feet wide. When faced with spending thousands of pounds on rent OR mooring up on a nice canal, you can see why it seems a romantic proposition for young people, and UK television channels always have slice-of-life documentaries about young folks fixing up their very own quirky solar-powered narrowboat. I don’t hate; I did it myself.
If you’re lucky, you might even meet some of the cool folks who run businesses from their narrowboats: canal-side walkers enjoy bookshops, vegan bakeries, ice-cream boats, restaurants, artists and crafters. There are Floating Markets and narrowboat festivals. It’s generally recognised that boaters contribute quite a lot to the canal - yet there are many tensions between different kinds of boaters (liveaboards vs leisure boaters vs tourists) as well as tensions with local settled people, towpath users like cyclists, and fishermen. I could go on and on explaining this rich culture and dramas, but I won’t.
Phillip Pullman’s Gyptians are a commonly cited example of liveaboards - although they were based on the narrowboat liveaboards that Pullman knew in Oxford, their boats are actually Dutch barges. Dutch barges make good homes but are too wide to access most of the midlands and northern canals, and are usually restricted to the south of the UK. So they’re accurate for Bristol/London/Oxford, and barges are definitely comfier to film on. (Being six feet wide is definitely super awkward for a boat.) but in general Dutch barges are less common, more expensive and can’t navigate the whole system.
However, apart from them, there are few examples of narrowboat depictions that escaped containment. So it’s quite interesting that there is an entire indigenous special class of boat, distinctive and highly specialised and very cute, with an associated culture and heritage and folk art type, known to all and widely celebrated, and ABSOLUTELY UNKNOWN outside of the UK - a nation largely known around the world for inflicting its culture on others. They’re a strange, sweet little secret - and nobody who has ever loved one can resist pointing them out for the rest of their lives, or talking about them when asked to. Thank you for asking me to.
My take on this missing submarine is it’s part of the thing where since Harambe the world operates on novelistic logic. Like, it’s not even that it’s poetic justice for these billionaires to die so much as that it’s a dramatic event arising from the confluence of several major themes of the contemporary world
Okay, today I got up early (cause setting my alarm ain’t no thang anymore) to talk to a landscaper about tilling up and leveling the lower backyard, then I finished distributing the last of the medium hemlock mulch, went back to the landscaping yard and got half a yard of bark nuggets, distributed them as a durable top layer around trees, and assembled maybe half the weight bench before it got too dark
You can tell my mulch-pitching muscles have been developing, because they held up long enough for me to get fucking exhausted
And also by the way I got back-under-the-shoulderblade pains the night and day after but they weren’t so bad I had to adjust my sleeping position to compensate
Yeah, so when I grab the bottom corner of my stomach now not only is there no room for the pinky finger but the ring finger doesn’t really have purchase to get involved in the grab
Yeah I think the rest of the year I’ll commission some self-contained contracting work – leveling the lower backyard, the fence, possibly the garage door – do the things remaining re: the landscaping yard (filling in Blueberry Hill & Strawberry Ridge, maybe replacing the walkway to the front door and backyard with smooth pebbles now that Darwin in the driveway blocks the sun and turns the grass there now to muddy morass).
Chase down the last few % of putting every room in order and have them cleaned, get my corded screwdriver and stud-finder and stuff to put up these cool corner-thru shelves in the garage and the clamps for my Russian bedroom wall rug
Then sit down and really plan out to get the house reno done next year – also plan to get back in the medical system when my insurance rolls over next year.
Texas has become the latest in a growing number of states to pass legislation that LGBTQ rights groups say targets drag shows, banning “sexually oriented performances” that take place in the presence of minors. […]
The measure, slated to take effect September 1, prohibits businesses from hosting “sexually oriented” performances in which someone is nude or appeals to the “prurient interest in sex” in the presence of minors. Those who break the law are likely to face hefty fines — up to $10,000 per violation.
Performers face much harsher penalties, and those caught violating the law’s new restrictions on drag shows could be charged with a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine.
An earlier version of the bill, introduced in March by state Sen. Bryan Hughes ®, sought to explicitly ban certain drag performances, but House and Senate lawmakers in March agreed to remove the direct references to drag, opting instead to expand what the state considers an illegal public performance of “sexual conduct.”
Luckily this will not affect one of Texas’ most beloved sports traditions, the Dallas Cowboys’ halftime performances of chaste Gregorian chant
Honestly cyberpunk’s not that insightful about or even really about neoliberalism so much as that a lot of the early defining stuff should really be counted as part of the “neon noir” 80s detective renaissance, so obviously “a client hires a private agent to resolve some shady issue in a world too complex and multilayered for legitimate authorities to exercise hegemony over” is the basic narrative drive
Okay, today I got up early (cause setting my alarm ain’t no thang anymore) to talk to a landscaper about tilling up and leveling the lower backyard, then I finished distributing the last of the medium hemlock mulch, went back to the landscaping yard and got half a yard of bark nuggets, distributed them as a durable top layer around trees, and assembled maybe half the weight bench before it got too dark
You can tell my mulch-pitching muscles have been developing, because they held up long enough for me to get fucking exhausted
the claim in Ice T’s memoir that the pimp outfits are for the girls (rather than for the johns), to advertise themselves as someone outside conventional propriety that can help you get in on some kind of hustle, lef tan impression on me. It’s got me re-evaluating intellectual cliques. It’s easy to frame documents as part of some factional struggle. But maybe their true audience is within the faction. Professors writing to legitimize themselves to their students, etc
Okay, today I got up early (cause setting my alarm ain’t no thang anymore) to talk to a landscaper about tilling up and leveling the lower backyard, then I finished distributing the last of the medium hemlock mulch, went back to the landscaping yard and got half a yard of bark nuggets, distributed them as a durable top layer around trees, and assembled maybe half the weight bench before it got too dark
Weird fact: there's kind of a divide in the car fucker community where the guys (it's all guys) who full on fuck the cars tend to be straight (and accordingly treat the cars as feminine) but the guys who get off on breathing in exhaust fumes/smoke tend to be gay (and accordingly have fantasies about other men revving their cars into their faces). There's definitely something psychosexual going on there.
New weed vape batteries (the $18-ish actual vape units, with a cartridge in about the size of a pen) that seem to have much improved airflow, consumes the cartridge maybe 1.2x faster but for 1.5x effect
Hm, when I say LA and early Portland parts of my life are starting to become mixed up in memory really that’s late LA after I started going to the dojo. Earlier stuff I can remember by thinking directly about the time but like, people or bars I knew then won’t populate general “people (or bars) I’ve known” memory lists
Stalin’s USSR = most woke nation to ever exist. You heard it here first, folks.
Imagine, for a moment, trying to figure out what the fuck is being measured on a scale where the USSR is a 10 and Portland, Oregon is an 8 without the excruciating knowledge of the hyperspecific neuroses of fascists over the past decade
