Category:
Oceans and Maritime Pursuits

Marco Dog and Cat Food—With Kelp!

And we all know how much cats and dogs love to chew kelp!



Posted By: Paul - Sat Nov 04, 2023 - Comments (2)
Category: Oceans and Maritime Pursuits, Cats, Dogs, Twentieth Century

The Violents, “Alpens Ros”

Not much of a plot, but lots of eye candy and a catchy tune.

The group's Discogs page.

Posted By: Paul - Fri Sep 29, 2023 - Comments (4)
Category: Music, Oceans and Maritime Pursuits, 1960s, Europe, Attractiveness, Sexiness, Allure and Personal Magnetism

Spermy

Multiple copies for sale at Abebooks.

"Published by The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, CT, 1950. A brief introduction to whales."



Thanks to Richard Bleiler.

Posted By: Paul - Tue Sep 12, 2023 - Comments (2)
Category: Innuendo, Double Entendres, Symbolism, Nudge-Nudge-Wink-Wink and Subliminal Messages, Nature, Oceans and Maritime Pursuits, Books, Reader Recommendation

Miss Crustacean

In 1951, Meta Justice became the first "Miss Crustacean." She was awarded the title at the annual crab derby in Crisfield, Maryland. She died last year (2022), and her obituary mentions the title. So it must have been something she was proud of.

Salisbury Daily Times - Aug 27, 1951



Baltimore Sun - Aug 27, 1951



In 1952, the festival committee decided to change the title from "Miss Crustacean" to "Miss Hard Crab Derby." They explained that Miss Crustacean "turned out to be altogether too cryptic, with people in general not understanding what it meant."

However, in subsequent years the title reverted to being "Miss Crustacean." Evidently that was less cryptic than "Miss Hard Crab Derby."

Baltimore Evening Sun - Sep 1, 1953



The annual tradition of bestowing the title of "Miss Crustacean" on a young woman continues to this day in Crisfield. Check out the highlights of the 2019 competition below.

More info: National Hard Crab Derby

Posted By: Alex - Fri Jul 21, 2023 - Comments (3)
Category: Awards, Prizes, Competitions and Contests, Oceans and Maritime Pursuits, 1950s

DeVere Baker, Mormon Raftmaker

His page at a Mormon Wiki.

He had the goal of sailing ocean currents in order to prove the voyages spoken of in the Book of Mormon were possible.... His failures were many, and often embarrassing, so embarrassing that the press and Mormons in general began to look the other way, rather than report on his adventures.... Nor were Baker’s dreams confined to the ocean. In a unique combination of science-fiction and Mormon theology, he authored several stories focused on a beautiful alien girl named ‘Quetara.’ A human scientist is kidnapped by her crew and falls in love with her, learning in the process how God came to be, billions of years previously, and how evolution allowed the endless variation of species to develop on each world in a grand, perpetual Cosmic experiment overseen and controlled by Deity. A subtext of this was ostensibly good latter-day doctrine – that countless other worlds, including, of course, the wise and alluring Quetara’s own planet, were inhabited by people just like us.


Read a long essay here.



Posted By: Paul - Wed Jul 19, 2023 - Comments (5)
Category: Eccentrics, Explorers, Frontiersmen, and Conquerors, Oceans and Maritime Pursuits, Religion, Twentieth Century

“Lucky” Fluckey:  The Only Submarine Commander Ever to Blow Up a Train

So long as submersible vessels are in the news...

His Wikipedia page.

In one of the more unusual incidents in the war, Fluckey sent a landing party ashore to set demolition charges on a coastal railway line, destroying a 16-car train.[4] This was the sole landing by U.S. military forces on the Japanese home islands during World War II. Fluckey ordered that this landing party be composed of crewmen from every division on his submarine. "He chose an eight-man team with no married men to blow up the train," Captain Max Duncan said, who served as Torpedo Officer on the Barb during this time. "He also wanted former Boy Scouts because he thought they could find their way back. They were paddling back to the ship when the train blew up."[5] The selected crewmen were Paul Saunders, William Hatfield, Francis Sever, Lawrence Newland, Edward Klinglesmith, James Richard, John Markuson, and William Walker. Hatfield wired the explosive charge, using a microswitch under the rails to trigger the explosion.





Posted By: Paul - Sat Jun 24, 2023 - Comments (0)
Category: Daredevils, Stuntpeople and Thrillseekers, Military, Oceans and Maritime Pursuits, War, 1940s, Asia

Battery Tanker

The Japanese company PowerX is building a tanker that will ship energy — not as oil, but rather as electricity stored in giant batteries. It will be shipping this electricity to islands off the coast of Japan.

Why not transmit the electricity the traditional way, with wires? Because undersea cables in this region would be vulnerable to earthquakes. So the company sees a market for delivering the electricity via ships.

More info: New Atlas

Posted By: Alex - Mon Jun 05, 2023 - Comments (0)
Category: Oceans and Maritime Pursuits, Transportation, Power Generation

Jamy Verheylewegen, Underwater Artist

We've previously posted about Zarh H. Pritchard, who pioneered the art of painting underwater. A later practitioner of this subaquatic form of art was Jamy Verheylewegen who begain painting underwater in 1983.

Some info from the site of photographer Christian Voulgaropoulos (with help from Google Translate):

Settled for a few years in Hyères, in the South of France, Jamy devotes himself to his eminently original sport/art: underwater painting.
Harnessed like a professional diver; diving suit, suit and bottles of compressed air, He descends to a depth of about ten meters to spend more than an hour, installed near a "drop-off", to transcribe, using his colored tubes, the wonders of the sea.
He has a secret process, that of depositing colors based on pigments on a prepared canvas and this, in a definitive way. The easel is held to the ground by heavy weights, otherwise the wood it is made of will cause it to rise to the surface.

Source: voulgaropoulos.com



Source: Odd and Eccentric People (Time-Life Books)

Posted By: Alex - Sun Jun 04, 2023 - Comments (0)
Category: Art, Oceans and Maritime Pursuits

Device for attracting submarines and the like

Submarines were a new menace during World War I, but Louis Schramm figured he had a way to defeat them. His invention (Patent No. 1,143,233) involved powerful electromagnets that would pull submarines to the sides of a ship where they could be electrified, killing their crew.

Critics pointed out that the magnets would attract anything metallic to the side of the ship, including mines.

Posted By: Alex - Mon May 08, 2023 - Comments (3)
Category: Boats, Oceans and Maritime Pursuits, War, Patents, 1910s

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Alex Boese
Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction, science-themed books such as Elephants on Acid and Psychedelic Apes.

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Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.

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