More snowy beach pictures

First two taken at the Atlantis early Saturday morning, the third on highway 70 in Morehead City around 11 or so Saturday morning. Someone knows how to drive a snow plow down east. Mardi Gras pictures below. The band is called the Haw River Rounders; they play out around the Triangle, so keep an eye and ear open for them. The seafood gumbo was as good as it looks, maybe better.

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Snowy beach pictures

These kinda speak for themselves. The last few are from this year's snow-covered Gloucester Mardi Gras. More mardi Gras pictures and a few others later.

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One man's heroic struggle against the intractable forces of nature

A photo essay:


Nature is a trickster, a jester, a player of practical jokes. With the one hand, she builds pristine beaches with wide, flat, inviting expanses of sand. With the other, she hurls hurricanes and tidal forces against these beaches, turning the sand to dust and muck, and carrying it to less accommodating locales.

But one man is making a stand against the madness. Armed only with a 12 inch diameter pipe, a couple of massive pumps, and a bulldozer, he's rebuilding beaches up and down the Carolina coast. Not every beach visitor is lucky enough to see him at work.


Yes, he works through the night to make sure that the beach is still there the next time you return to toss a tennis ball into the ocean with your dog, or bury your friends in the sand and give them fake boobies.

(MORE)All this work reminds me for some reason of the story of King Canute. As most of us learn it, Canute, the King of Denmark and England, exhibited the kind of hubris known only in Greek tragedies when he, believing himself to be a supreme ruler, attempted to stop the tides from rising. A more generous reading of the tale holds that Canute was a pretty smart guy who was more interested in making sure that his subjects and royal court understood that he knew the limits of his earthly powers, and did the tidal thing to let them all know he wasn't fooled by their fawning.

Nonetheless, i wish our heroic bulldozer operator Godspeed, and hope he doesn't uncover any alien meteors while undertaking this thankless task.

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Beach blogging

Oh, and if you didn't know, it's National Bourbon Heritage Month.


I hope you enjoy it as much as i am.

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