USCG Canned Meat?
I will admit to doing a double take when I saw the USCG press release announcing “Coast Guard Cutter Harriet Lane returns home after 9-week patrol.” I wondered, who would name a ship the Harriet Lane? For the record, the USCGC Harriet Lane was named for Harriet Lane, niece and official hostess of President James Buchanan. The current Harriet Lane is also not the first. There was also a revenue cutter by the same name in 1857.
For those familiar with sailor slang, however, Harriet Lane is also slang for canned meat. Harriet Lane was a murder victim, who was chopped up by her killer around 1875. Merchant sailors came to call any canned meat, Harriet Lane. Fanny Adams, also a long remembered, if also dismembered, murder victim, became Royal Navy slang for tinned meats as well. To the best of my knowledge, there is no USCG Fanny Adams, thank goodness.
This week 1,000 Royal Navy Medical Officer Journals were made available to the public at the British National Archives in Kew. The journals are revealing, if often disturbing by modern standards. From drunken mutinies to disease outbreaks to a walrus attack, the journals paint a colorful picture of 18th- and 19th-century ship life.
Given all the reporting on piracy off the Horn of Africa, we hear very little about another crisis – the flood of refugees fleeing the instability and chaos of Somalia’s clan wars. Last year 74,000 people crossed the Gulf of Aden in smugglers’ boats to reach Yemen, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR.
Yesterday we posted that scientists are not sure where all the plastic floating in the vast Atlantic and Pacific garbage patches is going. Sadly, the answer is probably not that a big vacuum cleaner is vacuuming the stuff up to recycle it. Nevertheless, here is a great story about 
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This sounds completely nuts. It might possibly work but there is the question of scale to be addressed. Hurricanes, or typhoons in the Pacific, need warm water to provide energy to the storm. The idea is to built a fleet of submarines to dive in the path of a typhoon and pump cold water to the surface to deprive the storm of its source of power. (I’m not making this up.)