robot word games
naming boats and storms
Bad puns are a true passion of mine, and getting to see lots of boat names is a fun aspect of life near the water, because boat names often have puns. Boat names are weird because they say a lot about the owner, beyond, “I have a boat.” They say “I express myself through stickers.” Boat names are basically giant custom window decals: imagine designing your own peeing Calvin, your own stick figure family, your own Jesus and/or Darwin fish, your own Live Laugh Love wall art… done in the style of a super creepy pun in 10”-tall letters. Heaven!
I had the idea for a bad boat name twitter or instagram account, but not like, real ones that I’ve seen; like just making up sort of funny names that give you a chuckle but also make you tilt your head and think, “Huh, surprised you’d pay for that.” Here’s how I described the account in the notebook I wrote the idea in: “a twitter account of [made-up] sort-of funny boat names that are a. bad puns b. good portmanteaus or c. oddly-specific regarding the owner’s profession. They should *not* be like, holy effffffff that’s clever.” (An example for type A: “Rod Steward”. Bonus on this one for the 80s, a major boat vibe.)
There are, from my observations*, a handful of major categories of boat name. I don’t often find them falling outside of these buckets, although others certainly exist. I’ll illustrate my theory with some real examples I’ve seen with my own eyes:
[primarily nautical] puns. usually misogynistic, or actually just gross. Again, these are real things people spent time and money printing and shellacking to their boats: “Nauti Nurse”, “Bow Movement”.
“distinguished”, usually single words. aggressively-literary terms (“Saga”), or stage whisper references to old-money class signifiers (“Veritas”). Oh, did you spend some time in New Haven, too?
very literally about the boat itself, but trying to be figurative. This is done more elegantly with sailboats (“Vesper”) than power or sports fishing boats (“Menu Maker”). Sometimes these get… weird: “Windigo” I assume is a pun about being wind-powered and [probably] not about cannibalism? Cringe-y twee can usually fall into this category as well, but depending on the size of the boat it’s not tacky: “Gosling” for a tiny little sailboat is more cute than try-hard.
(any of the above, but more of types 2 and 3 than 1, in another language. I see a lot of Italian, some French, some Portuguese, etc.)
working/commercial fishing boats named for 1 or more [presumably real?] women. Watch Andre or The Perfect Storm for wistful, cinematic examples named after someone’s beloved wife or daughter. I regularly see a “Kimberly Ann”, an “Alice T”, and my favorite in this category because I really want it to be about a real person and not about the song: “Proud Mary”.
There are also twists and variations: Category 1 often have some angle on the owner’s profession, or former profession, or other source of money that they want to tell you about, but in a clever(?) way: “Brainwaves” for a retired neurologist; “Cash in Advance” for something very legit, I’m sure. (Note that these can’t fall into category 2 because a. they’re usually trying to be funny, and b. they’re references to HOW I MADE ENOUGH MONEY TO BUY THIS BOAT WHICH YOU KNOW IS EXPENSIVE, which is by definition, a very new money kind of sticker to put on your boat. also this applies to expensive boats but not yachts; yacht owners didn’t make their money from a job.)
Anyway the next time you find yourself strolling near a dock, check out some of the names and see how well my model holds up.
there’s no such thing as free shipping, part 56256546: “The servant economy also reinforces existing racial, socioeconomic and generational divides, often in an algorithmically surveyed and enforced way.”
the perfect house doesn’t exi—
I’ve never had Jarritos Mineragua but now it’s on my list as a potential alternate when I can’t find Topo Chico near me (which is always)
the WSJ discovers who’s got ~*tall girl energy*~ on Zoom (it’s a pretty mild article; if you can’t read through the paywall I’m happy to share, but that’s basically all there is to it: people hired remotely meeting their coworkers for the first time, and being sort of sweetly surprised that folks are taller or shorter than they expected. the comments are expectedly awful, bc WSJ)
here for any and all pieces about someone who has a “‘Talented Mr Ripley’ thing going on”
as we prepare for the first real hurricane of the season, in a place that historically didn’t have a hurricane season, Texas towns seek out new and infuriating ways to set the earth on fire**
* The breakdown is based on my own observations walking around various New England harbors — if you spend time in more exclusive settings, or different areas of the country/world, I hope there are some other types that I haven’t yet encountered, but that I very much look forward to studying. Naming things — especially things often purchased used, but that supposedly are bad luck to rename — is really hard! It’s always helpful to have a framework.
** my mental image of bitcoin mining is a sort of heart-tugging dystopian movie cartoon, like WALL-E: tumbleweeds roll past unmarked warehouses holding thousands of high-powered computers sweating profusely as they are forced by someone(?) to do tedious and complicated things (maybe fumbling with little robot T-rex arms to fold increasingly-complex paper airplanes that sometimes, adorably, catch fire) for eternity, or until they wither and disintegrate in their own heat. At some point, a newborn high-performance graphics processing card rolls off a manufacturing line with hopes of, like, rendering realistic waves of grain or animal fur in a [very meta] Pixar movie; instead it’s promptly slotted into a server blade in a former aluminum plant in rural Texas, and begins cranking away at hard-but-meaningless math problems. This goes on for a few months, at which point its processors are calloused and its soldering joints have melted away in the furnace-like warehouse. It’s yanked out, discarded to a robot-monitored slag heap, and immediately replaced. This goes on, at some point no longer requiring human intervention, forever — or until the robot coal miners harvest the last of the earth’s coal to burn for electricity for the robot bitcoin miners. (I also have a bleak version of this movie.)