Bill Mann

Viewers, have I got a hashtag for YOU! (##)

I was idling on Twitter the other day, and found a promising- “looking trending hashtag called #AddaWordRuinATVShow. This looked like a good source of found humor, and it was. And as a former newspaper TV critic, I couldn’t resist . Some of my favorites:

- “Sesame Street Fight”

- “That 1870’s Show”

- “Hill Street Blues Brothers” 

- “Rosa Parks and Recreation”

- “The OJ Simpsons”

- “Hair Band of Brothers” (with a pic of Whitesnake) 

- “Starsky And Rabbit Hutch”

- “The Kanye West Wing”

- “The Young And The Restless Legs”

- “Family Zip Ties”

- “Parks And Recreational Drugs”

- “The $100,000 Pyramid Scheme”

- “Gaetz Arrested: Development”

- “Falcon Crest Toothpaste”

- “The Not Tonight Show”

- “Arrested Economic Development”

- “Hill Street Blues Clues”

- “Wells Fargo”

- “Game of Porcelain Thrones”

- “The Jay Walking Dead”

- “Cagney and Lacey Undies”

- “Two and a Half Mennonites”

- “M*A*S*H Potatoes”

- “Clarence Thomas The Tank Engine”

- “Charles Barkley in Charge”

- “My Three Sons of Bitches”

— The Steamshipping News: Stewart Pugh is one of the most interesting and unusual characters I’ve met in PT. 

He’s a violinist with the Port Townsend Symphony, and once played an obscure and ornate-looking Norwegian instrument called the Hardanger fiddle (no melody or beat that I could discern in that quirky Nordic music. Strange). 

But that’s just the start of Pugh’s C.V. As a young man, he worked in the fusion-energy research lab at Lawrence Berkeley Lab along with Nobel Prize-winner Glenn Seaborg, the discoverer of plutonium and several other radioactive elements. Physicist Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, “used to occasionally come by and stick his head in,” says Pugh, now a Cape George resident. 

Pugh once actually held plutonium — through a glove box, of course. “It was the size of a hockey puck, it was heavy and warm,” he recalls.

Finally, Pugh is a veteran sailor, boat owner, and has a master’s license. He’s a licensed captain for sailing ships. Additionally, he’s a maritime historian. 

Pugh explained to me that when oceangoing sailing ships became obsolete as a workhorse for carrying cargo, Port Townsend’s fortunes sank, too. 

And PT’s decline wasn’t mainly because a major railroad didn’t come up here as is often believed, Pugh says, although that was envisioned. It was technology. 

“The oceangoing sailing ships had to stop in PT to unload their cargo. They couldn’t sail back from Seattle and Tacoma. 

“They’d unload their cargo in PT and it would be picked up by the mosquito fleet, small, coal-fired boats, which brought goods to Seattle and Tacoma. 

“Then, in the 1880s, the big sailing ships were replaced — by oceangoing steam-powered and steel-hulled cargo ships. Those didn’t have to stop here in Port Townsend en route to Tacoma and Seattle.” 

So steam took the sails out of PT. 

— Pugh also regularly sails over to nearby Protection Island. He knows the sole caretaker who lives out there. Which reminds me of an indecorous thought. 

When we first moved here and I heard there was a place nearby called Protection Island, I visualized (gulp) ... a giant condom. 

 Just another example of male testosterone poisoning. 

— Hard to disagree with Jon Tarlton of The Seattle Times: “If I were king, I would require vaccination in order to maintain a driver’s license — the only way to get Americans’ attention is to threaten their ability to drive.”

— Finally today, the minor-league baseball team over in Port Angeles is called the Lefties. Its season is about to start. 

That’s a curious nickname (it refers to geography), and I’ve always wanted to get together a group of us old lefties from PT, head over there — stopping at Costco on the way, of course — and for a gag hold up pictures of Marx and Lenin and fly hammer-and-sickle flags in the stands. Real lefties! And instead of “Take Me Out to The Ballgame” we’d sing  “The Internationale.” 

Hey, if  Mitt Romney can be called a “Commie,” why not?

(For the record, PT resident Bill Mann does NOT have a poster of Che Guevara in his house. Newsmann9@gmail.com)