







All Roads Lead to Bruff
Beach Street Quick-Build Project
Construction for the Beach Street Quick-Build Project is substantially complete!What’s New

A Canticle to the Waterbirds
Clack your beaks you cormorants and kittiwakes,North on those rock-croppings finger-jutted into the rough Pacific surge;You migratory terns and pipers who leave but the temporal clawtrack written on sandbars there of your presence;Grebes and pelicans; you comber-picking scoters and you shorelong gulls;All you keepers of the coastline north of here to the Mendocino beaches;All you beyond upon the cliff-face thwarting the surf at Hecate Head;Hovering the under-surge where the cold Columbia grapples at the bar;North yet to the Sound, whose islands float like a sown flurry of chips upon the sea;Break wide your harsh and salt-encrusted beaks unmade for songAnd say a praise up to the Lord.And you freshwater egrets east in the flooded marshlands skirting the sea-level rivers, white one-legged watchers of shallows;Broad-headed kingfishers minnow-hunting from willow stems on meandering valley sloughs;You too, you herons, blue and supple-throated, stately, taking the air majestical in the sun-flooded San Joaquin,Grading down on your belted wings from the upper lights of sunset,Mating over the willow clumps or where the flatwater rice fields shimmer;You killdeer, high night-criers, far in the moon-suffusion sky;Bitterns, sand-waders, all shore-walkers, all roost-keepers,Populates of the ‘dobe cliffs of the Sacramento;Open your water-dartling beaks,And make a praise up to the Lord.For you hold the heart of His mighty fastnesses,And shape the life of His indeterminate realms.You are everywhere on the lonesome shores of His wide creation.You keep seclusion where no man may go, giving Him praise;Nor may a woman come to lift like your cleaving flight her clear contralto songTo honor the spindrift gifts of His soft abundance.You sanctify His hermitage rocks where no holy priest may kneel to adore, nor holy nun assist;And where His true communion-keepers are not enabled to enter.And well may you say His praises, birds, for your waysAre verved with the secret skills of His inclinations,And your habits plaited and rare with the subdued elaboration of His intricate craft;Your days intent with the direct astuteness needful for His outworking,And your nights alive with the dense repose of His infinite sleep.You are His secretive charges and you serve His secretive ends,In His clouded, mist-conditioned stations, in His murk,Obscure in your matted nestings, immured in His limitless ranges.He makes you penetrate through dark interstitial joinings of His thicketed kingdoms,And keep your concourse in the deeps of His shadowed world.Your ways are mild but earnest, your manners grave,Your customs carefully schooled to the note of His serious mien.You hold the prime condition of His clean creating,And the swift compliance with which you serve His minor meansSpeaks of the constancy with which you hold Him.For what is your high flight forever going home to your first beginnings,But such a testament to your devotion?You hold His outstretched world beneath your wings, and mount upon His storms,And keep your sheer wind-lidded sight upon the vast perspectives of His mazy latitudes.But mostly it is your way you bear existence wholly within the context of His utter will and are untroubled.Day upon day you do not reckon, nor scrutinize tomorrow, nor multiply the nightfalls with a rash concern,But rather assume each instant as warrant sufficient of His final seal.Wholly in Providence you spring, and when you die you look on death in clarity unflinched,Go down, a clutch of feather ragged upon the brush;Or drop on water where you briefly lived, found food,And now yourselves made food for His deep current-keeping fish, and then are gone:Is left but the pinion-feather spinning a bit on the uproilWhere lately the dorsal cut clear air.You leave a silence. And this for you suffices, who are not of the ceremonials of man,And hence are not made sad to now forego them.Yours is of another order of being, and wholly it compels.But may you, birds, utterly seized in God’s supremacy,Austerely living under His austere eye—Yet may you teach a man a necessary thing to know,Which has to do of the strict conformity that creaturehood entails,And constitutes the prime commitment all things share.For God has given you the imponderable grace to be His verification,Outside the mulled incertitude of our forensic choices;That you, our lesser in the rich hegemony of Being,May serve as testament to what a creature is,And what creation owes.Curlews, stilts and scissor-tails, beachcomber gulls,Wave-haunters, shore-keepers, rockhead-holders, all cape-top vigilantes,Now give God praise.Send up the strict articulation of your throats,And say His name.
Neil Chudleigh on Twitter / X
the tide is shifting to local models. pic.twitter.com/mFtCJxoEJy— Neil Chudleigh (@neilsuperduper) August 1, 2025


Published work: ocean journalist Melissa Hobson, the Ocean Writer
As an ocean journalist, I've written about all sorts of fascinating things going on beneath the waves. Read some of my published work here.

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1. září – Vrak Titaniku: Nejslavnější objev oceánu byl jen krycí historka
Jak to uslyšíte ve škole od učitele Rok 1985. Oceánograf Robert Ballard se po letech snahy konečně vydává hledat nejslavnější vrak světa. Titanic leží někde v severním Atlantiku od dubna 1912 a čeká na člověka, který bude mít dost techniky, peněz, trpělivosti a romantického vztahu k rezavým lodím. Ballardův tým

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» Sea of Crises
Hakuho bends into a deep squat. He claps twice, then rubs his hands together. He turns his palms slowly upward. He is bare-chested, 6-foot-4 and 350 pounds. His hair is pulled up in a topknot. His smooth stomach strains against the coiled belt at his waist, the literal referent of his rank: yokozuna, horizontal rope. Rising, he lifts his right arm diagonally, palm down to show he is unarmed. He repeats the gesture with his left. He lifts his right leg high into the air, tipping his torso to the left like a watering can, then slams his foot onto the clay. When it strikes, the crowd of 13,000 souls inside the Ryogoku Kokugikan, Japan’s national sumo stadium, shouts in unison: “Yoisho!” — Come on! Do it! He slams down his other foot: “Yoisho!” It’s as if the force of his weight is striking the crowd in the stomach. Then he squats again, arms held out winglike at his sides, and bends forward at the waist until his back is near parallel with the floor. Imagine someone playing airplane with a small child. With weird, sliding thrusts of his feet, he inches forward, gliding across the ring’s sand, raising and lowering his head in a way that’s vaguely serpentine while slowly straightening his back. By the time he’s upright again, the crowd is roaring.

kepano on Twitter / X
My design philosophy for @obsdmd: it should be intuitive for beginners but have infinite depth for advanced users.Like going to the beach. You start in the shallow waters, and can stay there as long as you like, or keep swimming out into the ocean.— kepano (@kepano) May 23, 2024
Hegseth at Normandy: "Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain and Italy and Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not."