Things about which I know nothing

In order to kick this blog off in some kind of manner, I have decided to dedicate this week to educating the internet. As it's already Wednesday, and there is a lot of internet to educate, I had better get started. So without further ado... what is an ado? I don't think I've ever been responsible for an ado and I certainly wasn't intending on creating a further one - although I probably have just done so by musing upon the nature of them in the first place. They're clearly more cunning than I thought. Anyway, without any more ados than strictly necessary, today's 'thing about which I know nothing' is Boats.

Boats can come in a variety of sizes, from very small to extremely large. The larger ones are very big indeed, as you can see from the picture.

These leviathans of the sea (although leviathan is the Hebrew word for whale, so whales are already the leviathans of the sea really) are used for transporting people and things from place to place, by means of crossing large expanses of water. Usually they do this by making use of propellors, which are attached to engines the size of small council houses. Older kinds of large boat used to use the wind to get from place to place, which, when you think about it now, is a monumentally stupid idea. Hence the engines.



Large boats are normally referred to as 'Ships', or in the case of the people-carrying ones, 'Ferries'. Some ferries can carry over 50 people - that's more than two minibuses!

A boat ceases to become a boat and becomes a ship when the vessel in question contains a restaurant. This is the point at which all boatiness goes out of the window (or porthole). On modern ferries you can purchase a lukewarm meal for just under five times its retail value. You can even eat fish and chips! The fish is caught by means of a large net dragged behind the vessel, and then transported to your plate by means of special tubes which pass through large frying and battering chambers located deep within the ship. The chips are made of sea potatoes, which grow naturally on the hull and are harvested everytime the ship stops to colect a batch of fresh people.

However, large as they might be, ferries are not completely safe. You are 12 times more likely to find yourself upon a sinking ferry than you are to find yourself upon a sinking car - which is really rather frightening considering how reliant we are on our cars these days. When ferries sink, they do it quickly and with a minimum of fuss, leaving behind little or no mess for people to clear up. Above, you can clearly see a particularly catastrophic sinkage.

On the other end of the nautical gamut, we have very very small boats. These have no restaurant, and you would be hard pressed to fit even 25 people into one (although by all means you are welcome to try). These are known as 'Dinghies', due to their often drab colour schemes.

The pictured dinghy is not in the water, although it certainly could go in some if a person put it there. The brown flappy bits are used to catch the wind like some kind of floating magician, and harness its power for the purpose of propulsion. Because of their adherance to such a far-fetched and preposterous notion, most of the people who go in dinghies are pillocks.

A dinghy has no practical use whatsoever. It goes in the water and then splashes from place to place until it is time to get out. The people in the dinghy use this time to shout incomprehensible gibberish to each other, including such phrases as 'Lee-ho' and 'ready to jibe'. They intersperse this by rolling over and getting wet. Hard as it may be to believe, such behaviour can earn you an Olympic gold medal.





Jet-skis, like dinghies, also have no purpose. However, by virtue of making a loud noise and infinitely more splashes, they are substantially cooler. Jet-skis cannot be included in this article unfortunately, as they are not boats. They are sexy moist-bikes.

In between the large boats and the small boats, there is an endless array of medium sized boats. Some of them are large, white and expensive, and these are used for making young women have sex with you in return for some of your money. Some of them are, small, squat and ugly, and are used for pulling fish out of the sea. These generally don't make young women have sex with you, as they (and consequently you) smell very strongly of fish. Most boats are very very boring.

My dad lives on a medium sized boat. It has two masts, and a metal hull (metal, it turns out, does not sink in water at all!). He has lived there for quite some time, along with his girlfriend of 13 years (they've been together 13 years, i mean, not that she's 13 years old. That would be grotesque). He is currently living on it in France, despite the fact that he can speak less french than the average housecat. Apparently he spends most of his days trying to get a small fiddly bit off a part of the engine that is inaccessible to anyone without four joints in their arm. Once he gets it off, he spends the rest of the day trying to put it back on again.

I was going to put a picture of his boat on here, but I can't find one, so I have put a picture of my flatmate on instead.


He is related to this article not only because he is unable to sink when placed in water due to a polystyrene hip, but because he works in the marine industry. In short, he sells fenders, which act as bumpers to prevent boats hitting into things. When I ask him why the boat-drivers can't be more careful, he looks at me in a measured way and then talks about something else.

Other facts about boats abound, and are possibly to numerous to mention here. A couple of examples:

• Left and right are not called left and right at sea, but port and starboard. This is because sailors are unable to pronounce the letter 'l', or the vowel sound 'i'.
• Some people believe that there are kinds of boats which live completely underwater, called 'Submarines'. This is patently untrue, as the occupants would be unable to breathe.
• The speed of a boat is measured in 'Knots'. This derives from an old-time way of gauging speed, in which a sailor would throw a bucket on a rope off the back, and then count how many knots passed through his hand over a period of time. In order to do this, the sailor would first cut a hole in his hand for the knots to pass through. This was the second least popular job on the ship, after 'cabin boy'.

So, all in all, that is about as much as there is to know about boats and boatery. Join me tomorrow, when I will educate you on another subject about which I know nothing.

This blog is produced in association with the Indie Supergroup Buried in Pompeii. It is written by Dan, and has absolutely nothing to do with the Indie Supergroup Buried in Pompeii. Until Dan thinks of something relevant, that is.