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Wonderful, Frank!!

For anyone who doesn't know of the mythical town of Quahog, Rhode 
Island, I'd suggest asking a local teenager or young adult regardless of 
where you live.  The US TV show "Family Guy" is set in this town.   I've 
sat in a hotel (well, rather more like an upscale hostel) in Tokyo and 
discussed US TV shows with twenty-ish people from everywhere from New 
Zealand to Denmark and all agreed that their favorite US TV show was 
"Family Guy."

Having boated in Narragansett Bay, the principal waterway of Rhode 
Island, for many years, I am fascinated by the inside jokes on the 
show.  For example, the teenage son goes to the Buddy Cianci Memorial 
High School.   Buddy Cianci was a fabulously corrupt mayor of 
Providence, Rhode Island's capitol.  Did two terms as mayor, then eight 
or ten years in US prison for corruption, then another eight as mayor. 

The creator of Family Guy is Seth MacFarlane, who is now the highest 
paid producer/writer of any TV series on American television -- and was 
also the subject of a US TV network news vignette describing him as 
"king of fart jokes" (did I make it clear that this is a TV series aimed 
at the mentality of college students?)

BTW, Frank, Quahog looks like it's just south of Providence.  A recent 
episode (yeah, I'll admit I still watch) did a zoom up into the sky from 
Quahog.   Whoops, there's Cranston, now Warwick, now all of Narragansett 
Bay, now southern New England (but, curiously, the upper arm of Cape Cod 
was missing), and so on to outer space.



frankreed@HistoricalAtlas.com wrote:
> George wrote previously:
> "I have not yet met a graduate of the Frank Reed school of Celestial Navigation"
>
> And Geoffrey wrote:
> "You have met me George and this method is how I started out getting to
> grips with celestial navigation. Having graduated from the "Frank Reed
> school" and my interest aroused, I then went on to gain "a rounded
> understanding of position lines and sight reduction, how to read a nautical
> almanac, how to use the Moon or take a twilight round of star
> observations..." Frank's point, though, is that it was not necessary to go
> on and do the post-grad course to be able to navigate successfully and
> safely around the world - provided the limitations of the method are born
> in mind. But that is true whatever method is used."
>
> Quite so.
>
> AND NOW FOR AN ANNOUCEMENT!
>
> The "Frank Reed School of Navigation" is expanding from its humble quarters 
in Mystic... We have recently acquired a new classroom facility on the shore 
of Quonochontaug Cove in Quahog, Rhode Island. Our state of the art facility 
includes the latest Macbook laptops (running both OSX and Windows Vista) at 
every desk and two high-definition plasma monitors for group presentations. 
We have also acquired fifty unused (still in the original packing materials!) 
surplus sextants from the USCG facility at Quonset Point which recently 
closed. Furthermore, we have arranged a charter arrangement with the 125-foot 
schooner "Spirit of Quahog" which will take students out on the waters of 
Block Island Sound for Noon Sun sight rounds and also evening star sights for 
advanced students. Two-day seminars on latitude and longitude by Noon Sun are 
currently being sponsored by the SCA and will cost students only the price of 
materials: $25.00 total. Classes for advanced students, including, of course, 
a class on lunars, will be available at somewhat higher prices starting at 
$250 per day. Students may stay overnight at the lovely Dewdrop Inn located 
in a beautiful cottage setting next to the quaint old lighthouse on a small 
hill overlooking our classroom site and the pier where "Spirit of Quahog" is 
normally moored.
>
> .
> .
> .
>
> Had you going there for just a second, didn't I? Alas, no. There is no such 
thing. Just so there's no misunderstanding and folks don't start looking for 
our web site, my eponymous "school of navigation" is purely metaphorical! It 
don't exist in the real world.
>
> Oh, and Quahog is a fictional town (though widely known in American pop 
culture) and as far as I know there is no schooner named "Spirit of Quahog" 
(a quahog is an Algonquian name for the local hard-shell clam --you fish for 
them with your toes in sticky black mud). And there are no rooms full of 
Macbooks and HD plasma monitors ready to teach celestial navigation, no 
surplus sextants to be resurrected from the dustbin, no support from the SCA 
(the Society for Creative Anachronisms), no inn by the quaint lighthouse... 
It's true: nothing that I write is true.
>
> But Quonochontaug is real and so is Quonset Point, and Wequetequock where I 
used to live. There are a lot of Q's in the toponyms of southern New England. 
:-)
>
> -FER
>
>
>
> >
>   


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