Heard on the lower decks

You've never heard "Proud Mary" until you've heard it sung by a half dozen drunk Hungarians. It was sort of closer to the Ike and Tina version...

Speaking of musican monstrosities, the showband has become morbidly fascinated with Europe's "The Final Countdown", to the point where we played it at a crew party this week. It wasn't quite The Bad Plus, despite my best/worst Braxton impression, but it's the closest we'll come on this contract.

This Sunday, Spanish ESPN is showing a Red Sox game. I'm thrilled beyond words- I haven't seen a game in three months, and am in serious withdrawl.

"Technical difficulties" is one thing, but this is nuts: MySpace, in its latest spate of growing pains, seems to have deleted a full third of their member pages, including mine. Aaaargh... Will fix ASAP.

On a more serious note, we were delayed yesterday when the Coast Guard asked us to shadow a Cuban fishing boat until they could get to it. Obviously, you hear about Cuban refugees down here, but this was the first time I had actually seen a boat in person. It's pretty remarkable- more than twenty people in a 6'x12' boat not built for anything like this, out thirty miles from land in four foot waves. This was probably the fruit of weeks and weeks of planning, only for the refugees to be caught and turned back. (Unless they had a lefthanded pitcher in there.) I'm not crazy about either Castro or American policy towards Cuba, but the both the courage and desperation present in a sight like that is simply breathtaking.