Plan B profile picture

Plan B

About Me

Ship James Arnold of New Bedford (3/16" scale), 2008 Bark Wanderer of New Bedford (3/16" scale), 2001 Well, I'm a Nautical Miniatures Artist (OK, I build model ships), bookseller, amateur historian of sorts, old fashioned Progressive, and all around kind soul. Also, if you ask me how I'm doing, and I say "Still ticking," I mean it literally. Brimming with ideas right now, hoping that I will have the time and energy to make some of them reality.

My Interests

I'd like to meet:

Easygoing folks of good will with similar interests. People who buy (or build) model ships. Maybe others who feel as I do, that as humans have, with much gusto, made the world such a miserable place, they have it well within their power to make it better than all the combined dreams of all the Utopians of history. As some quotable personage once said "I never met a man I didn't like." Of course, he never worked in retail.

My Blog

Yarrr! There be an Iceberg dead ahead!

I guess I'm in the wrong business, if you can call it that.  While I'm well aware that no one ever went broke selling booze or sex, I thought I could avoid those trades, that there was room for e...
Posted by on Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:17:00 GMT

Telemarketers Hang Up on ME

Here they come. Right about now, telemarketers supposedly working for alleged charities start calling en masse.  They represent (so they say) everything from the Fraternal Order of Police to the ...
Posted by on Tue, 27 Nov 2007 05:37:00 GMT

Santa Claus and his . . . clipper ships?

Just in time for Yule / Christmas, I thought I might shed some light on the possible source for the fanciful names given to Santa's reindeer in the nineteenth century poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas,"...
Posted by on Mon, 12 Nov 2007 04:11:00 GMT

"Ich bin ein Plastic Model!"

Recently picked up an old Aurora plastic kit model that I have been looking to add to my collection for years- one of the oddest relics to emerge from both the plastic figure model craze of the S...
Posted by on Sun, 14 Oct 2007 06:49:00 GMT

Bookstore Talk: A Poem of Blather

Some ladies were having a loud conversation in the store the other day.  While I was not quite eavesdropping, I did catch an odd word or phrase here or there, and started writing them down in ord...
Posted by on Sun, 14 Oct 2007 06:40:00 GMT

Working Waterfront Festival

Hi all- Worked all day yesterday (Sunday 9/23) at New Bedford's Working Waterfront Festival, and again enjoyed myself immensely.  It was a chance to get outside on a gorgeous day and put my name ...
Posted by on Mon, 24 Sep 2007 06:19:00 GMT

Don’t Faze me, bro

A lot of people have obviously seen the video of the University of Florida student questioning Senator John Kerry, then getting "tazed" by the campus police when he refused to leave.  I wonder if...
Posted by on Sun, 23 Sep 2007 21:43:00 GMT

Beware of Faketiques!

I've been reading about fake antiques lately, and my reaction to these warnings has been along the lines of "Well...duh."  So many things I've seen for sale in "antique" sales have seemed to me t...
Posted by on Thu, 23 Aug 2007 06:35:00 GMT

Restoration waiting in the wings

You know I try not to be anal -in ANY way, mind you- but sometimes little things bother me.  Take for instance the little "category" menu for inputting a blog here.  There's no selectio...
Posted by on Thu, 23 Aug 2007 01:08:00 GMT

Wisdom From the Nautical Cinema

Some inspired and/or inspiring quotes from watery type movies: "We do not have time for your damned hobbies, sir!"-Aubrey (Russell Crowe) in Master & Commander "You know, I do believe this ship ma...
Posted by on Fri, 25 May 2007 20:05:00 GMT