Kinda glad they're in Charlestown

If the yuppie scum are flexing their pallid arms in Charlestown, then the millennium has come.

I'm delighted to see that some other Charlestown residents are preparing to demonstrate in behalf of USS Constitution's morning and evening guns. The purpose of the guns, by the way, is to signal the daily raising and lowering of the colours: everyone within earshot is supposed to face the colours (if visible) or the sound and render a hand salute. It's a ritual observed on military and naval installations around the world. The ritual was at least 100 years old when Old Ironsides fired her first morning gun. The controversy is a pretty little fight to have the week of Veterans' Day, and I congratulate the condo owners behind this for their monumental lack of tact.

In my venerable town there are five, count them, five yacht clubs. They do not observe morning colours but they do observe evening colours, every night from late spring until their waterfronts close in October. Due to the imperfections of both timepieces and firing mechanisms, there is an interval between the first gun and the last that suggests skirmish fire rather than ritual.

I don't have to ask how the yuppies like this (at least the ones not in the yacht clubs) because they have complained, and have received the old Yankee version of "sod off" as a reply. Yacht clubs contain many more lawyers than public relations people (though they have both as members), so when they say "sod off" they mean it.

With the yacht clubs come yachts, or at least watercraft of every size and description; around 1500 of them at last count. Some yuppies have complained that a) there are too many boats in the harbour, which spoils the view and b) that the boats make too much noise just sitting on their moorings. The larger and tonier yacht clubs began admitting non-sailing members some years ago as a money-raising venture, and these Thurston Howells very soon began to complain because their yacht club tended to get cluttered up with (wait for it) yachts—and sailors! I present all this as evidence that yuppies eat their young.

Numbers of those commenting on the Boston Herald piece cited above proposed that USS Constitution double-shot the guns and aim at the condos in question. Please, people! Those guns are irreplaceable antiques, and this is Charlestown, noted for its warm hospitality and directness when dealing with any alien life form. If I owned one of the affected condos, I'd be putting plywood over my windows before the ship's supporters demonstrate.