Pat (Catspaw),

Anybody puttin' lighthouses where there're channel buoys is way out of the channel anyhow and will most probably run violently aground pretty quick. Lighthouses on rivers are overkill for sure. The buoys on the rivers have reflective surfaces that bounce/reflect the long white spear of the towboat's searchlight in great fashion. Any respectable pilot (except maybe John Hartford) could navigate in fine fashion using that time-tested method. (Mr. John H. is too easily distracted by any passing female form.) Putting real, huge lighthouses on the rivers as navigation aids would be like allowing Sue the T-rex (now at the Field Museum Of Natural History--Chicago) to go marauding, alive, through Central Park. (But it might be fun to watch New York get stepped on.---Must be the anarchist in me.)

Yes, Pat, there ARE light's on the rivers--but very small ones. They're not buoys but "day markers" (as they're called)---fixed navigation aids on the shore. Those have flashing dim lights--solar powered by batteries that are charged up during daylight hours. Mr. Hartford (mentioned earlier) had one of those lights named for him by the Army Corps of Engineers on the Cumberland River (or is it the Tennessee?) where he can see it from his house. That has never, ever, been done to honor a person now living. They did that because of all he has done with his music to educate folks to the wonders of river life and how the rivers work---not to mention the romance and the draw of steamboats---now and in the past.

As some of you may have heard, recently they have started tearing down some of the huge dams built in the 1930s by the Army Corps of Engineers. Seems those monstrous erections ;-) are now politically incorrect. (VIAGRA AGAIN!?) The salmon can't seem to get up river to spawn as well as they used to before the damn dams were built. We all know one must get up to spawn. Well, live an' learn. The more things change, the more they get different. I even hear there are plans to use T-rex DNA to clone a huge mixed DNA creature from Sue and Dolly, the cloned sheep! The resultant mutant creature would be used to TEAR DOWN, not only the old dams, but the lighthouses erroniously built along rivers spoiling everyone's view of aproaching tornadoes and, thusly, proving to be quite detrimental to all sorts of endangered species. (The most endangered species in those cases being humans.---And everyone knows that the best way to get REAL action along those lines is to show that one or two PEOPLE are actually in hot water.) Once you've got the needed HOT WATER it's real easy to make a tempest in a teapot!! Nobody knows yet if tornados in a teapot can be manufactured artificially. But eveyone does know that, if it can be conceived by the minds of humans, that's almost a direct order to go ahead and do it---as in the cases of the atomic bomb, cloning, Liberace, the recent bombing war, Industrial Rock and Tiny Tim---if ya know what I mean. To paraphrase a saying from the '60s, "If it feels good, do it"---no matter what might be the outcome. In the case of Viagra, we all know what the outcome will be!

Yes, Catspaw49, I can see your points---but only when you are wearing a wet T-shirt.

Love,

Art