And another thing...

…About boats. You have to wear your baseball cap backwards when you drive them. Closeted country music star Kenny Chesney must be as bald as a cue ball. You never see him without a hat. Ever. In the beginning it was a cowboy hat. Then Chesney bought a place in the Caribbean. Suddenly, all of his music videos had beach or water themes and his music was less “country” than before. (Steel drums? In a country song? Come on.)

Chesney must’ve started spending a lot of time on boats too, because when he appeared in the videos, he had ditched the cowboy hat for a baseball cap that he began wearing backwards, the way kids in the States used to when that was a fad…a fad that I’ve never been very fond of. Now when I drive the boat, like Kenny Chesney I wear my baseball cap backwards. I’ve become what I hate.

..About country music. American country music is wildly popular down here for some reason. As I’ve already written, reggae and other forms of tropical music are curiously absent. There is no indigenous music at all. It is disconcerting to be in a bar in a place like this and hear nothing but country music emanating from the jukebox.

Our cook is crazy about country. He keeps the Sirius satellite radio in our main house tuned to a country channel. And he plays it loudly. It’s not that I dislike country music – I don’t. I just don’t like hearing the same six or seven country songs over and over and over. I could overrule him and switch the channel, but you do not want to piss off a good cook. And Daniel is a good cook. So I settle for just turning it down.

…About satellite radio. There are those who believe that satellite radio will cause the demise of regular old, terrestrial radio, the kind we’re all used to, the kind where the signal emits from a big tower and the programming is produced locally. I’m not sold on satellite radio, and here’s why: Repetition.

There are scads of channels, more than you can imagine. Something for everyone, literally, and all commercial-free (for now – remember when cable t.v. was commercial-free?). There are two Howard Stern channels, and one devoted entirely to the music of Elvis Presley. There is even a music channel devoted entirely to a certain type of “new wave” music that was popular in the 1980’s. Now, I happen to be very fond of ‘80s music, especially that type. So when Daniel isn’t around I switch the Sirius radio to “my” channel. It did not take long before I realized that, just as with his country channel I was hearing the same few ‘80s songs over and over. There were literally hundreds of songs that became popular during that period, but Sirius only plays about thirty of them, if that, regularly. It was frustrating. After two months I’d heard enough. Click!