Frazz by Jef Mallett for November 18, 2018

If he was from the northern hemisphere, he was already a Shellback.

I doubt that one. Gold earrings were expensive. Those ships had a lot of sailors on board. In those days your ship had to be able to fight, or you wouldn’t have it long.

I thought they got a dunking.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Tsunami_by_hokusai_19th_century.jpg

Gold ring for the dangers of Cape Horn; paper gold star for missing the reefs in writing a paper. Visible proof commensurate with significance of event. Pride is outcome in both. But. . .um. . .still working on Frazz’s comment.

Why did I just picture a pirate tourist shop just past Cape Horn?

Space weather can kill you just as dead as earth weather, such as solar radiation and getting hit with little hunks of really fast moving micro-meteorites.

Piffle. The gold earring is to pay for a Christian burial if you fall overboard and your body washes up on a ‘civilized’ shore. This is well-documented in the literature.

I think the gold earring was for rounding The Horn for the first time.

When I taught third grade, I put my sticky gold stars on the kid’s foreheads instead of on the paper because " Your brain did it, the paper doesn’t deserve to get a star". Some of the kids wore those stars for a week or so, until they got dirty enough that the glue stopped working.

The gold earring is for the ear closest to land. West to East left ear, East to West right ear.

They didn’t call it “Cape Stiff” for nothing.

An “earring” was also the rope loop that held the outside corners of a sail onto the yardarm.

Your thinking of the Shellback initiation done on Naval ships when they cross the Equator.

Really enjoyed today’s comments. Each taught me something I did not know about Cape Horn lore. Whatever sailors got for that passage, they suffered beyond reason for it and deserved that and more.

Frazz19 hrs ·

For the longest time, I used to think of the old sailors as the astronauts of their day. But the more I learn, the less sure I am of what I used to believe (to quote Frazz’s lyrics in one of the very first episodes, “it’s education’s special curse, it works its magic in reverse. The more I learn, it seems, the less I know”). Without diminishing in the slightest how brave and smart and well-trained the modern astronaut, and while fully appreciating the harsh and unforgiving environment they venture into, at least outer space doesn’t have weather.