Naked Mermaid
A Dave Barry article that was posted this week on the Miami Herald web-site brought to mind an incident on Kwajalein atoll. The article discussed modern art in public places and questioned whether the average tax payer would appreciate large sums of money being spent on an object that essentially looked like a mangled air conditioner. It was something like that. It reminded me of a controversial art object on Kwajalein. In this case it was a mermaid statue that (parents don’t let your kids read this part) had her breasts exposed. I would not say it was exactly anatomically detailed if you catch my drift but if you looked at it and were a love starved bachelor you could imagine that they were breasts. There are many such bachelors there especially on gender deprived Roi-Namur. Well, a certain well intentioned woman decided the statue was pornographic and complained to the authorities. I hope this lady never goes to Europe because I’ve seen photos of the statues there such as Michelangelo’s David and Venus de Milo and they are much more detailed than this mermaid. But the authorities on Kwaj are sensitive to offending the public so they covered the mermaid with a t-shirt. I don’t know if the lady in question (who is an otherwise nice lady that I was friends with) did not consider that good enough or they were worried the t-shirt would come off but eventually they removed the statue altogether based on one person’s complaints. I thought they should have been more considerate of us bachelors who don’t get to see anything like that on Roi, it would be nice to know what we were missing. I think a common sense solution might have been to place the statue underwater at a dive site. It would look really cool to see a mermaid statue underwater with fish swimming around it. But irregardless this provided me an opportunity to use the words naked, breasts, and pornographic, and thus dramatically increase my hits on google.
Figure 1 Venus de Milo - note the significantly more detail than the mermaid I described
Technorati Tags: breasts, naked, naked mermaid, venus de milo, pornographic, Marshall Islands, Kwajalein, Roi, Roi-Namur, Micronesia, travel
5 Responses to “Naked Mermaid”
 Comment by Richard Jones September 21st, 2007 at 7:06 pm |
Well, I don’t know about the shamless part… but things are working out, record numbers of viewers attending in droves!!! |
 Comment by glennstu September 24th, 2007 at 11:52 am |
BTW, Do you know why mermaids wear seashells? Because b-shells are too small and d-shells are too large. Thanks to Gary of Gary’s diving in San Carlos, Mexico for that one. |
 Comment by Ike February 9th, 2008 at 4:17 pm |
Gosh, Quite surprising an innocent naked human figure causes such a stir. BTW, your idea of an underwater statue sounds really cool! Ike |
 Comment by David October 4th, 2008 at 8:34 am |
My how these tales get spun. The mermaid was on Kwaj in front of the firestation. And one day the firemen decided to paint the mermaid. They gave her a “flesh tone” but they decided to paint her nipples red. The flesh tone and red nipples clashed and obnoxiously stood out. The woman complained about the new & improved paint job. In reaction to this, the guys put a tee shirt on her for a while. End of story, they toned to paint color. But she still there guarding the fire station. |
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Comment by glennstu October 9th, 2008 at 4:32 pm |
Thanks David for the correction. Glad she is still there. I guess things got distorted by the time they reached Roi. |
