"The flyway goes right over the catfish farms in Mississppi. It is a great thing if you're a bird, sucks if you're a catfish farmer." - Professor Nixon "All those coastal land owners in Texas have an emergency phone number to call after a storm wipes away their beach vegetation. Then a bunch of guys--I'm pretty confident from across the border--come over and plant like hell." - Professor Nixon "The Land Commissioner will come and tell you that now that your house is seaward of the line of vegetation, you need to move it. Now, the Land Commissioner in Texas wears a big hat, tall boots, and I'm pretty sure he has a gun in his pickup truck. So, when he tells you to move your house, you pick your house up and move it." - Professor Nixon "Oh yes, Governor 'Fast' Eddie DiPrete. He's now in the big house. One of our more recent governors to end up in prison." - Professor Nixon "And the guy said, 'I know how to beat erosion. I'll just dump a truckload of debris off my cliff ever night; build myself a new peninsula.' This wasn't really a smart thing to do seeing as how the School of Oceanography was right across the water; they tend to notice this sort of thing." - Professor Nixon "The power rule follows the old saying 'if you've got a big gun, shoot it.' " - Professor Clarke "A good reason to go into law: Professor Nixon was flown to Australia to talk about marina law." - Mike Daly "So you can't go on the property unless you're carrying a fishing rod?" - Student "Right, or a gun." - Mike Daly "What are you doing?! Are you teaching?!" - Mike Daly to Professor Nixon "First the trollies were run by horses, but then they were electrified." - Professor Krauss "So, if you jump off the Empire State Building, you have 8.84 seconds for your whole life to flash in front of you." - Professor Clarke "Which activity does the majority opinion favor: walking along the beach holding a child's hand, or a shotgun? Watching birds with binoculars, or blasting them out of the sky with bird shot?" - Professor Nixon (Questions at the end of chapter 4 of his published book) "Will Rogers once said, 'buy land, they don't make it anymore' but, he was from Oklahoma. Here in New England, we make land. We take whatever junk we have lying around and throw it into our coastal waters." - Professor Nixon "The first thing they do when a military base is abandoned is a hazardous materials remediation because the one thing the military is really good at is creating hazardous waste." - Professor Nixon "What is the most popular syndicated TV show in the world? Baywatch, and I'm sure that this is because of interest in the shore, not Pamela Anderson." - Professor Nixon "The other major Pacific military installation is in Hawaii. You may have heard of Pearl Harbor; it's not just a movie." - Professor Nixon "You know how you fill out those Teacher Evaluation Forms at the end of the semester? Well, there is a question on there about whether the teacher knows if the class is understanding him or her. I always get a 'D' in that area. So, I'm telling you right now, I know you don't understand me so don't give me no 'D'." -Professor Clarke "The rivers routinely caught on fire. You think of fireboats and tugs designed to put out fires on other ships, well, we had fireboats to put out the river." - Professor Nixon "When people say the 60s were exciting they weren't exaggerating. We not only had extreme racial conflicts but environmental pollution in levels never seen before or again. It was a sick time in our nation's history." - Professor Nixon "You can always tell the students from the University of California, Santa Barbara. They all have black feet. It's the campus of black-footed students. Blonde hair, blue eyes, black feet." -Professor Nixon "No one had tried to burn sand before so we weren't sure how it would work." - Professor Nixon "When they had to abandon their flaming tugboat you'd think they could just get into one of the liferafts. Nah- didn't have one of those. oops!" - Professor Nixon "I'm under the lights so I don't have to worry about the ceiling tiles, but good luck." - Professor Nixon "We've gone from freezing our asses off to sitting in the sauna." - Professor Nixon "So frankly, it was a major pain in the butt to move cargo around the world." - Professor Nixon "How can you not look!?" - Professor Turner (wearing pink bunny ears) "I'm hearing 'lemons.' It sounds like you are singing, loosed from imaginary lemons." - Professor Turner "It's...Schubert goes jazz." - Professor Turner "Frankly, I think the technical legal term is 'sleezy.'" - Professor Nixon "I know I've used this term...I'm going to start throwing chalk." - Professor Nixon |