What is there to say about Afroman other than he’s about as funny of a human being as we’ve ever met. He was cool enough to let us hang out with him in a top secret location when he was on The Cape for his show at The Beach House. Catch a glimpse of the man in his element…

(video by John Beninghof @johnbeninghof)

CapeCodOnline.com – Tired of winter? Summer’s coming — and the forecast for this summer is a good one, several in the hospitality industry said, with expectations running higher than last year.

Both summer bookings and asking prices for vacation home rentals on the Cape Cod are up this year, according to WeNeedaVacation.com, a vacation rental booking business that makes an evaluation based its own listings.

Bookings through mid-February for summer lodging on Cape Cod are up 6.3 percent from the same time last year, the booking company reported. The bookings increased 7 percent on Martha’s Vineyard and 3.3 percent on Nantucket.

I’m not one to complain about weather or winter, but when I woke up this morning to more snow falling I had just about fucking had it. Enough is enough. I literally thought to myself that I would trade having to deal with thousands of New Yorkers for not getting one more inch of snow in a heartbeat.

Well I need to apologize because it looks like my wish is going to come true. Be prepared Cape Cod, the summer people are coming, and they are coming in hot! I think this winter has been so bad that I kinda actually miss the little martians. Has Mother Nature driven me to the brink of insanity or does anyone else agree?

I’m not saying I won’t want to murder everyone in my way like two days after they wash ashore. I’m just saying that after eighteen feet of snow and weeks of cold so brutal it turned me into Ashy Larry, a fanny pack or two and some schlub asking where the bridge to The Vineyard is might actually be kind of a welcome sight this year, amirite?

CapeCodOnine.com – The shark tournament will be back — but not in Oak Bluffs.

In the wake of the tragic death of Oak Bluffs Monster Shark Tournament director Steve James in January, his family has decided to continue the tradition with a shark tournament in Newport, R.I., July 17 through 20, according to state shark expert Greg Skomal.

Martell’s hotel was the de facto headquarters for the tournament, which James estimated brought as much as $4.5 million to the town’s economy. At its peak, the tournament drew nearly 300 boats with big cash prizes.

“The town wasn’t in the mood,” Vail said. Town meeting voted 64-40 in April to support a nonbinding resolution to make the annual shark tournament a catch-and-release event.

“I’m looking forward to trying this on for size,” Vail said.

The Monster Shark Tournament had been held in Oak Bluffs for 27 years, but in recent years drew fire from animal rights groups and locals. The weigh-in, when boats returned at day’s end with their catch, attracted big crowds to the Oak Bluffs harbor docks. The weekend crowds sometimes became rowdy, to the point the town imposed additional fees on tournament participants to pay for keeping the peace.

“This hysteria took over,” said Wesley Hotel owner Peter Martell of the votes against the tournament. He blamed the behavior of onlookers.

“They should have been controlled,” he said.

“It was too bad to lose him,” Martell said of James. “Everybody had a good time.”

He said the jury is still out on whether a fishing tournament without sharks will draw crowds and business.

“I don’t see them getting a lot that first year,” said Skomal, the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries shark scientist. He used to spend his summer weekends going to fishing tournaments to collect data and samples for scientific study. Sharks are caught relatively close to shore, but big game fish such as marlins, tuna and swordfish are found far out to sea in areas close to the Gulf Stream where there are deep underwater canyons. The larger vessels required for a roundtrip of 200 miles or more are beyond most budgets and use a lot of fuel, he said.

I know that was a long excerpt, but I wanted it all there so we could break the entire thing down into one sentence;

The town of Oak Bluffs was “not in the mood” to host an event that “attracted big crowds” where “everybody had a good time” and brings “$4.5 million to the town’s economy”. Seems legit.

I mean why on earth would anyone want big crowds and large quick injections of cash into the local businesses of a vacation destination area? It only fundamentally contradicts the basic foundation of our economic survival. I get it though, big crowds having a good time are just awful. I’m sure Indiana is working on a way to ban the Indy 500 as we speak and I’d imagine that New York will be cancelling the Macy’s Parade ASAP right?

Newport must not have any experience with these large crowds of people having a good time. They will probably cancel this event after one year. There’s no way they can know what they are in for, it’s not like they have any big Folk Festivals or anything.

It is absolutely exhausting keeping up with all the ways the fun police are literally killing Cape Cod.

In this post about The Cape Cod Roller Derby a while back we wrote this…

This is a promise to our readers. Now that we know about this we will do everything in our power to get to a derby ASAP and write up a proper review. Until then keep up with these gals on their website or Facebook Page.

Well that day has come folks, and tonight we roll. Derby style. We are bringing the whole crew, some armed with skates and some armed with cameras. There is absolutely no telling what will happen, but we know this, there will be video proof. Insane Tony on roller skates? Insane Tony on roller skates.

Have a good weekend everyone, and speaking of video… Encore!

There will be no jokes in this post. We have been sent this story by quite a few people and immediately knew it had to be shared. Separating these three boys would be nothing short of tragic. Below is an excerpt of their story, but we highly suggest you click the link and read the entire thing. Sometimes it takes a village and sometimes it takes a peninsula. Cape Cod should rally around these folks and help them stay together as a family.

CLICK HERE to read the entire story and help out in any way you can…

When we first took emergency guardianship of these innocent boys, we pulled them out of a domestically violent and drug abused home. This was not a home for them, it was a scary place that they never wanted to go back to, screaming and crying before ever having to enter. They will never have to face that again. Escorted by police and with custody papers in my hand and my dad by my side with papers in his hands, we rescued those boys from that sad story. At that time they stayed in my parent’s home, as my fiancé, Byron, and I lived in a 500 square foot studio apartment. We all loved, cared and comforted them, and at the end of the night they had a warm bed waiting for them with their loving Nana and Papa.

After a year and a half of all of us taking care of these amazingly resilient kids, and their mother completing the programs she had to complete and having a year of sobriety, we released our guardianship back to her on September 19th 2013, in faith that she was ready to be a mother to them. Through the program she’d completed, the state provided her with a transitional home, where her three boys were able to reside with her.

Faith is a beautiful thing to have, but unfortunately after only a few months back with her children, she turned back toward drug abuse. On January 15th I received a call from the Department of Children and Families, prompting us to travel over the cape cod bridge immediately, to rescue the boys. So we got in the car, we picked them up and we brought them back to our small town, to our tiny 500 square foot studio apartment where our two cats awaited our return.

DCF told me that I had to file for Guardianship of the three boys again, or the state will take them, ship them off to foster homes and assured me that they would unfortunately have to separate all three of them because it is so hard to find a foster home for one child, let alone three. So as of January 17th, we are their Guardians once again, and forever. We will not let them be taken by the state to be separated from each other and from the only stable people in their lives who have never left them.

CLICK HERE to read the rest and help any way you can.

Share this story with as many people as you can.

CapeCodOnline.com – Last fall’s bonfire on Bass River Beach — a brand-new addition to the town’s popular Seaside Festival on Columbus Day weekend — left behind something more than the hoped-for pleasant memories.

“We saw the ash ring from the bonfire, and in it were hundreds of 4- to 6-inch rusty nails,” said Andrea Sandler, a Connecticut resident who owns a seasonal home in West Yarmouth. “We called the Police Department about it.”

Several departments and volunteers involved in planning the bonfire had decided pallets would be the cleanest wood to burn — with no chemicals or old paint to pollute the pristine stretch of coastline. Nobody thought of all the nails that held those pallets together.

“We had the DPW, fire, police and health director at the planning meeting,” said Patricia Armstrong, director of the town’s Parks and Recreation Department. “We thought we had really done our due diligence on this.”

“I can’t believe with all the people that discussed it, we didn’t think of the nails,” Armstrong said.

Love the straight honesty from Patricia Armstrong here. She just says hey, we didn’t think about the nails, we should have but didn’t. Our bad. It’s refreshing to hear that kind of candor from a town official for a change.

Of course the Fun Police are probably already assembling to discuss how they can use this to stop the bonfire next year. They are probably picking a patsy to inject with tetanus as we speak so they can parade him around town meeting twitching like a crackhead.

The sad part is that they will probably win and there most likely won’t be a bonfire next year. But what’s even sadder than that is this lady who found the nails and called the cops. Wouldn’t the DPW be a better call to make in that situation? What are the police going to do about rusty nails on a beach? I’d love to hear the conversation the responding officers had with each other after that call. Yeah sure lady, let us just take off all of our bullet proof armor, radios and gun belts so we can roll up our pants and get to work removing those nails with our specialized police nail removal tools.

There’s two distinct types of people in this world. There’s the ones that see rusty nails on the beach and call the cops and then there’s the ones that actually understand how the world works.