Triumph of the Swill

British papers can get rather loose and excitable about the facts, which is why this Daily Mail Cruise Ship of the Damned headline seems a tad overblown: Boss of Carnival cruise ship adds insult to misery by going to basketball game as 4,000 suffer aboard 'stinking stricken ship' with urine-soaked carpets and sewage in cabins. If there was a direct correlation between "not going to the game" and "sewage disappearing from cabins" I could understand the jibe.

I'm not saying the Triumph is an old ship, but here's a promotional handout photo.

At a news conference yesterday a company spokesman said that not all the bathrooms had been knocked out by the engine-room fire; there were 22 public bathrooms, and most of those were working. Most.Well. If you look at deck plans of the ship, and you'll note that the cabin decks have no public restrooms. Most of them are indeed in the public area, fore or after and occasionally midships. And they're small.

So reports about the conditions onboard are probably correct - hot, smelly, hungry, angry. That also goes for most comments on the news stories, since cruise-ship mishaps always bring out the people who do not like cruise ships and think you should not like them too, unless you're a stupid fat American but I repeat myself ha ha. Well, I love cruise ships. Standing on your balcony as the ship slides out of a harbor at dusk is one of the joys of life, and I pity anyone who can't see why some people would enjoy threading through fjords with the knowledge that nothing is required of you that day but your presence at dinner.

That's the civilized side of cruising. Getting on a cheap party boat that lumbers around from one hot indistinguishable beach to the other can be a different manner. I like those too. But the bad ones generate some amusing reviews. As with, say, the Triumph.

What, it hit a giant soup can? No, it's a port. Another review:

Another person complains of the cigarette smoke, and also

To be fair: almost any ship will have a slew of bad reviews, because you can't please everyone, and some people are just finicky pills. Head over to the reviews for the Nieuw Amsterdam, and the people who like Carnival say it's the "Snootiest ship in the fleet" and a "Floating nursing home." For example:

This person is - what's the technical term? Idiot? I think that works. Really, here's a standard hallway:

Blue. Red. Those things on the wall? Photos of old ships and bygone scenes of New York. The ship is loaded with art - paintings of the other vessels to bear the name in the fore gangway, Dutch art in the midships stairs, modern art in the aft stairs. And then there's this:

Seems likely.

My point: regard these reviews with some skepticism. But oh, how I look forward to reading the reviews after the Triumph gets home and 3,000 people get in front of a computer.

How things have changed: the humble GIF is not only considered an art form now, it has its own search engine: Giphy.

Here's a selection of eight chosen for their art-history connections. Such as:

In related news: the Mona Lisa in the Louvre? It might be a copy.

UPDATE: A few days ago we discussed a story from a Russian news site - yeah, I know, there's the problem right there - claiming an asteroid was due to smack us hard next century. Given the source and the tone, I was inclined to disbelieve it. Vindication arrived yesterday in the following form, from Slate:

It is appalling, but like I said: Russian media.