It's 11/11--Make a Wish!

Here, I'll start off and then you can just ignore this entry and get back to taking pictures of your cats:

I wish I had a huge, sturdy oceangoing vessel to travel the world aboard indefinitely, with enough room for a rotating supply of friends and family to join me for segments of the lifelong voyage, a competent and good-natured crew to do all the work of actually piloting/maintaining the ship, maybe a tennis court, and definitely a hot tub.

It would look something like this:

Or maybe like one of these:

But definitely not like this:

Paul Allen's floating pleasure palace. In the absence of friends,

he takes aboard any sycophant that can find a room not used to store bags of cash.

What would it be like to live on the ocean? Who knows, but I'm sure I would get used to it and my pleasure would be derived more from the places I would be able to go, the random beautiful things I would see along the way, lengthy trips ashore in foreign locales on a whim, the close company of loved ones, and the eternal adventure of always being on the move.

"Where we headed, boss?"

"Anywhere!"

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Womb-Like Slumber Guaranteed--For a Price

This room at the Conrad (as in Hilton) Maldives Rangali Island looks pretty sweet, as long as a whale doesn't bump into it in the middle of the night or a hurricane doesn't throw a yacht at it.

Arrive at our Maldives hotel in style in a seaplane over the lagoon, dine in the world's first all-glass, undersea restaurant and indulge in luxurious spa therapies.

Sited in a picturesque corner of the Maldives, our luxury Maldives resort is spread across two islands, surrounded by a vibrant coral reef and lagoon. Twice voted 'Best Hotel in the World' and several times 'Best Resort', our Maldives hotel boasts 50 luxurious water villas, 79 exotic beach villas and 21 fabulous spa water villas with private treatment rooms.

Okay, time to paraphrase (so you don't have to read the word Maldives 400 more times): an 18,000 bottle wine cellar, a spa built above a coral reef (and probably killing it), 7 restaurants (including one underwater), and don't worry--there is also a souvenir shop, jewelry store, and high-end Italian clothing boutique on-site so you don't have to miss out on spending obscene amounts of money shopping just because you're in an island paradise, m'kay?

So, let's see...150 rooms at double occupancy is 300 guests on a good night. The staff for these 300 guests is probably around 300 (bellman, waiters, chefs, prostitutes, line cooks, dishwashers, reception staff, cleaning personnel, boat drivers, seaplane pilots, spa personnel, store clerks...).

Where does the product of 600 people going to the bathroom every day wind up on a tiny sandy island in the middle of the ocean? Did they create their very own 'human waste reef' on the side of the island nobody is allowed to visit? Where the "sea-monster" lives?

Ah, the creativity of the megarich businessmen selfishly portioning out the world for their own gain...

Some more photos to entice you (book through me and I get a 20% vig): 

Just Deserts?

Yeah, yeah, yeah--impressive...but what's the food like on this one?

Breaker: A second Titanic nearly sunk recently--in the Caribbean, of all places.

Brass Tacks:

A sinking yacht called the Titanic avoided the fate of its tragic predecessor, thanks to an international rescue operation co-ordinated from a do-it-yourself store in Wales, it emerged today.

Three crew were rescued in the Caribbean after one of them dialled from memory the number of a friend in Aberystwyth who serves as a volunteer on the local lifeboat.

With their yacht listing badly, short of power and too far from the nearest island, Grenada, to use VHF radio, the crew members cheered when the 4,000-mile call from their satellite telephone got through.

It was only after heartfelt reassurances that he swung into action, co-ordinating the rescue from the store's kitchen section. He took down grid references for the 79-metre, 1,700-tonne yacht on a till receipt and phoned them through to Milford Haven coastguards.

The alert was passed to Falmouth, which deals with international emergencies, and within an hour a French spotter plane located the Titanic. A United States coastguard cutter arrived at the scene shortly afterwards and towed the damaged vessel to port.

The yacht, which was playfully renamed after its previous owners decided to transfer its old name to a new ship, had taken on two and a half metres depth of water in the engine room by the time rescuers arrived.

(courtesy The Guardian)

Now, this is hardly a tragedy of Titanic proportions (oh, SNAP!), but it bears mention simply because it will now serve as proof that somebody was stupid enough to name a ship after the biggest embarrassment to float the Seven Seas.

After all, it's not every day one comes across such a perfect example of idiocy and I think posterity can learn a great deal from this debacle, if they stop sexting each other for a second and tell their one of their robots to read this article aloud to them.

Are you there posterity? It's me, Margaret...

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