NYC-Bermuda cruise

The last week in August, Chad's folks took the kids (and us) on a cruise out of NYC to Bermuda and back. This was so lovely and convenient: no planes! Drive down to the shipyard, park, walk onto the ship!

We were on the Norwegian Cruise Lines' Escape, which has a passenger capacity of over four thousand, nbd. Anyway, it's enormous, it has a ropes course at the stern that the kids loved (best experienced during the in-port days), and the restaurants we went to were all good; I think our main note about the ship itself was that it would have been a little nicer if there had been a designated quiet pool somewhere.

I personally kind of liked having two and a half days in one place, instead of stopping at a bunch of places; it was nice to get the chance to explore in a little more detail. We didn't take as much advantage of that as we might have, because we had booked three out-on-the-water excursions for each morning, but various combinations of our group made their way ashore: wandered the National Museum of Bermuda and saw their dolphins, looked around the West End, got some souvenirs. (I got a neat glass ring and pendant at Studio 8 Glass, where SteelyKid also got a pink-sand-and-charms locket.) Of course SteelyKid and I made it back onto the ship with a whole ten minutes to spare before the all-aboard time, which was mildly nervewracking, but we managed.

The water excursions were a bit of a mixed bag. We did Rising Son Cruises's catamaran tour the first day; they had a nice mix of equipment (snorkel, paddle board, kayak), and the spot they brought us to had some decent snorkeling and cool caves, but it was quite close to the dockyard and I found that very mildly deflating. Then we did a kayaking trip and that was a mistake, because it was hot and required physical exertion and the kids were super not into it. It probably would have been good otherwise, though. Finally, we did a glass-bottom boat and snorkel (I don't know the name of the company, unfortunately), which was perfect; we got a good informative look at stuff through the glass, and the snorkel spot had more variety and clearer water than the first trip.

(Note to self: you are a lousy swimmer, take the fins, they make snorkeling so much less work. Also if your mask is leaking around the nose it is probably too tight, not too loose.)

It was sort of amusing taking three tours in a row; we heard two very similar versions of the turtle egg transplant story and one wildly different (incorrect) one, and three generally similar variants of the sad tale of the HMS Vixen, though with more detail than I can confirm on a quick morning Google (in particular, did it arrive in Bermuda with convicts aboard that no-one told them to expect? and did the convicts doing the dockyard construction set it on fire?).

Finally, I am pleased to report that the medical staff onboard was very good, because the Pip developed an allergic reaction to something the evening we left Bermuda and was all over hives; we made one trip down to the medical center for a diagnosis and Benadryl, and then another the next day when the hives were worse, resulting in an IV drip of Benadryl and Prednisolone. His poor Pipliness has had an up-and-down time of the symptoms since, but yesterday morning the pediatrician recommended we change to another antihistamine and, knock on wood, that seems to have done it. (No, we have no solid idea what caused it; no, we're not planning to do any testing unless it comes back, because our best guesses are the ship's detergent or something at the beach that day; as always, no unsolicited advice, thank you.)

Edit: I forgot I had a couple of videos of the dolphins: the longer one is the dolphin on the left learning to come inside the sphere, as part of a study to map dolphins' visual blind spots (teach dolphins to come in, teach them to vocalize when they see a light mounted inside the sphere, figure out which areas of the sphere they can't see), and the shorter one is a dolphin swimming upside-down with a ball.

Chad also posted a giant album of photos just after I made this post.

Edit 2: another giant album of photos, this time featuring the sillyheads.

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Saturday links are very backlogged

What with the leadup to taking a week off work, the cruise with limited Internet, and the kids going back to school, I have quite the backlog.

• I lost hours watching videos of Simone Biles doing a triple double on the floor exercise and a double-double beam dismount, because the human body is capable of amazing things. Here's a Slate article and a Twitter thread.

• Something I did not know: The Statue of Liberty was created to celebrate freed slaves, not immigrants, its new museum recounts, at the Washington Post.

• At Atlas Obscura, What the Heck Is Crab Rangoon Anyway?, subtitled "How a fusion of at least four cuisines created a beloved and misunderstood dish."

• Jan Hakon Erichsen (janerichsen) is a "visual artist and balloon destroyer"; he has compilations at his YouTube channel, such as this two-minute one that I find just very satisfying.

• Via Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Hollywood Reporter article criticizing Bruce Lee's portrayal in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I discovered that the two of them were in a movie together called Game of Death, and their ten-minute fight scene is available on YouTube. It is truly something to behold.

• I'm posting this just in time for the season finale tomorrow night, but Discovery has a documentary show called Serengeti that is narrated by Lupita Nyong'o.

• Vox on the history and appeal of escape rooms.

• Good Eats is back; here's an interview about the filmmaking behind the show, then and now.

• Scathing farewell article from Deadspin's editor-in-chief on how

  A metastasizing swath of media is controlled by private-equity vultures and capricious billionaires and other people who genuinely believe that they are rich because they are smart and that they are smart because they are rich, and that anyone less rich is by definition less smart. They know what they know, and they don’t need to know anything else.

• A positive review of the styling service Stitch Fix by a wheelchair user.

• A quite interesting article at Strange Horizons by Victoria Chen, age 18, called “A lag is happening” : A disconnect between YA writers and the readers the books are written for.

• The AV Club's Home Video Hell series asks, How can you not check out a movie called The VelociPastor?

• The Tiptree Motherboard on Alice Sheldon and the name of the Tiptree Award (as the post says: content notes for discussion of suicide, mental illness, caregiver murder). Quick edit: valuable perspective from beatrice_otter, found via jesse_the_k.

• I was bummed to hear that Alexis Kennedy, who founded Failbetter Games, has acted abusively toward women in the industry. I am glad that he hasn't been with FBG for years, since though I haven't played Fallen London much for a while, it still means a lot to me. Andrew Plotkin has some links, and Vice has a bit more detail (nb. the rest of that article discusses allegations of sexual assault and suicide).

• A long tribute to Car Talk, including an interview with Ray; its humor wasn't aging well even when it was still airing live, but I have a lot of fond memories of lazing around on Sundays listening to it all the same.

• Slate on What’s Missing From “White Fragility”: "Robin DiAngelo’s idea changed how white progressives talk about themselves—and little else."

• Moving article from film critic A.A. Dowd on Re-reading Stephen King’s It and confronting my own personal Derry. Spoilers, naturally, and also descriptions of childhood abuse.

• A Nobel-Winning Economist Goes to Burning Man to investigate urban planning, over at the NYT.

• Also at the NYT, 82-Year-Old Slipped by Doormen to Steal $400,000 in Jewelry, Police Say: people skills will always count when it comes to theft.

• Last one, and again from the NYT: I never watched Friends, but I liked Wesley Morris' tribute.

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