Breakfast this AM is at O’Sheehan’s Pub.  It isn’t crowded, and the service is great right at your tableside.  Awesome omelet but the bacon was too thin.  They allow you to make substitutions or additions to the normal menu fare.  Nicely done.

This ship has three water slides, and I try the second one that requires no inner tube today.  It’s a blast.  The ship’s water parks are great fun for all ages.  There’s 7 hot tubs, swimming pools aft and mid ship, kiddie pools, and even a pool that has a dance floor rise right out of the water!

I hit the gym and am politely told that I can’t wear flip flops in there, even though I had the day before.  So I round trip it back from my studio and hit it up again, this time literally, as I use a punching bag.

Then I lose at Trivia but have fun doing it and attend a talk on the first port we’ll hit in 5 days or so: Funchal, Portugal, in the Madeira wine region.  It looks beautiful, and I’m looking forward to it.

BTW, someone was rescued at sea today.  We weren’t planning to get so close to Bermuda, but as it is a shore boat picked up our critical passenger little more than a mile from the island.  Not the place you want to get sick, in the middle of the ocean.

I try to go to a “traveler’s” meet up at a bar, which coincidentally is also a Martini tasting.  Sounds like the perfect match, right?  That’s what the LGBT crowd thought as well, and by the time I got there they’d taken the place over.

So it was dinner again back at Taste.  I hurried through my meal so I could make it to the Second City TV Improv Comedy Troupe.  I had to get reservations for this one because the venue was so small.  Mixed review from me.  Yes, some of it was LOL funny, but way too much was just forced rather than freewheeling humor.  I won’t bother with them again.  Here I’ll note that they also had the obligatory Catholic bashing joke.  Hasn’t that been done out by now?  Why not try something truly avant-garde like Rabbi jokes?  That’s fresh material, and there’s a reason why it isn’t tried.  Do it, and you wind up doing cruise ship tours for the rest of your life.

OK, I leave the SC skit early and show up later in the evening for a “sock hop” party, wisely eschewing the golf lessons and the basketball tournament.  Trouble is, party’s been moved indoors due to weather, and the new location is really too small for passengers AND crew…and they both show up in droves.  So I’m off to bed early.

And now for observations from the hard barren soil of a paleo-conservative’s mind…which is another way of saying, the truth.  If you are sensitive and your feelings get hurt real easy you should just skip this.

I’ve been cruising off and on for 30 years, and there’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed that, incredibly, has never changed.  That is: affirmative action is not practiced on the open sea.  Nope.  Take a look at the picture chart of officers on most any cruise vessel and what you’ll see are the smiling faces of white guys!

That’s right.  Wasn’t NCL told that it’s not important who is most competent?  Weren’t they aware that having no black faces among the crew higher-ups is prima facie evidence of discrimination?  Don’t they realize that there would be more black captains as master of the ship if only the ancestors of the Danes and Norwegians who seem to dominate these top staff positions hadn’t enslaved the Noble Negro?  Oops!  No it wasn’t the Danes who did that, but just the same…HOW DARE THEY???

I think it’s because these ships may operate out of the USA on occasion, but they are not based here as a corporation and so don’t have to sacrifice efficiency and public safety on the altar of a racial spoils system that makes sure mediocre minorities are elevated to positions beyond their capability. That doesn’t matter so much at a bank where after all nobody dies when a rogue bond trader destroys a hundred billion dollars in less than a month…and of course, the bank doesn’t even lose that money, we the taxpayer do.

But if a ship’s captain isn’t at the very top of his game, people could die.  Now, Americans and Canadians have a role on these ships also as entertainers.  The busboys and housekeepers are from the Philippines and Thailand, the waitresses are from Eastern Europe, and the blacks are cooks or deck hands.  Nepalese handle the security, and Bulgarians are the engineers.  It’s a polyglot international crew, and each subculture has found its own level in a natural way based purely on discrimination-the kind of discrimination that says “I only want the BEST people as the top trustees of this 100 million dollar investment.”   Bravo!

I for one am glad to see this.  NCL is promoting people based on the “content of their character rather than the color of their skin”.  Hmmm…who else said that?