doing the job better

Almost 3 years back, I invited Morpho Trust, the TWIC program administrator, to eat a dick. They certainly earned that scorn I handed out. Cost me lost time at work, people not where they were supposed to be, and making me pay, literally, for their mistakes.


 Oh, the TWIC card is a port access ID that the Ministry of Fear Department of Homeland Security came up with, you know to make our ports safer after no one attacked them, ever. Morpho Trust was awarded the contract to administer the pain process of applying for and handing out TWIC cards.

 Well, it went so well last time. It took 3 appointments to get them to accept my application, then 2 appointments to get my card, which, also, turns out, was sent to the wrong office, so I missed  a couple days of work chasing it down because they refused to mail it.

 Well, as I said, last time, I invited them to eat a dick.

http://bigironbegfish.blogspot.com/2013/01/fame-recognition-news.html


       3 years later, I have applied for a renewal.  OK, it was way too expensive, but the process has been streamlined, and, I'm pleased to report, it went as well as it possibly could. I made my appointment online, found a local office, and did my renewal. The one guy running the show was fast and efficient, polite even, and I was back on the road in 25 minutes. One week later my card showed up in the mail. EVERY. SINGLE. MISTAKE. GOT. CORRECTED.

 So, last time I wrote, an exec from Morpho Trust called me at my home, scaring the shit out of me, and personally apologized for all their fuckups. I've got to say, they have really gotten their shit together, going by my experience.

 So, to the folks at Morpho Trust, I say attaboy. I'm not going to thank someone for merely doing their job, but I sure do appreciate the improvements they made. Morpho Trust is no longer invited to eat a dick, in my book.

THE AWAKENING OF A GENERATION

Deep thoughts and intense debate are raging across the decks, and loud voices are echoing off the bulkheads here at HAWSEPIPER's Afloat Global HQ/think tank today.

 The question posed:

Which of the two individuals shown below formed the nucleus of awakening adolescence for more men between the  ages 32-44? Was it:

 

 Miss Tawny Kitaen, the reason MTV worked and why Whitesnake was on it?

Or was it Ron Jeremy, holding the double-edged sword of both hope that a regular guy could succeed in all things, but also the cautionary and vague feeling that as a generation, we really got screwed in the genetic below-the-belt department?













I argue a middle path: the fact that these two images form a cornerstone of 80's teen male sexual gestalt explains a lot about why we're a little off. HOWEVER, this must be contrasted with the emo girl-child psychology of the entitlement generation's men. It's possible that without Ron's Super Mario-esque tutelage of succeeding by sheer force of will where God gave with one hand and took with the other, and awareness that David Coverdale's Sword of Damocles applied to all of us, whether or not there was a redhead absolutely writhing in almost-sheer fabric on the hood of one's dad's car.

 I say that it's a wash. I took from Ron that since I'm at least better looking, though limited to just two legs, I'd probably be OK if I worked as hard as he did. From Tawny, I took away the feeling that girls might be both interesting and intensely dangerous if she got a mind to climb up on the hood of my car. When I got one.

Battleshit

I saw the new movie "Battleship" last night.

 Oh, my goodness, that was absolutely awful. It was certainly creative, in that they cobbled together CGI and stock footage of navy ships, but the story was insipid, the acting was wooden, and they very obviously never consulted with a Navy vet when writing dialogue or plotting out the storyline. Typical Hollywood fashion, every naval ship was run as a democracy, as though a chain of command never existed. Shit, I never went in the navy, much to my shame, and even I know how the pecking order works.

 Anyways, if you want to save yourself some effort, rather than wading through this ass-high pile of afterbirth of a movie, watch some youtube footage of naval exercises, watch "Transformers," then take $20 and two hours of your life, and wipe your ass with it.

On board the Titanic bandwagon (warning: contains SCIENCE!)

This week's winner of the Smug Gorilla Giving The Finger Award goes to James Cameron and the other ghoulish  profiteers who pimp out a mass graveyard for profit and attention-whoring purposes. 

The above photo was recently released as a reminder that the RMS TITANIC is an underwater graveyard, the final resting place of over 1,200 people.

   The Titanic media blitz can't go 30 seconds without mentioning some fucking people who made a fucking movie, and the guy who told them how to read the goddamned words on the paper they were holding.

    I need to mention this: I don't give a shit about the movie, or the people who made it. I don't even give a shit about the guy who found the Titanic in the first place. He was simply a fundraiser who knew how to hire someone who could read maps, and is good at getting money out of people. For this, he gets called a 'scientist' though he certainly isn't. He doesn't study anything, but rather finds funding for people to study things, and then accepts credit for it. My dad sailed for the same organization for years, and was on the construction, testing and operating team that ran the submarine they used to find the ship. He retired long before the Titanic search took place, back when they used the sub to do things like find lost nuclear bombs and do actual scientific research instead of using the Navy's construction budget to engage in the intellectual equivalent of masturbating in front of a full length mirror and calling it 'art.'
(Edit: I sound hostile in the above because the ALVIN is expensive to charter, and there's a long line to get time on her. The initial TITANIC search, while pretty amazing, tied up the sub for a long while at a time when geophysicists and physical oceanographers with something to offer the world went sub-less. Had the Alvin been released ASAP to continue on her scientific mission, I'd be singing a different tune).


     The only thing I really care about the TITANIC:

 1).  SOLAS (The international convention on Safety Of Life At Sea) came from it, ushering in a new era of safety, about 400 years too late, but welcome still, so that the terrible lessons learned could have meaning, and be prevented in future.

2). The Titanic is a sunken graveyard, the final resting place of over 1,200 souls who died in the name of  greed and hubris (so what else is new!). As such, it should be (and is not) afforded the same level of protection as your town's graveyard, or that of other shipwrecks that aren't quite so profitable to certain interested  *cough cough james cameron cough cough* parties.

 Today's notable pap, showing the true value of self-education when a rich drama queen decides to 'do marine science' without benefit of education, or, more charitably, having a basic science education, comes from the self-serving sultan of Smug himself, James Cameron, recent creator of a cartoon version of Dances With Wolves, set in space. With big blue cats. This from the same guy who's justification in strip mining the TITANIC like a child with a booger-filled nose is that he's "never seen human remains".

Sigh. What does he want? The answer, of course, is dramatically-posed skeletons, a true double-edged sword. On the one hand, dramatic photos of well-dressed dead people would sell. On the other, photos of the mortal remains of accident victims might actually create enough of an outcry that the Titanic wreck site would be protected with a certain amount of dignity. Regardless, the skeletons in questionare nowhere to be found, and, therefore, makes this not desecrating a mass grave, but rather, some form of  'research' by mass media standards.
      Why aren't there skeletons? Chemistry. Same reason ocean water is ocean water. Something I learned on the 3rd day of Intro to Marine Biology. There's plenty of calcium in seawater, which is why mollusc shells and other calcium-heavy things don't dissolve quickly in water, despite a rather intense demand for calcium by creatures such as molluscs and other animals, who can pull it out of seawater and incorporate it into bones and shells and such. Below a certain depth, however, calcium carbonate (shells, bones and such are made up heavily of this stuff) gets aggressively dissolved rather more quickly than in the shallows. This is called the Carbonate Compensation Depth, or CCD. The Titanic rests in deep, deep water, well below the CCD. Aside from the animal life that would be interested in mortal remains, the bones wouldn't last too long, either. And so, once again, basic ignorance of day 1 science shit can be used as a wonderful reason to exploit the dead for fun and profit.
 Now look at that. You learned something! See, there's no reason to blindly dislike people. There's plenty of perfectly good reasons to dislike people.

   

Quiet

It's damn quiet here. Today's the halfway point of this tour for me, and crew change, so there's some fresh blood aboard, but I am here for another 14 days, and looking forward to the next cargo, some time tomorrow. We're approaching the home stretch of this particular project cargo, and, with only a few more (hopefully) loads to go, we can sail north soon after and take up our regular line of work.
 Anyhow, I'm feeling slightly nostalgic for days gone by, when I used to truly sail, where the water was blue, not brown.

The Invasion

In the era of sail, when the officers of one ship would be invited to dine on another, the crew, with the complicity of the Captain of the mess, would refer to the luncheon as an 'invasion.' The rigid and extremely well-enforced rules of communal dining aboard ship were followed, including the rules which dictated where and when rules could be relaxed.
One thing that stood out, at the time, was that if the hosting senior officer decided that everyone was going to get well and truly stinking drunk, there was little choice in the matter. This led to world-class hangovers and good times, apparently, for the most part.
Well, the days of drinking afloat are dead and gone forever, but the invasions continue. Yesterday we hosted a visiting officer for birthday cake, his 36th birthday having come while his vessel was moored alongside us. As the old doryman's creed of "share and share alike" is still obeyed here, today we're invited over for a lunch of lasagna with peach cobbler for dessert... something to brighten up the day here, which, being a rainy mess of a nor'easter, is eagerly looked forward to.
If we're still here tomorrow, I'm going to make some Brazilian stroganoff, in an effort to one-up our Italian neighbors here in the anchorage.

All the poop about poop.

Some oil barges are equipped with incinerating toilets instead of the more traditional water-filled standard toilet. This is done because marine plumbers (known as 'turd chasers') are expensive and about as rare as a $2 bill at the grocery store, but more realistically, a sewage system that doesn't require putting sewerage in the water or in a tank doesn't require permitting, EPA involvement, or monitoring how and when the system gets emptied in order to keep within the very strict confines of the law, and doesn't require anywhere near the level of maintenance that a standard marine septic system needs. I hope you'll believe me when I say that the septic system on a commercial vessel is, after the propulsion and electrical system, one of the most complex and incident-prone systems on board.

Now, long ago here I told the story of 'Peanuts' the 3rd assistant engineer, a young kid fresh out of King's Point who had to flush out one of the holding tanks on my ship. With a fire hose. A fully charged fire hose. As you may remember or may guess, there was a, ah... backdraft from the tank. The kid got splashed. I was cutting through the engine room at the time, on my way to the bridge of the ship, and, almost tripping over a fire hose, saw the action. Well, after the hose was put away, I approached the engineer, who was, it turns out, under the assumption that he missed being hit by ass shrapnel. I accidentally spilled the beans (sorry), by pointing out that he had something in his hair. A peanut, it turns out. Without a word, the boy bolted upstairs headed for his shower, and ran into the captain, himself cutting through the top of the engine room on his way to lunch. Seeing a wild-eyed boy running full speed up a catwalk, the captain must have been slow to get out of the way. The boy yelled "Fucking Peanuts!" and I swear shot by the captain on the narrow catwalk like a watermelon seed pinched between two fingers.

Well, after that, Peanuts was pretty much this guy's brand to own. In fact, I don't remember his name at all.


Hopefully, you get the idea. Dealing with the most comfortable seat in the house is something of a burden when you're afloat. Now, the incinerating turd burner is not just an ideal way to take care of Big Business, either. In fact, it's both a tool and a political bargaining chip.
Let's say a tugboat fetches up against you, hard. After a long, long day, just as you're dozing off, with only a few precious hours of downtime, you get blasted halfway out of your bunk when some heavy-handed cowbow smashes his tug against your hull. This causes an adrenaline surge, and pretty much kills the impulse to sleep for about an hour. Now, if said bump was caused by inattention (as opposed to weather or poor maneuvering room) or heavy-handedness, the electric super bowl now becomes a weapon. Once the tug is in place, and, if the wind is right, it's time to fire up the turd burner and send a smoke signal to let the operator know that, hey, there are people here. People who need rest in a bed that doesn't act like a mechanical bull. This is called 'voting with your ass' and it's a hell of a lot more satisfying than calling a 900 number to tell Simon Cowell what you think of this weeks' American Idol contestants.