"After watching the whole course of the accident, the respected comrade Kim Jong-un made [a] stern assessment..."

"... saying that it was a serious accident and criminal act caused by absolute carelessness, irresponsibility and unscientific empiricism which is out of the bounds of possibility and could not be tolerated.... He warned solemnly that the irresponsible errors of the relevant officials… responsible for the accident that brought the dignity and self-respect of our state to a collapse in a moment would have to be dealt with."

So it said in The Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the Workers’ Party of Korea, as quoted in "North Korea warship launch accident leaves Kim Jong-un furious/Supreme leader says the damage suffered by the 5,000-tonne naval vessel, which was launched sideways, was a disgrace to the country’s 'dignity and self-respect'" (London Times).

I'm perplexed by the degree of openness from the government and in the press in North Korea. Over here in America, I don't even know who was President in the last few years.

Every man for himself.

In the comments to the previous post, about the Cuauhtémoc disaster, Old and slow said: "They could see the collision coming. I don't understand why the sailors stayed up on the yardarms."

I asked Grok, "Were they courageously holding their formation? Were they waiting for a command?" and guessed that no such command was given because the men could not have scampered down all at once. Grok observed: "Staying in place, secured by harnesses, may have been safer than attempting to climb down without clear instructions.... Naval operations prioritize collective action over individual initiative in emergencies.... The sailors likely held their positions to avoid creating additional hazards, trusting their officers to issue appropriate commands."

My inclination was to credit the sailors with courage, but Grok thought it was more likely a matter of "duty and discipline." If adhering to duty and discipline doesn't count as courage, are we systematically lying to ourselves and others and engaging in sentimentalism and propaganda when we speak of courage in the military? And why would it be less courageous to unclip the harness and attempt to descend?

In writing my question for Grok, I thought of the expression "Every man for himself." Is that a command ever given in the navy? Grok said — full Grok answers here — that's not a formal command in the naval tradition. But then why do I know that phrase? Where does it come from?

Mexican tall ship hits Brooklyn Bridge.

Sailors seen dangling from the Top Masts of the Mexican navy vessel that collided into the Brooklyn Bridge. It appears that several people were hanging and/or clutching on to objects several hundred feet in the air in an attempt to avoid falling.pic.twitter.com/Y3Bt145IxF

— Noteworthy News (@newsnoteworthy) May 18, 2025

"But state officials worried about terrorism had focused on bombs and bad guys in small boats, not an errant 95,000-gross-ton container ship...."

"And after [the Interstate 35 bridge collapse in 2007], the focus wasn’t on building the kind of massive and costly barriers that might have had even a chance of stopping a ship like the Singapore-flagged Dali from sending the Key Bridge crumpling into the Patapsco River, said the former senior transportation official. 'It never occurred to anybody,' he said.... At the time of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge accident, the Baltimore Sun reported that a top state engineer said the Key Bridge couldn’t withstand a similar collision. 'I’m talking about the main supports, a direct hit — it would knock it down,' the official said."

From "Officials studied Baltimore bridge risks but didn’t prepare for ship strike" (WaPo).

They knew the problem. "It never occurred to anybody"... please. The necessary precaution, the bridge having the limitations they knew it had, was to ban ships that size from passing there. That's how I see it, as a layperson. Prove me wrong.

I looked up the Celtic Sea, because it came up in my readings... and I was entranced....

.... by the reviews people had given it in Google Maps. To quote 4:

1. "It was wetter than I expected. Lots of fish swimming about under the surface, if you like that sort of thing."

2. "Very good sea. Compared to other seas, lakes and natural reservoirs it is undoubtedly superior. However, looking at the oceans, we need to admit that Celtic sea is slightly inferior. Nevertheless, it is a great representative of a sea.

3. "Against all the odds it does appear to be a genuine sea! I can confirm the presence of both waves and sky, with the correct one being above the other. Very tricky to get around if you don't have a boat. Minus 1 star."

4. "Lovely spot of water."

***

I was reading "Colonel Roosevelt" (commission earned). This part:

"Already hampered by problems at the Panama Canal, shipping companies are now steering clear of the Suez Canal to avoid being attacked in the Red Sea."

The NYT reports.

The Houthis, an armed group backed by Iran that controls much of northern Yemen, have been using drones and missiles to target ships since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.... [T]aking the Cape of Good Hope route could add roughly $1 million, or around a third, to the cost of a round trip from Asia to Europe... A portion of that additional cost could be passed on to consumers just as inflation is slowing in the United States and Europe. The attacks have already appeared to push up the price of oil.... The economic impact has increased the pressure on the United States and other countries to stop the attacks by the Houthis....

The problem with the Panama Canal is entirely different: "The lack of rain has reduced the amount of water available to fill the locks."

"A squid ship is a bustling, bright, messy place. The scene on deck looks like a mechanic’s garage where an oil change has gone terribly wrong."

"Scores of fishing lines extend into the water, each bearing specialized hooks operated by automated reels. When they pull a squid on board, it squirts warm, viscous ink, which coats the walls and floors. Deep-sea squid have high levels of ammonia, which they use for buoyancy, and a smell hangs in the air. The hardest labor generally happens at night, from 5 p.m. until 7 a.m. Hundreds of bowling-ball-size light bulbs hang on racks on both sides of the vessel, enticing the squid up from the depths. The blinding glow of the bulbs, visible more than a hundred miles away, makes the surrounding blackness feel otherworldly. 'Our minds got tested,' Anhar said...."

From "The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat/China has invested heavily in an armada of far-flung fishing vessels, in part to extend its global influence. This maritime expansion has come at grave human cost," by Ian Urbina (The New Yorker). 

"So, yeah, I said, ‘Okay, well, this floor is moving. So, the floor is going, and you have to just find how you relate to the floor."

Said ballet master Antonio Castilla, quoted in "The perils and pirouettes of staging a ballet aboard the Queen Mary 2/The Cunard line’s flagship offers passengers a rare opportunity for performances at sea with the English National Ballet" (WaPo).

"The body of the dancer is very, very sensitive to the changes... We work down into the floor and then from the floor we adjust up, and unless you do it from the floor, it’s just fake."

"There was no emotion. While we were getting things done, we all had that feeling, ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ but it didn’t keep us from doing what we needed to do and prepare ourselves to abandon ship."

From "Sailboat crew rescued in Pacific after abandoning ship sunk by whale/ Four people aboard the Raindancer were stranded in the Pacific Ocean for 10 hours" (WaPo).

"Twitter has long been referred to as a 'hell site,' but the weeks that followed Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company marked a nadir for social media..."

"... or perhaps a climax, depending on how prone you are to Schadenfreude. The majority of discourse on the platform focussed on the platform itself and its theoretically impending doom. The situation called to my mind Théodore Géricault’s 1819 painting 'The Raft of the Medusa' which pictures the aftermath of an infamous shipwreck with the few living sailors struggling to climb up a mound of corpses on a decaying raft. In this case, no one was coming to the rescue, especially given that Twitter’s content moderation and safety staffs had been decimated by layoffs."

Writes Kyle Chayka in "The Year in Apps I Gave Up On/In 2022, the entire Internet began to feel something like a dying mall populated only by stores we don’t want to visit" (The New Yorker).

How does the Twitter situation look in your head? Please express yourself metaphorically, citing a work of art — e.g. "The Raft of Medusa":

Background story (from Wikipedia): 

How many people should be traveling to Antarctica every year? Was that "rogue wave" a wake up call?

I've already blogged about the rogue wave that killed one cruise passenger, but I want to take up the question whether Antarctica ought to be visited at all anymore — or at least not routinely by bucket-listers on cruise ships.

I'm reading "Rogue Wave Strikes Cruise Ship, Killing a Passenger and Injuring 4 Others/The passengers were hurt after a large, unpredictable wave hit the ship, which was traveling toward the Antarctic, Viking Cruises said" (NYT):

Tourism to the Antarctic has steadily increased in the last 30 years, with 74,401 people traveling there in the 2019-20 season, according to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators. Roughly 6,700 people traveled there in the 1992-93 season, according to the association....

"One cruise passenger died and four others were injured during an Antarctica voyage this week when a 'rogue wave' slammed into the Viking Polaris..."

WaPo reports.

"It’s a marvelous lake. If you aggregate all of its assets, it’s one of the most exciting cruise destinations anywhere."

Said Stephen Burnett, executive director of the Great Lakes Cruise Association, quoted in "Lake Superior Is Cold, Sparsely Settled and Known for Bad Weather. Perfect for Cruising, Some Say. As cruising picks up, one small Wisconsin port weighs the pros and cons of more ships and their impact on the town and the environment" (NYT).

In late May, 30 m.p.h. south winds forced Viking to cancel shore excursions to Bayfield. The first three stops in Houghton, Mich., on the Keweenaw Peninsula, were also canceled because of inclement weather and winds, much to the chagrin of Marylyn and Randy Sandrik, passengers who live in Frisco, Texas.... 

So far they are enamored with both the ship and the voyage. “I like that there’s no smoking, no gambling, no casinos, no charge for drinks and no talent shows on board,” said Ms. Sandrik.... 

I love that string of "no"s with the one about drinking being "no charge."  

In Bayfield, Ted Dougherty, the chairman of the Bayfield Harbor Commission, and other local officials, including Lynne Dominy, the superintendent of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, spent a total of three years negotiating with Viking. Ms. Dominy’s concerns about the ship were the safety of park visitors in smaller vessels like sailboats and kayaks, wake damage to park shoreline and infrastructure, and the displacement of local businesses who offer ferry excursions and other boat journeys within the park....

"The Dutch like to say, 'Acting normal is crazy enough.' And we think that rich people are not acting normal."

"Here in Holland, we don’t believe that everybody can be rich the way people do in America, where the sky is the limit. We think 'Be average.' That’s good enough...”

Said Ellen Verkoelen, "a City Council member and Rotterdam leader of the 50Plus Party, which works on behalf of pensioners," quoted in "The Country That Wants to ‘Be Average’ vs. Jeff Bezos and His $500 Million Yacht/Why did Rotterdam stand between one of the world’s richest men and his boat? The furious response is rooted in Dutch values" (NYT).

“When I was about 11 years old, we had an American boy stay with us for a week, an exchange student,” she recalled. “And my mother told him, just make your own sandwich like you do in America. Instead of putting one sausage on his bread, he put on five. My mother was too polite to say anything to him, but to me she said in Dutch, ‘We will never eat like that in this house.’” 

At school, Ms. Verkoelen learned from friends that the American children in their homes all ate the same way. They were stunned and a little jealous. At the time, it was said in the Netherlands that putting both butter and cheese on your bread was “the devil’s sandwich.”...

The Ukrainian postal service issued stamps showing a Ukrainian fighter giving a Russian warship the finger.

The NYT reports. 

People lined up for hours to get these stamps — a million were printed — which quickly sold out.

The image related to an incident early in the conflict, when a warship demanded the surrender of a small group of fighters guarding a rocky island in the Black Sea. The gesture by the fighter was a visual representation of the profane phrase one of the island’s defenders used in a radio transmission, in which he told the warship where to go....

That's a wordy way to avoid quoting the phrase "Russian warship, go fuck yourself." But the stamp avoided displaying the words. It switched to the wordless finger. 

And then, the day after the stamps came out, the Ukrainians hit a Russian ship — the Moskva — and the ship later sank.

The house/yacht distinction — it's a tax question.

More, here, at the Miami Herald. Miami-Dade County has sent the owners a property tax bill of nearly $120,000, but there's a state constitutional law provision barring property tax on boats. What makes a boat? The lawyer for the owners says the county is relying on "the shape and the style and the look" of what the lawyer calls "this boat."

This isn't just an isolated case. This thing — "The Arkup" — has been touted in mainstream media and is intended as a model for extensive new housing development — "small apartments on the water for students, townhouses for families.... housing solutions for a broader audience." I can see why the promoters of this kind of floating house-building stress future benefits for the non-rich, but the real house/boat in issue in this case belongs to rich people.

Who should pay property taxes? Why should land-based domicile-owners pay the bills? Should you have to change that state constitutional law provision first, or is it enough for the government to draw the boat/house distinction in the way that allows for more tax collection?

But houseboats have been around for ages, so you'd think this problem would have been worked out long ago.

"The Endurance22 Expedition has located the wreck of Endurance, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship which has not been seen since it was crushed by the ice and sank in the Weddell Sea in 1915."

The Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust annnounces.

Clear video of the wreck (in what the leader of the expedition calls "a brilliant state of preservation"):

Here's the NYT article, "At the Bottom of an Icy Sea, One of History’s Great Wrecks Is Found/Explorers and researchers, battling freezing temperatures, have located Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s ship that sank in the Antarctic in 1915." 

Under the terms of the Antarctic Treaty, the six-decade-old pact intended to protect the region, the wreck is considered a historical monument. The submersibles did not touch it; the images and scans will be used as the basis for educational materials and museum exhibits...

Shackleton left England aboard Endurance with a crew of 27 in 1914, bound for a bay on the Weddell Sea that was meant to be the starting point for an attempt by him and a small party to be the first to cross Antarctica....

And let me recommend the excellent New Yorker article, "The White Darkness/A solitary journey across Antarctica" by David Grann (available at Amazon in book form). Excerpt: 

He had studied with devotion the decision-making of Shackleton, whose ability to escape mortal danger was legendary, and who had famously saved the life of his entire crew when an expedition went awry. Whenever Worsley faced a perilous situation—and he was now in more peril than he’d ever been—he asked himself one question: What would Shacks do?

Dolls and Porsches.

1. "Dolls and Drinks for Likes and Clicks/The American Girl Cafe has become an unlikely party spot for influencers and their imitators" (NYT)("'Come with me to get absolutely obliterated at the American Girl Doll Cafe,' begins a TikTok video... The store comped their meal, as they sometimes do for influencers').

2. "Ship Carrying 1,100 Porsches and Other Luxury Cars Is Burning and Adrift" (NYT)("No rescuers or crew members were injured in the 'highly skilled and physically demanding' operation... that whisked the crew members to the nearby Portuguese island of Faial").

"During the Second World War, a pigeon was cited for bravery by the U.S. Army. During a storm, the bird, known as U.S. 1169, carried a distress message..."

"... from a foundering Coast Guard vessel and alerted rescuers. Between 1943 and 1949, the Dickin Medal—a British award for animal bravery—was bestowed on thirty-two pigeons, nearly twice the number given to hero dogs."

From the book "On Animals" by Susan Orlean.

Here's the Wikipedia page for the Dickin Medal, where you can see the details of what these pigeons — and other creatures — did. And by "other creatures," I mean dogs, mostly. 18 of them. The only other creatures were 3 horses and — incredibly! — 1 cat. He was a ship's cat named Simon:

"Here's how the full moon helped free the stuck ship Ever Given in the Suez Canal."

Space.com explains.

"We were helped enormously by the strong falling tide we had this afternoon," Peter Berdowski, CEO of Boskalis, the salvage firm charged with freeing the Ever Given, told The Associated Press. "In effect, you have the forces of nature pushing hard with you, and they pushed harder than the two sea tugs could pull."