Forever This Way

Conditions: Warmingly warm.

Anniversary!

I believe there is a lot of blame in the Costa Concordia liner disaster to go around. Certainly blame for the captain if, as it seems so far, he veered his ship off course in order to do a drive by of a particular island where family of the crew worked, then abandoned ship while passengers were still trying to work out how to get off. But there's also blame to be placed elsewhere, concerning the ship itself. Four thousand people on that ship were faced with the Titanic scenario, 100 years after that liner sank. How to evacuate thousands of people from a sinking ship when there is a shortage of lifeboat capacity.

Veteran mariners say the Concordia wreck - particularly the problems the passengers encountered in launching lifeboats as the ship listed to one side - proves there are problems the industry, try though it might, still has not solved.

"The regulations rely on untrained and frightened passengers being able to deal with life rafts in the absence of trained crew members - including having to board them from the water," said John Dalby, a former oil tanker captain who now runs maritime security firm Marine Risk Management.

"The whole point of the Titanic regulations was to avoid what happened with her, and it has now happened again with Costa - that is, the difficulty, if not impossibility, of launching lifeboats from the 'high side,'" Dalby said, referring to the side of the boat tipped into the air.

In the wake of the Titanic disaster, maritime regulations make it mandatory for all ships to have a minimum of 125 percent lifeboat and life raft capacity, comprising 50 percent on each side of the ship plus an additional 25 percent available. According to the International Chamber of Shipping, they are designed to be ready for use within 5 minutes and to be filled as quickly as needed.

But all of that is for naught if the lifeboats cannot get into the water, or if the ship finds itself in distress in adverse conditions - late at night, in a storm or far from land, for example.

- reuters.com/article/

Titanic taught us that regarding the ship itself as it's own lifeboat was incorrect: that no matter the size, the ship had to allow for a full evacuation to the lifeboats. Surely there is an issue here with a ship that can carry over four thousand people? How can you expect four thousand people to be able to evacuate a ship in a couple of hours - a similar time line for both Titanic and the Concordia. Especially since the ship will likely be damaged and listing, and it's dark or possibly even in storm conditions. They've kept building these ships bigger and bigger, and I suspect have focused more on the "unsinkability" factor of the Titanic legend with hull design and computer assisted navigation systems and the like, rather than the "failed lifeboat evacuation" factor, wherein the nature of a crisis prevents the perfect conditions from being able to happen, and you cannot fill the lifeboats to their capacity.



Film Review: The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

Seems there are two kinds of people in the world, those who know all about Tintin and his adventures, and those who do not know him at all. I am firmly in the former camp, having eagerly read all his books from a young age. Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson have combined forces here to present an amalgam of Tintin adventures, roughly focusing on the Secret of the Unicorn, rendered through computer graphics to present a sort of living comic book. And the effect works fairly well, mostly avoiding the danger of the uncanny valley, where computer-designed faces look more creepy the more lifelike they appear, by sticking to how the characters looked in the comic books.

Of course the essence of a Tintin story is adventure and action, and Spielberg has taken this to heart, with a rip roaring adventure tale that simply doesn't let up. Ocean journeys, daring escapes, french foreign legion, hidden treasure, car chases, plane crashes, gunfights, and even a pirate battle is thrown into the pot. It's about as solid and true to the comic stories as you could hope, and I guess that's where I have an issue. Herge may have known how to write a good adventure, but he doesn't seem to have concerned himself too much with characters or relationships. Being very true to the source material, neither has Spielberg, and I guess that was fine when I was nine years old. But I've been around the block a few times since then, and frankly I'm looking for a little more in my blockbuster entertainment than just non stop action.

Call me nit-picky if you like, and I realise the source material has the same failings, but I feel that a movie that is all action sequence is really only half a movie. The digital effects are superb. The actors are top notch. The settings are brilliant and even the plot is pretty darn good. But where's the heart? Where's the actual risk? Yes the captain drinks too much and Tintin is trying to get him to cut down, but why? Other than the fact that these characters are famous, why should we really care who wins the race to find the treasure? It shouldn't get a pass just because it's old. Three head injuries out of five.


- Peace out