Noah Called: "Febreze Please!"

You always wonder about what you DON’T see when you're on a cruise ship: like what do the kitchens really look like, and how about those wee windowless cabins where the crammed-together staff-people have to duck their heads whenever they stand up to zip their pants?Mostly if you look around at all us fat first-worlders waddling to the midnight buffet you think “Gad, we’re generating a hell of a lot of waste here, people!” I picture the hold of Noah's little cruise-ship the morning the waters finally receded enough to let down the ramp. But then you step into one of  the rest rooms and it’s like something out of a Renaissance palace, all rosy-hued marble and honey-colored tile - or you go back to your cabin and see this bathroom that is a pure jewel of efficiency, mirrored shelves with tiny guardrails for your cosmetics and then the toilets! Those vacuum-powered toilets strong enough to suck down even your dainty washables!Ah but what we learned this week is that even a vacuum doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It needs power and that’s what they lost on the Carnival Cruise Ship Splendor...There’ll be more to learn in the days to come, though delicacy will probably forbid most people from unpacking their full store of figurative language on the experience. It’s a good reminder that really we’re all still  animals just like the scaled, the feathered and the four-legged underneath our Speedos and our thong bikinis,. And as for us first-worlders sucking up all the resources, then going off to the Captains’ Ball? Well, our day of reckoning is bound to come too - and that time there won’t BE any complimentary second cruises to compensate us for our trouble.Now, just so you'll know I don't see myself as above it all, here I am with my gang, dressed up for - what else? - Toga Night on our own ship of fools in '99. (You know that clicking on an image will enlarge it, right? ) Now somebody call Nero!  And tell him to bring along that fiddle!)