Unsolved Disappearances at Sea
The story about disappearing cruise ship passengers has been picked up by MSNBC.This may be a statistically improbable thing to care about, since 10 million people cruise each year and around 12 have gone overboard during voyages in five years.
However, each incident affects thousands of people, because the ships turn back to participate in searches, and some may involve foul play rather than suicide or accident.
There also can't be many more grim tragedies to endure than a loved one who disappears off a ship in the middle of the ocean, never to be found. Seven years after Amy Bradley was lost on the Royal Caribbean Rhapsody of the Seas, her family still has no answers for what happened to the 23-year-old.
When Reporters Attack
Washington Post reporter Mark Leibovich covers a raucous press conference with Sens. Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, and DNC Chair Howard Dean:The press chorus then devolved into a cacophony of competing screams. (And Dean knows screams!) After several seconds, a booming voice cut through the noise. It belonged to Brian Wilson, a Fox News correspondent who was standing in the middle of the crowd. He asked Dean "if people are focused on the other things that you've said about hating Republicans, about Republicans being dishonest and then this latest comment about the Republican Party is full of white Christians. You say you hate Republicans -- does that mean you also" hate white Christians?
Dean didn't respond and Reid talked about having a "positive agenda." Wilson was so insistent that at one point, Durbin asked, "Does he run the press conference?"
... An aide to Reid announced that the photo op was over.
"We'll decide when we're ready," Wilson said. Later, Durbin would recount the scene with some exasperation. He chided the media for avoiding important issues in favor of trivial matters. "Please, for a minute, get to the substance," he said to a group of reporters. "You guys should be ashamed of yourselves."
The article's more interesting when you learn that Wilson and Leibovich got into a journalistic sissyfight after the event:
Wilson was apparently wearing no credential of any kind (that wasn't a red flag to anyone) and behaving "bizarrely angry" so the Washington Post's Mark Leibovich asked who he was.
We hear that Wilson "went nuts," responding to the Post reporter (whose credentials were clearly on display):
"Who the fuck are you?"
I hope that Leibovich had the good sense to give the correct answer to that question.
As you enter Disney World Epcot, you pass granite monuments covered with thousands of postage stamp-sized etched metal portraits.Getting a single picture on a Leave a Legacy monument costs around $35, and I've always regarded it as a very moving tribute to Disney's ability to separate millions of dollars from their original owners.
However, on my last trip I glanced over a few of the portraits, spotting one next to a woman and child with an inscription "Cesar Alviar 9-11-2001."
Alviar was a Marsh & McLennan accountant who died in Tower One of the World Trade Center.
Tracking an IP Address
A person calling himself Ranveer of Mumbai visited the Drudge Retort last night, posting three memorable anti-American rants:... you have the gall to talk about not finding anything pure to drink in India other than Coke? Even our cows' urine is more pure than your drinks.
As I checked the IP address to see if Ranveer was really posting from India, I thought the links might be useful to others. Here's what I do when playing Scooby Doo Internet detective:
- The IP address to host name service reveals the name associated with an address, if one has been defined.
- A traceroute service identifies each hop from a chosen server to the address.
- Three WHOIS registrars -- APNIC, ARIN, and RIPE -- can tell you what company controls an IP address.
The WHOIS registrars cover different regions, so for any IP address, one provides a definitive answer and the others offer generic information covering the entire IPv4 Internet (the range 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255).
For example, ARIN identifies that the address 207.46.130.108 belongs to Microsoft, while APNIC and RIPE come up with bupkiss.
The only thing that worked on Ranveer was APNIC. He posted his comments from an address owned by REACH, a global Internet provider that specializes in Asian connectivity and has offices in Mumbai.
Another Reason for Tower's Cabinet Defeat
In a story on secrecy in Washington, Post writer Sally Quinn drops a bomb on the late Sen. John Tower:
... John Tower, the powerful Republican senator from Texas, was nominated to be secretary of defense, a job he badly wanted. Tower had a reputation as a serious womanizer. It was a poorly kept secret on the Hill, but most women wouldn't talk. Only one or two had the guts to speak up. Tower, who was a friend of my father, had attempted to sexually assault me when I was 18 and a college freshman. Embarrassed and ashamed, I had kept this story a closely guarded secret for years.
One day, during Tower's confirmation hearings, two FBI officials showed up at my front door and asked me to tell them about the incident. I refused to confirm it. "But you don't understand," one of them said to me, "this will be totally confidential." I burst out laughing. "Are you kidding?" I said. "Where do you think The Washington Post gets its stories? From guys like you who leak."
As it turned out, there were enough stories like mine to deny Tower his confirmation. And later, Anita Hill made a mistake I did not, when she agreed to testify "confidentially" about Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.
Tower, who died in a 1991 plane crash, had a reputation as a drunken womanizer that helped defeat his nomination by the first President Bush to be Defense Secretary -- the first Cabinet choice rejected by the Senate in 30 years.
Tower's never been accused of attempted rape before, based on my search of news accounts. When his treatment of women was scrutinized during the 1989 confirmation process, the public only heard about Benny Hill-style shenanigans like chasing a secretary around a desk. In 1998, Washington Times columnist Suzanne Fields even wrote that he was rejected "because he was seen putting a hand on the knee of a woman under the table at a restaurant."
Tower's entire FBI file was shared confidentially with senators. If any sex-assault allegations were included, that detail didn't make the press, according to the Los Angeles Daily News in 1997:
While the raw FBI files contained words like "extremely inebriated" from unnamed witnesses, and the final report apparently concluded that Tower had once had a drinking problem, the White House concluded that the FBI did not corroborate the most serious charges against him.
The Senate has had its share of notorious horndogs in recent decades, including Bob Packwood, Strom Thurmond, Gary Hart, and Ted Kennedy. Tower once said of Thurmond, imagining his future funeral, "they'll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball bat to close the coffin lid."
If Tower's behavior with women reached a point that his fellow senators took offense, there had to be some horrible stuff in that FBI file.
Teaching Kids to Leapfrog a Jackass
I've been ending each day by reading a chapter of The Great Brain to my sons, the first book in a series by John D. Fitzgerald that I devoured as a child.The books, which detail life for three Catholic brothers in a Mormon town in 1890s Utah, describe a time when children weren't raised like bubble boys (my preferred technique). They explore caves, test their mettle with fistfights under rough and tumble lumberjack rules, and do demented things like this:
"We are playing Jackass Leapfrog," Sammy said as he led the immigrant boy to the center of the lot. He pushed the Greek boy's head down in position to play leapfrog. "You are the jackass," Sammy said as if the new kid understood English. "Now stay that way."
The rest of us kids lined up with Sammy in the lead.
"Whack the jackass on the rump!" Sammy shouted as he ran and leapfrogged over Vassillios with one hand while he whacked the Greek boy on the rump with the other hand.
The rest of us followed, whacking the jackass on the rump.
As it turns out, the term "jackass" is comedy gold to kids.
The protagonist, the narrator's brother who calls himself the Great Brain, discovers that Vassillios has formidable wrestling skills, solving his troubles with Sammy -- a dreadful child whose father derides immigrants for taking American jobs.
Reading this chapter, I wondered if Fitzgerald's 1969 book could survive the ideological cleansing that conservatives are waging in schools and overprotective liberal do-gooding that would purge fights and Jackass Leapfrog.
Cruise Passengers Lost at Sea
My wife M.C. Moewe, a reporter for the Jacksonville Business Journal, has been chasing an elusive story over the oceans of the world for several months: Cruise ship passengers who vanish while their vessels are at sea.At least 12 passengers have gone overboard or disappeared since 2000, including five on Carnival Cruise Lines ships within the past 12 months. Some are suicides, others accidents, and at least one incident suggests the possibility of foul play. One was lost coming into Jacksonville last Thanksgiving, a new port for cruise embarkation.
Many incidents are completely unexplained, including one man who survived by swimming 17 hours until being spotted by a cargo ship. He awoke in pitch-black sea with no shoes, no pants, no ship, and no explanation for how he ended up in the water during a voyage to Cozumel, Mexico.
Because these people often go missing in open ocean, they may be the most difficult to resolve missing persons cases in the world. When your endangered missing adult report has a locale of "Int. Waters, San Juan, Puerto Rico," the futility of the case is pretty clear. The cruise industry does not track incidents.
Some victims even receive marketing mail after the cruise:
Crystal Tinder's 37-year-old fiance, Christopher Caldwell, went missing off the Carnival Fascination during a July sailing. A contact from Carnival came shortly after the cruise.
"Chris got an e-mail from the Carnival booking agent asking him if he enjoyed his cruise," Tinder said.
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