Self-help guide to bedroom communication with the chapter heading “If You’re So Submissive How About Submitting to the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known?”
My take on this missing submarine is it’s part of the thing where since Harambe the world operates on novelistic logic. Like, it’s not even that it’s poetic justice for these billionaires to die so much as that it’s a dramatic event arising from the confluence of several major themes of the contemporary world
Also I’ll say the prospect of awaiting inevitable death trapped at the bottom of an ocean in an ersatz high tech tin can with a few other representatives of a wildly wealthy novelty-seeking class is very 80s horror, that could have been a Tales From the Crypt episode back when it was Black Mirror about yuppies.
(Fuck if I know how you’d shoehorn in the practical effects gore and tits.)
Anyway for any other billionaires out there looking for high risk vacations costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, in change for $10k I will take time off from my job and google publicly available info about the company to compile a dossier of how likely you are to bite it. I will even knock a couple thousand off the price tag if you pinkie promise not to drag your kids along
For reference, US citizens drive an average of around 15k miles a year and the US has a death rate of around 1.5 fatalities per 100 million miles driven, so assuming you’re statistically average your odds of dying in a car crash in one year are about 15,000 * 1.5 / 100,000,000, or close to 1 in 400.
Conversely, a little over 6000 people have climbed everest and over 300 people have died on it, so your risk there is more like 1 in 20.
With the power of easily googleable statistics and back-of-a-napkin math, you too could avoid dying in a really stupid, expensive way
Because people are naturally not great at reasoning with probabilities, especially when it comes to matter of life and death, I propose the adoption of a new measurement, the U.S. passenger mile fatality expected value equivalent (USpmfEVe), which is much simpler and more intuitive. At 0.57 deaths per 100,000,000 passenger miles in the U.S., that puts a single sure death at approximately 1.75e8 USpmfEVe.
For example, skydiving is equivalent to 440 miles per jump and whitewater rafting is about 1200 miles per trip. Hopefully this has helped someone reason about risk.
Huh, there’s a tree that had ventured a branch into a rich vein of sun and had branched really profuse there but Monday we got the hardest rain since its leaves came in and they got wet and weighed down the whole big zone to slightly drooping, and now even dry and undrooped it’s more horizontal, like the experience strained the branch enough for a little cracking.
But then I look at the rest of the tree and I wonder if this might not actually be the usual growth pattern. I know trees incorporate weighing-down into their growth patterns, I have one in the upper backyard that tends to send off shoots awfully vertically but then the second year they bear flowers and the fruit (one of the for-birds soury things we’d probably call “crabapples” if anything) weighs the branches down more horizontal in time for it to get woody and rigid and stay there.
A narrowboat (all one word) is a craft restricted to the British Isles, which are connected all over by a nerve-map of human-made canals. To go up and down hills, the canals are spangled with locks (chambers in which boats can be raised or lowered by filling or emptying them with water.) As Terry says above, the width of the locks was somewhat randomly determined, and as a result, the British Isles have a narrow design of lock - and a narrowboat to fit through them. A classic design was seventy feet long and six feet wide. Starting in the 18th century, and competing directly with trains, canal “barges” were an active means of transport and shipping. They were initially pulled along the towpaths by horses, and you can still see some today!
Later, engines were developed.
Even after the trains won the arms race, it was a fairly viable freight service right up until WW2. It’s slow travel, but uses few resources and requires little human power, with a fairly small crew (of women, in WW2) being capable of shifting two fully laden boats without consuming much fossil fuel.
In those times the barges were designed with small, cramped cabins in which the boaters and their families could live.
During its heyday the narrowboat community developed a style of folk art called “roses and castles” with clear links to fairground art as well as Romani caravan decor. They are historically decorated with different kinds of brass ornaments, and inside the cabins could also be distinctively painted and decorated.
Today, many narrowboats are distinctively decorated and colorful - even if not directly traditional with “roses and castles” they’ll still be bright and offbeat. A quirky name is necessary. All narrowboats, being boats, are female.
After a postwar decline, interest in the waterways was sparked by a leisure movement and collapsing canals were repaired. Today, the towpaths are a convenient walking/biking trail for people, as they connect up a lot of the mainland of the UK, hitting towns and cities. Although the restored canals are concrete-bottomed, they’re attractive to wildlife. Narrowboats from the 1970s onward started being designed for pleasure and long-term living. People enjoy vacationing by hiring a boat and visiting towns for a cuter, comfier, slower version of a campervan life. And a liveaboard community sprang up - people who live full-time on boats. Up until the very restrictive and nasty laws recently passed in the UK to make it harder for travelling peoples (these were aimed nastily at vanlivers and the Romani, and successfully hit everyone) this was one of the few legal ways remaining to be a total nomad in the UK.
Liveaboards can moor up anywhere along the canal for 28 days, but have to keep moving every 28 days. (Although sorting out the toilet and loading up with fresh water means that a lot of people move more frequently than that.) you can also live full-time in a marina if they allow it, or purchase your own mooring. In London, where canal boats are one of the few remaining cheapish ways to live, boats with moorings fetch the same prices as houses. It can be very very hard for families to balance school, parking, work, and all the difficulties of living off-grid- but many make it work. It remains a diverse community and is even growing, due to housing pressures in the UK. Boats can be very comfortable, even when only six feet wide. When faced with spending thousands of pounds on rent OR mooring up on a nice canal, you can see why it seems a romantic proposition for young people, and UK television channels always have slice-of-life documentaries about young folks fixing up their very own quirky solar-powered narrowboat. I don’t hate; I did it myself.
If you’re lucky, you might even meet some of the cool folks who run businesses from their narrowboats: canal-side walkers enjoy bookshops, vegan bakeries, ice-cream boats, restaurants, artists and crafters. There are Floating Markets and narrowboat festivals. It’s generally recognised that boaters contribute quite a lot to the canal - yet there are many tensions between different kinds of boaters (liveaboards vs leisure boaters vs tourists) as well as tensions with local settled people, towpath users like cyclists, and fishermen. I could go on and on explaining this rich culture and dramas, but I won’t.
Phillip Pullman’s Gyptians are a commonly cited example of liveaboards - although they were based on the narrowboat liveaboards that Pullman knew in Oxford, their boats are actually Dutch barges. Dutch barges make good homes but are too wide to access most of the midlands and northern canals, and are usually restricted to the south of the UK. So they’re accurate for Bristol/London/Oxford, and barges are definitely comfier to film on. (Being six feet wide is definitely super awkward for a boat.) but in general Dutch barges are less common, more expensive and can’t navigate the whole system.
However, apart from them, there are few examples of narrowboat depictions that escaped containment. So it’s quite interesting that there is an entire indigenous special class of boat, distinctive and highly specialised and very cute, with an associated culture and heritage and folk art type, known to all and widely celebrated, and ABSOLUTELY UNKNOWN outside of the UK - a nation largely known around the world for inflicting its culture on others. They’re a strange, sweet little secret - and nobody who has ever loved one can resist pointing them out for the rest of their lives, or talking about them when asked to. Thank you for asking me to.
My take on this missing submarine is it’s part of the thing where since Harambe the world operates on novelistic logic. Like, it’s not even that it’s poetic justice for these billionaires to die so much as that it’s a dramatic event arising from the confluence of several major themes of the contemporary world
