Something About the Spring...

And we don't mean disaster as in I ordered a Venti Misto & they gave me a Tall Chai. If you use a word like disaster for that you should probably kill yourself.

In the Spring, young men's minds turn to thoughts of fancy, or so they say.  However if you're a fan of the history channel, the weather networks and cable news, then you're more likely to be thinking that April is one of the most disastrous and violent months of the year.

In fact the days between of April12th to 20th are filled with numerous anniversaries of bad shit happening.  Everything from natural disasters, to mass murders, and terrorist attacks -- so much in fact that when the United States' Department of Homeland Security introduced their colour-coded threat level system in response to the September 11th attacks, this week was automatically designated as an Orange Alert.  That is, the threat level is raised to High Alert...

We all know some of the infamous, major historic events like Titanic, who just celebrated her centennial on April 15th, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 16th, 1865.

But let's take a disturbing trip down memory lane at five of the intense psycho-dramas and violent acts of nature that mark this week in April as one of the most exhausting for entropy fans everywhere.  In case you forgot about some, I'll remind you now it gets kinda heavy and icky from here on out...

5. San Francisco Earthquake, April 18th 1906

Before Pat Roberston was around to proclaim natural disasters like this happen in America because God hates bum sex, the blame for California's seismic troubles lay with the San Andreas Fault.  Measuring in somewhere around an 8 on the William Riker scale, it's believed that between the quake itself and ensuing fires that razed the city, close to 3,000 people were killed.

One of the enduring impacts has been the mission to design quake-proof foundations for even the tallest skyscrapers erected from San Francisco to L.A.  Some structures today, like the U.S. Bank Tower, incorporate all sorts of shock absorbing technology in the foundation and are built to accommodate an amount of sway in their upper floors so as not to have their backs broken like the majority of structures in 1906.

4. Waco Texas Siege of April, 19th 1993

When you lock up your family and fellow cultists in your fortified ranch like David Koresh did at his Branch Davidian compound in 1993, you're going to attract a little attention.  A preacher with a stockpile of weapons large enough to storm a town, Koresh's followers engaged in a bloody standoff with the ATF that lasted more than two months.

After a number of small gunfights in which the authorities appeared to be having their asses handed to them by a sect of religious nuts, things went over the edge when the FBI finally stormed the compound on April 19th.  When the ensuing blaze and blitzkrieg was over, nearly 80 people in the compound had been killed, and worse for the authorities' PR, a whack of them were children.

 "We're not letting any of those nuts commit suicide,

even if we have to kill every last one of them..."

The aftermath really is clouded to this day since there is ongoing debate surrounding who started the inferno and who fired the first shots but from '93 onward, the FBI and ATF would continue to be criticized for aggressiveness and incompetence in handling similar scenarios like the ones that followed, nearly to the day, 2 and then 6 years after Waco, respectively.

3. Oklahoma City Bombing, April 19th 1995

Nearly 200 people were murdered in what in the pre-9/11 days was the largest terrorist attack on the U.S.  The early reports that came after a truck bomb ripped through the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City told authorities to be on the lookout for two men of middle-eastern decent.  Since the first bombing attack at the World Trade Center, two years prior, it perhaps wasn't completely crazy that the first suspicions centered on Islamist Fundamentalists.

But then came the arrest of a couple white dudes.  The main conspirator in the plot, Timothy McVeigh was a Gulf War Vet and militant gun-nut who had targeted the Murrah Building to destroy the ATF and FBI offices at the site in retaliation for, among other stuff, the agencies' "tyrannical" handling of the Waco incident.  Also in the same building was a daycare, of which 19 children were killed in the blast.  Regardless of any pretense of political action, few outside of the lunatic fringe had much sympathy for this mass murderer and McVeigh despite, a rousing interview on 60 Minutes, was executed.



There is no why, just insanity.



In the fallout, debates raged over everything from Second Amendment rights to the death penalty, and legislation was enacted surrounding how trials are carried out for domestic terrorism suspects.  However, any way you slice it, mass acts of violence have rarely ever helped any cause.  If you're cool with murdering children to prove a point, you'll at worst welcome the wrath of any civilized human being, and at best alienate your fellow travelers of whatever stream of bullshit you profess.

2. Columbine High School Massacre, April 20th 1999

Contrary to reports at the time, the victims were more or less picked at random.

More than ten years after the methodically planned killing-spree that took 12 lives and injured 21 others in Littleton, Colorado, Columbine remains the most high-profile school shooting in U.S. history.   Questions persist even now as to the clear motives behind two upper-middle class boys decision to murder their peers but the issue of bullying remains the prevailing talking point.

What's unique in this case is that the two kids who carried out the attack, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, planned and prepared for months in advance, collecting bomb-making materials, even enlisting an older friend to purchase weapons from gun shows.  They drew maps, lists of supplies, recorded hours of video-taped rants (the infamous, never released "basement tapes") even a timetable for how the day would unfold.  All the while they were writing essays and stories for class about going on rampages, filled with violent imagery, trying to convey how angry they felt at the world.  Hmm.

Hindsight is always 20-20, and the picture that has emerged is one of two, seriously depressed, angry young men who shared many signs of the trouble they were in with disparate sources.  Just as important as anti-bullying initiatives is the implementing of resources to share information with counselors when a kid is writing violent stories, collecting books about weapons, having mood swings, etc.

Growing up is a fucked up enough process and it's hard to distinguish budding creative, if melancholy genius from clinical depression and suicidal tendencies.  But there's little doubt now that if someone examines more than just a small part of the picture, something can be done to prevent pain from swelling into violence.

1. Virginia Tech Massacre, April 16th 2007

That brings us to April of 2007, our last stop on this excruciating excursion and what is currently the worst school shooting in America to date.  Seung-Hui Cho, a student at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, methodically walked the grounds of the school, shooting students in a residence and engineering hall.

In the end, 32 lay dead making this the worst attack by a single perpetrator in U.S. history.  Once again, many of the same issues from Columbine arose, this time focusing on the fact that Cho had a well-documented history of mental illness but this information was not shared with the school.  Like the killers at Columbine, Cho had produced disturbing writings and even made references to repeating Columbine - the difference is this time, teachers and counselors intervened to set up psychiatric treatment.

 

Tragically, for all well and good reasons of privacy, the breadth of his mental health issues were not shared with Virginia Tech and as it deteriorated Cho fell through the cracks.  There's really no determining signs for anyone to cite as a threat to public safety, the combination of external and internal factors make it impossible to distinguish early mental health issues like clinical depression from the stress and pressures of being a teenager and growing up.

Or maybe April just shitty cause it's final exam time, Mom and Dad are loosing their shit over Tax returns, the weather doesn't know day to day if it's summer yet or or still the ass end of winter, and there's usually only the shittiest movies playing this time of year.  Like Nat King Cole, part of it may be that everybody's aching to roll out those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days O' Summer...

Here's a Dancing Cat just to lighten the damn mood :(

Titanic and Her Big, Bad Sisters

"There is a line often quoted in the newspapers...God himself cannot sink this ship. She was appropriately named, the Titans dared to challenge the gods and for the arrogance they were cast down, into hell..."  George C. Scott as Titanic's Cpt. Smith in a forgotten 90's TV miniseries.

Even the casual observer knows that the Titanic wasn't just a big ship. She represented a zenith of human engineering in the first decade of the 20th century.  The industrial revolution's triumph over the natural world, we're all familiar with Titanic vernacular that includes the tragically ironic claims that she was unsinkable, as well as accounts that the band played on, etc.

That fateful encounter with an iceberg and ensuing stories of heroism and tragedy have become a post-modern epic, perhaps the first legend in the time of iron, steam and electricity.  Our imaginations and pop-culture have run away with the story in films, novels, stage musicals, and even weirder, inflatable amusement slides:

Does that mean we're 89 years away from 9/11 the ride?

But Titanic was only the first chapter in the White Star Line's trilogy of gargantuan, and seemingly star-crossed luxury liners.  Under construction along side her at the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast Ireland were two, nearly identical ships that together would have constituted the three most palatial, Victorian hotels afloat.

They were subtlety named Britannic and Olympic.

One of these boats is weeks away from making James Cameron a Billionaire.

The Olympic and Titanic were nearly identical copies of each other, built side by side and finished over the course of two years.  Although Olympic would be launched first and make a successful crossing to New York, the Titanic underwent some last minute changes to the first-class deck.

Originally they all shared Titanic's paint scheme until Olympic and Britannic were drafted by the Royal Navy.

For the superstitious, one incident involving the Olympic may have served as an ominous sign of things to come.  A few months before Titanic set to sea, Olympic was slammed in her side by the Royal Navy ship HMS Hawke.  It was only the first in what would become a recurring issue with Olympic's penchant for colliding with everything except an iceberg.

The Hawke, post-Olympic.  It takes a special kind of Captain to not see

you're headed towards the biggest ship in the world. 

Or you could take the attitude of the White Star Line at the time and brag to the papers that you've built a new line of ships that will prove "virtually unsinkable."

Bully! Took a lick and soldiered on home to Southampton for Tea.

The career of the Olympic lies somewhere on a continuum of illustrious service and reverse nautical-Darwinism.  Having survived such a harrowing encounter at sea with minimal damage considering, it's not difficult to see how an overzealous attitude prevailed months later when Titanic begin her week of trials before setting off across the Atlantic.

Meanwhile in the vacant slipway left by the Olympic, construction was well underway on Britannic, slated to be third leviathan, identical to the Olympic and Titanic in every aspect of its design.  But then of course, came the early morning hours of April 15th 1912.

We all know what really happened.

Understandably after the Titanic disaster, some changes were advisable in the design.  Thus work was stalled on Britannic as a major overhaul of its safety features began; minor details like the water tight bulkheads that only went to E deck on Titanic had caused an ice-tray spillover effect that dragged down by the bow.  So those bulkheads were bumped up a few letters all the way to B deck.  Most important among the changes was the concession that maybe it isn't the best idea in the world to carry only the bare minimum of lifeboats on a ship intended for 2,500 passengers.

It must have been like M*A*S*H* and the Loveboat rolled into one.

The affect on Britannic was the addition of extra-large davits to accommodate a greater quantity of lifeboats. 

Originally downplayed on the earlier two ships for fear that too many lifeboats would negatively impact the clean aesthetic of the deck, the refit on Britannic would ultimately save lives when she met the most violent end of the three great liners...

Olympic in her "Razzle n' Dazzle!"

Britannic was launched early in 1914 into a world about to implode into The Great War and along with the Oympic was requisitioned a year later to serve as a military transport.  Whereas Olympic was given a dramatic "dazzle" camouflage paint scheme and employed as a troop transport, Britannic was converted into a floating military hospital, emblazoned with crimson crosses on a ghost-white hull.


Olympic continued moving people and ramming into things around the Atlantic, while Britannic meandered about the Mediterranean on various missions. It was on a voyage to the Greek Islands when, through a twist of fate, she combined Olympic's penchant for randomly hitting small things that ships sometimes hit, with Titanic's knack for hitting the worst possible thing a ship can ever hit.  Britannic's side was ripped open by an underwater mine that caused such severe flooding she nearly capsized before slipping beneath the sea after only 55 minutes.

En-sunk-lepedia Britannic.

The death toll (30 men killed) was nowhere near the colossal loss of life on Titanic since in this case Britannic's lifeboats were able to accommodate the little more than 1,100 souls aboard (also the water was much warmer than the North Atlantic and help was minutes as opposed to hours away).

After the war, the first and last of the Big Three, Olympic, went back into service as a luxury liner, although likely tormented by whatever is the ship equivalent of PTSD. She would continue to serve as the proto-Carnival Cruise era floating hotel/shopping mall, making numerous crossings from Liverpool to New York.  She had been the first of the three giants to make a voyage that her sister ships were fated to never complete.

Olympic was retired in 1934 (not before hitting one more ship and cleaving it right in half).  She was scrapped and bits of her sold off to become expensive Titanic recreations in various exhibits around the world.

Gone it seems with those great vessels are the romantic days of discovering America and Europe by sea and starting your life over abroad. The days when the safest method of travel could sometimes end in epic, global headlining disaster. Although in recent months, what with Somalian Pirate attacks, Italian cruise liners capsizing and running aground, maybe the world hasn't lost its appetite for the occasional futility at sea...