2015-12-13 Shows and Lectures

The last two evening shows have been really good. The Maasdam singers and dancers outdid themselves Friday night. We have a large group of singers and dancers this time and they are excellent. I don’t see how they can do two shows a night but somehow they do it. Thankfully, the sea was pretty calm. This kind of show is cancelled when it’s too dangerous to dance on chairs, for example, like a young man did during the show.

We picked up a performing group called Island Magic Steel Band at our last port. They are from Trinidad and present both popular and classical music with a Caribbean flavor. They were on last night and they were also fantastic! It’s hard to explain what they do with steel drums but they tried to explain it to us. The steel drums look empty inside but somehow they hit them in the correct spot to produce each note.

The “cello” sound was produced by Opal who is in the room two doors down from us. They played a few popular songs from Cats and Phantom of the Opera. Then they did Ave Maria very softly. It was so sweet that the man who was playing the “violin” part started crying. It was very moving to him, too, I guess.

They played several upbeat classical songs to end the show. One of them was the theme known as “Can Can.” It was fantastic! Bill turned to me and said he hoped they would play “The William Tell Overture.” And they did!  I have never seen the kind of reception they received from the audience on a cruise ship. People leaped to their feet whistling, yelling and clapping! We managed to get them to play one more song. The whole performance was just amazing.

It was even more amazing because the "violin" player died suddenly and Opal replaced her with only a few weeks to get ready for this cruise.

Afterwards, there was a celebration of Frank Sinatra’s 100^th birthday in the Ocean Bar. There were some guest singers. One of them was the cantor on the ship. He has a deep voice. He sang “My Way” and “New York, New York.” Today is the last day of Chanukah and he is leading the Jewish services in the showroom at five. I am going to go and see what they do.

Then the cruise director, Mark Brignone, (who is from Murray, Utah) sang two songs in a beautiful tenor. One of the songs was “Summer Wind.” He’s a great singer and a wonderful guy to boot.

We also have a pastor on board and a Catholic priest, Father Joe. We have chatted with him several times. We have a lot in common because he lives in Boise, Idaho so we can discuss issues local to the Intermountain West.

I watched the Paris Climate agreements on the BBC yesterday while Bill took a nap.  I would say it was cool but that would be a pun.

We are still attending lectures on Space by Frank Buzzard.  He said that space exploration is the reason we have such amazing satellites and why we can see TV and use the internet in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Here is Frank's picture on LinkedIn:

The terrorism lectures have also been good. There are 250 definitions of terrorism. We reviewed some of them.

“Terrorism is a form of theater aimed at the people watching.” OR “Terror is a natural phenomenon. Terrorism is the exploitation of this phenomenon.” OR “The threat or use of violence to persuade, coerce or gain public attention.”

It’s a threat of what might happen. They seek to multiply the fear reaction by choosing the people they want to influence. It makes people change their behavior. In most cases, they want to affect governments and intimidate the civilian population. They are the playwrights and the primary actors. The media, governments and the rest of us write the reviews.

We talked about flying and how much it has been changed by terrorism. He says he doesn’t worry about flying because terrorists choose the softest targets.

We had much more opportunity to comment today. I made a comment about the Tylenol murders. It changed life for everyone when containers of medications and foodstuffs became much harder to open. As a child, those containers were easy to open and I was rushed to the doctor once for eating a whole container of baby aspirin and once for eating a whole container of Ex-Lax. I don’t remember any of that but my family told me about it. I also fell out of the car four times before the door handles were improved to make it harder to open the door accidentally.

Bill and I once had an experience that might qualify as terrorism. At the time we just thought of it as violence. But it is one of the reasons we moved to Utah from California. We worked to get a public park in our area of San Bruno. One of the people who helped us was a stringer for the local paper and wrote news stories about our efforts.

WARNING: The following is graphic--true but shocking!

She was jogging along the railroad a few blocks from our house one morning when she was beheaded by a group of black men using a machete. There was some speculation about whether or not they were the group known as the Zebra Killers. They were black men who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area by attacking white people. This was around 1979. After that horrible incident, we became more serious about moving.