After going down in flames in the Beluga Whale endangered species lawsuit, and being kicked all over the courtroom in its other endangered species litigation, the State of Alaska, Department of Law has decided it is time to recruit an assistant attorney general with knowledge of the Endangered Species Act. Wouldn’t this have been a great idea, say, 18 months ago?

For at least the last 25 years, the State of Alaska has been working on widening Illinois Street on the north side of the Chena River here in Fairbanks. Probably longer than that. So far, that effort has gotten us a bridge across the river that is fenced so no one can use it, a lot of vacant lots and some partially relocated power lines. And the State still doesn’t have all of the right of way it needs to award the contract. Highway construction is paid for mostly with U.S. Department of Transportation funds, which are mostly the federal gasoline tax. The feds won’t let contracts be awarded until all of the land has been acquired. (Which proves they are smarter than the former Mayor of Wasilla.) Oopsie.

This isn’t original to WC but as WC traces it, but Eye of Newt is using his two daughters from his first marriage to attack his wife from his second marriage for claiming Gingrich wanted an open marriage so he could continue his adultery with the woman who is his third wife. That’s family values for you.

Speaking of bad water, it appears that the $50 million Ruth Burnett Fish Hatchery will start hatching fish this year, more than 18 months behind schedule. The problem has indeed been the water, and issue that’s the responsibility CH2M Hill. You remember them; they are the successor to Bill Allen’s VECO, having purchased VECO after Allen’s bust. Bad karma in the water, perhaps? WC has been looking forward to seeing more Arctic Grayling in interior streams, but at the rate this is going, he’ll be too old to fly fish by the time the fish are stocked.

To all of the obscure Asian companies who continue to solicit WC’s help collecting a judgment: can’t you dream up a new scam? This con is getting as old and tired as the Nigerians’ stupid pitch.

This cheerful tweet from Scott Simon: If you could thaw out Captain Scott at the South Pole, 100 years after he died, the Cubs still wouldn’t have won the World Series.

Alaska Airlines is eliminating prayer cards from its first class food service trays. A reader wants to know if this is a sign of the Apocalypse. The reader is posting her question to the wrong blog.

WC gets a lot of emails complaining he writes about _______ too often. You can fill in the blank. Recent complaints have included the Cubs, Republicans, nature photography, the Cubs, global warming and the Cubs. And writers have complained the WC is a liberal, a Commie, a libertarian, a Democrat, a fisherman, a nazi, a tree-hugger, arrogant and, worst of all, “uses big words.”

Whatever.

WC writes about what attracts his magpie sensibilities. Whatever bright, shiny issue appeals at the moment. WC follows Mark Twain’s abjuration, appearing in the frontispiece to  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

A writer wants to know how much of the stuff WC writes about is real and how much is made up. Yes.

The rest of the stuff is too vulgar for even WC’s blog and will be used as digital mulch.

Justice Scalia is an “originalist.” He believes the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted  as the Founding Fathers meant it. The most widely cited form of originalism, “original meaning,” emphasizes how the text would have been understood by a reasonable person in the historical period during which the Constitution was proposed, ratified, and first implemented.

Wait a moment, you say. The Founding Fathers didn’t know about GPS. Or electricity, integrated circuits, orbital mechanics, relativity, radio waves or a thousand other kinds of technology that make GPS work. For that matter, they didn’t know about the automobile to which the GPS unit was attached, the interstate freeway on which the automobile was driven, the cocaine that was allegedly sold, cell phones used to set up dales or the paper money used for the purchases. Justice Scalia’s reasonable person might think it is absurd to try and guess how a figure from the late 18th Century would understand and apply the Fourth Amendment to technology that would have been indistinguishable from magic.

But WC will show you how Justice Scalia pulled the trick off. Warning: don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would have been considered a “search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted.

United States v. Jones, p. 4

That’s right: Justice Scalia concludes that, say, James Madison, the guy who, you know, wrote the Fourth Amendment, would have extended that amendment to GPS devices. Because Justice Scalia has the uncanny ability to get his head inside the mind of a man living in 1790. Justice Scalia can magically grasp the world view of a man who lived 220 years earlier and intuit the application of that man’s words to a 21st Century set of facts.

Justice Scalia’s supernatural skill – which the Jones decision makes clear is “beyond doubt” – is the heart or originalism.

Poppycock.

What he’s really doing is mystically concluding Madison would have thought this involved the tort of trespass. Bizarre.

Even if you believe in originalism, it is useless as  precedent. What makes cases useful is that they provide guidance in other cases with similar facts. But if a decision turns on mystic foofraw it’s useless as guidance in another case. Which makes Jones worthless in deciding other issues involving other 21st Century technologies: cell phone call records, world wide web searches, text message records. How can we deduce what the court would do with those technologies? Wait for Justice Scalia to exercise his mystic powers to know what James Madison would have done?

And speaking of precedent, Justice Scalia’s magic also allowed him to ignore 40 years of precedent and a well-developed body of law on the reasonable expectation of privacy. He just ignored it. Because after all, he knows what Madison would have done.

Justice Thomas is even worse. But don’t get WC started on “strict constructionism,” which is even more absurd.

Hello? U.S. Supreme Court? You’re falling further and further behind. Pretending you can deduce what Madison would do is intellectually dishonest, lends itself to purposiveness and is ultimately futile. You can pretend you know what Madison or Jay or Jefferson would have thought about Twitter. But you are pretending.

The irony is, you think you are being conservative. The truth is, you’ve got it exactly backwards.

Satellite Image, Costa Concordia, by DigitalGlobe

The Costa Concordia still lies on her side off the Tuscan coast, with 16 confirmed dead and many still missing. Alaskans know, to their sorrow, that not all ship’s captains are scrupulously careful, not all crew members fully qualified and not all accidents truly accidents.

A Dutch salvage company is struggling to off load the half million gallons of fuel still on the ship, before something fails and another of the world’s pristine marine environments falls victim to industrialization. In this case, industrial tourism.

But as sad as the Costa Concordia’s story is, as tragic as the grounding has already been for the families of the dead and the injured, WC  can’t help but imagine the consequences of a similar accident in southeast Alaska, in Prince William Sound, or in Kachemak Bay. Imagine a Carnival Cruise ship laying on her side at the head of Muir Inlet, sunk in a too-close approach to the glacier to give the passengers a thrill. Imagine a ship this size going down in Dangerous Passage on the west side of Prince William Sound because someone mis-read a tide table.

Don’t say it can’t happen. It has. It will again.

Even if the technology were perfect – and it isn’t – human error, whether it drunkenness, showboating or plain incompetence  can overcome any fail safes. The problem with making things foolproof is that fools are so ingenious.

As industrial tourism, with its 4,000 passenger ships, penetrates the arctic and cruises through the northwest passage become more routine, the problems will only become more acute.

Sure, there are damage control plans, contingency plans and drills. But you will forgive WC his skepticism. There were plans for oil spills before the Exxon Valdez, and they were worse than useless. The Costa Concordia struck that rock on January 15; as of this date, she still lies there. This shipwreck is in the heavily trafficked, well-developed Mediterranean; can you imagine the chaos if this was in the Beaufort Sea? Thousands of miles from the nearest help, in a much more hostile – and fragile – environment?

Alaska has a … difficult … relationship with the cruise ship industry as it is. But the incontrovertible lesson of the Costa Concordia is that it will happen again, and Alaska once again will be nearly helpless to respond.

You wrote about the SOTU response that “It was what a sane Republican critique of this presidency would be.” I strongly disagree. This speech was heavily laced with the usual canards Republicans use to raise doubts about this president. For example, he faulted the president on energy policy for resisting domestic oil development. As you well know, the president has opened vast areas of previously protected land for oil development, a policy he announced an expansion of tonight. He made a valid point about the Keystone XL pipeline. However, there were serious concerns about this project, which was under review by the administration. Congressional Republicans forced his hand before the review could run its course. Of course he decided against it. I would place more blame on the House of Representatives than the White House for the death of that project.

Daniels also pressed the lie that the president has made no serious efforts to reduce the deficit. Democrats and Republicans may disagree on the best way to reduce the deficit, however President Obama has put forward some of the most ambitious proposals to reduce the deficit to receive any significant support. During the debt limit debate, he was willing to go farther on spending alone than the Republicans were requesting. Never mind their unwillingness to raise taxes on anyone besides the average worker.

Then Daniels has the absolute nerve to blame the divisiveness of modern politics on our president. Our president, whom is routinely called a socialist, a communist, a Kenyan anti-colonialist, is the cause of the division. Our president, who has consistently tried to find common ground on taxes, on energy, on healthcare, and on any number of other issues, only to watch the opposition walk away from their previous positions, is the cause of the division. Our president, whose main role in the ongoing class war has been to point out how the unscrupulous among the rich have been waging this war for decades and winning, is the cause of the division.

I can understand the desire to find a sane voice among the officials of the Republican party. I’m a registered independent and share that desire. I agree with you about Ron Paul’s contributions to the debate; disagree with Jon Hunstman on policy, while I recognize that he tries to craft sane policy that accomplishes worthy goals, merely questioning his priorities; and I lament Gary Johnson’s having been excluded from the Republican presidential race. I was hopeful before this speech to hear what you evidently believed you heard, but I did not.

The problem with the modern Republican party is not merely a matter of tone. Chris Christie has convincingly challenged many Republican orthodoxies while maintaining the fiery tone that so appeals to many Republicans. He has done this by dealing firmly with the reality of the policies he deals with, instead of the insane otherworldly echo-chamber that defines mainstream Republican thought. He consistently impresses me in a way that Mitch Daniels, at least tonight, did not.

WC would like to give credit for this excellent, cogent response, but Sullivan didn’t respond to WC’s request for attribution. If a reader has a clue, pass it along.

Fergie Jenkins of the Chicago Cubs pitches in a game at Wrigley Field in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by: Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

But in the afternoon, a few of us headed north on the State Street ‘L’ (which is actually underground and not elevated at Chicago Avenue) to attend a Cubs baseball game. WC’s first Cubs game, ever. First ‘L’ train ride, ever. After settling in the bleachers ($2.00 tickets for the front tier of seats), WC watched the Cubs play the San Francisco Giants in the warm afternoon sunlight, with Fergie Jenkins on the mound for the Cubs and, eventually, Randy Moffitt (Billy Jean King’s brother) pitching for the Giants. At that point in WC’s life, he was sort of a Giants fan, the Giants then being the MLB team closest to Fairbanks. WC was the only Giants fan in the bleachers that afternoon.

WC also had his first Falstaff beer that afternoon. It was awful. Hog piss and soap suds. WC had attended undergraduate school in the Pacific Northwest, where the cheap beer was much better. But WC was a country mouse, so he kept his opinions to himself. The beer went largely undrunk. WC’s new roommate, John Freechak, was less restrained. John was from St. Louis, was an anti-fan of the Cubs, and freely shared with the rest of the crowd in the bleachers his strong, loud, largely obscene opinions on the quality of the beer, the quality of the Cubs and the quality of Cubs fans. He succeeded in annoying all of the true Cubs fans around him.

It was a very good game, with the lead changing hands several times. The wind was blowing out, which meant that a routine fly ball would get a wind assist out of the park and onto Waveland Avenue. There were at least 30 hits. And at least 8 home runs; Billy Williams and Ron Santo each had two. After 9 innings of play, the score was tied, 9-9. So in failing early evening light, we went into extras.

The Giants were retired without scoring in the top of the 10th inning, on a nifty double play line drive to the pitcher and a quick toss to first base. In the bottom of the 10th, Jose Cardenal singled. Billy Williams moved Cardenal to third base on a single. Rick Monday then struck out with runners on first and third. Ron Santo came up to bat, and the Giants chose to walk him. So the bases were loaded when Joe Pepitone came to the plate. Moffitt’s first pitch maybe – maybe – brushed Pepitone’s uniform. The umpire called it as a hit batsman, and Pepitone, without lifting the bat off his shoulder, “drove” in the winning run and the game ended with a Cubs win, 10-9.

Freechak was furious, and loudly protested what he saw as an unjust ending. It was too much for the Cubs loyalists around us, who dumped at least three half-full plastic glasses of Falstaff beer over Freechak’s head, soaking him and splashing WC pretty badly. That was annoying enough that WC threw his largely untouched beer on the folks he thought had soaked Freech and splashed WC.

One thing led to another, and before very long Freech, another new law student and WC wound up in the holding pen under the left field stands, cooling our heels, and stinking of bad beer, under the baleful eye of three security guys. Readers will note the guys who threw the first beer didn’t get detained. Eventually, the stadium manager turned up, chewed us out for a while, and banned us from Cubs games for three weeks. Ordinarily that wouldn’t count as punishment. You know, it’s the the Cubs. But the Cubs mounted a 12-4 record over that period, and then finished the season on the road. So we rode home on the ‘L’ in the dark, stinking of beer and looking like something the cat had dragged in.

WC learned later from Prof. Paul Slater that if he had offered $20 to the stadium manager to “pay the laundry bill,” the ban probably would have been lifted. But WC was still a country mouse at that point, and didn’t yet understand how Chicago worked.

But somehow WC started following the Cubs from that point forward, and sank into his 39 year addiction to a hopeless, hapless ball team.

Did you know it’s only 71 days to Opening Day?

Re: Department of Natural Resources Mission Statement

Dear Commissioner Sullivan:

The Anchorage Daily News reports that your Department of Natural Resources has recently revised its Mission Statement. WC is doubly annoyed.

First, to a very considerable extent, a mission statement is time-wasting twaddle for a government agency like DNR. You have a mission statement already: the Alaska Constitution. WC regards it as an ill-conceived waste of DNR’s resources, and an inappropriate activity for appointed officials, to be second-guessing, you know, elected officials.

Second, and more importantly, you got it seriously wrong. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the old and new

WC note’s that “conserve” and “future Alaskans” dropped out of DNR’s new mission statement. “Sustainability,” another pretty important concept embedded in the Alaska Constitution, never made the cut. What the Constitution actually says?

Article VIII, Section 2: The legislature shall provide for the utilization, development, and conservation of all natural resources belonging to the State, including land and waters, for the maximum benefit of its people.

Article VIII, Section 4: Fish, forests, wildlife, grasslands, and all other replenishable resources belonging to the State shall be utilized, developed, and maintained on the sustained yield principle, subject to preferences among beneficial uses.

(WC has tried to help by placing the overlooked critical bits in red.) To the extent that a mission statement is even necessary, shouldn’t it reflect, you know, the Constitution? Unless you just want to be a lapdog for our scofflaw governor, why not describe as your mission something other than the immediate gratification of whoever is defining “the public interest.” Sure, those fine, upstanding corporations, recently anointed as “people,” want the public interest to coincide with their maximum profits, but that’s not what the folks writing Alaska’s Constitution had in mind.

In fact, your new mission statement sucks up to the mining and oil industries in ways that contravene the Constitution. Not the least of which is the omission of conservation.

And, by the way, conservation goes beyond renewable resources. If the extraction of nonrenewable resources injures renewable resources, that’s a violation of the Alaska Constitution, too.

Why not scrap the whole thing? Why not tell anyone wondering if DNR has a mission statement that it’s Article VIII of the Alaska Constitution. Give them a link.

And to the extent that your boss objects, remind the Governor that he’s not the boss. The Constitution and the people it protects are in charge. To the extent that this revised mission statement may reflect what you really aim to do? Develop resources without regard to conservation, sustainability or the long term future of the resources? You are doomed to failure.

Just trying to help.

/Wickersham’s Conscience

Acoustic Adventures brings Frank Solivan and Dirty Kitchen at The Blue Loon

WC is not a huge fan of bluegrass music. As Frank Solivan described a jazz melody he and his band performed last night, “Earl Scruggs got ahold of it and blue grassified it.” To WC, most bluegrass music sounds like Robin and Linda Williams’ brilliant satire, “Marvin and Mavis Smiley and the Manhattan Valley Boys” doing their bogus infomercials for “Do-Tell Records.” Part of the joke – Marvin and Mavis do Broadway, Marvin and Mavis do Springsteen – is that all of the songs come out sounding exactly the same. And, candidly, all bluegrass music sounds a little flatt to WC.

But Trudy and Mase of Acoustic Adventures are diehard fans of the genre, and they’ve never steered WC wrong with a concert yet, so even though the show was at The Blue Loon, one of WC’s least favorite venues, Mrs. WC and WC headed out to Ester for the show.

Even if you don’t care for bluegrass, there’s no denying the quality of the musicianship, the sheer skill of many bluegrass players, and Frank Solivan, in the latest lineup of Dirty Kitchen, has come up with some wonderful artists, who can not only play as a group, but do some pretty impressive solos, too. These four guys can play.

Frank Solivan can set a mandolin on fire, and isn’t bad at fiddle, either. Mike Mumford is a terrific banjo player. Danny Booth is excellent on upright bass. But it was baby-faced, 21-year old Chris Luquette blew the crowd away with his guitar solos in his first show, ever, with Dirty Kitchen. The group wasn’t afraid to break away from traditional bluegrass, including a fine cover of John Stewart’s “July You’re a Woman” or topical songs like Solivan’s homelessness study from the other side, “Left Out in the Cold.”

Polished, tight and plainly enjoying themselves, there were moments when WC could almost understand why some folks like bluegrass so much.  Props to Steve Brown & the Bailers for opening (with Robin Dale Ford filling in on bass).

A fun evening. Thanks to Trudy and Mase for putting it together.

Dr. Kirk Johnson and Ray Troll at Gulliver's Books

Dr. Kirk Johnson and Ray Troll were at Gulliver’s Books in Fairbanks on Friday night, talking about their 2007 book Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway, telling stories and autographing books. It was a hoot.

Johnson is a paleobotanist, a fossil-hunter who specializes in the fossils of plants. As he puts it, he goes time traveling with a shovel. He understands William Faulkner’s line, “The past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past.” He has a gift for telling stories, and is a science popularizer par excellence. Plus, he can find dinosaur footprints in roadcuts driving by at 65 mph.

That’s not the kind of skill you’d expect to find in the Vice President of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, but it’s true. As well as a Ray Troll drawing.

Ray Troll is, well, he’s Ray Troll. He’s an Alaska treasure, a man comfortable with fish, evolution, puns, geology, the Amazon, puns and Truly Awful puns. His surrealistic art has anatomically correct critters. And he’s a fine public speaker, too. He gave a very nice, 45 minutes summary of the book and the adventures that led to it, complete with excellent KeyNote slides. He is, of course, a Mac user.

He can and did talk knowledgeably about the Morrison Formation, Pleiosaurs, Triceratops, Jackalopes, Ammonites and the strata of the Wind River Canyon. He can draw a vivid explanation of Natural Trap Cave – the mother lode of Holocene mammal skeletons – and make a joke at the same time: “Forty Thousand Mammals Can Be Wrong.” He sells t-shirts, but world class museums compete for his exhibitions.

Johnson wrote the book, mostly. Troll illustrated it. Johnson has a easy writing style that is comfortable explaining deep time, Troll’s penchant for cheeseburgers, the mechanisms by which fossils are made and preserved and the endless variety and availability of fossils.

Look Under Your Feet, © Ray Troll

The book is science blended with the road story of Troll’s and Johnson’s trip together and excursions into some of the pleasures of geology. A couple of WC’s heroes wander into the story, including Dr. David Love, the subject to John MacPhee’s superb Rising from the Plains [Amazon link], and how Love came to have a dinosaur named after himself. Or at least a dinosaur track; the late Cretaceous, four-toed species is known to science only from its tracks. And, as it turns out, Love once took Olaus and Marty Murie, of Alaska fame, fossil hunting. You never know what’s going to wash up when you beach comb the shores of science.

And the book is filled with amazing new characters, too. Like “Buck-a-Bug” Jimmy Corbett, who finds trilobite fossils and sells them to Fossil King Robert Harris for a dollar each. As Troll skillfully points out,  if we look under our feet, the past is all around us.

There are Christianists, religious zealots and various prigs who would deny us and our children our true heritage: billions of years of history, deep time, and tens of millions of species that were long gone before mammals even evolved. They’d force our public schools to deny the existence of The Dinosaur killer, the K-T boundary that is the dinosaurs’ epitaph and all that went before and since. Johnson was raised in the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and his story of the moment as a teenager he realized Noah’s Flood was not the default answer to every geologic problem could stand as an object lesson for all creationists.

Ray Troll was kind enough to sign a few of WC’s books, and both Troll and Johnson signed a copy of Fossil Freeway. They are fine souvenirs, and will have a place of honor on WC’s bookshelves. But the bigger take away from the evening is the hard, clever work of these two gentlemen who are working to tease a little knowledge of the past into the thick, stubborn brains of Americans.

WC is grateful for their efforts and wishes them every success.

When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of education
Hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Kodachrome
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah!

Paul Simon, “Kodachrome,” from There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, 1973

Eastman Kodak filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy Thursday. $5.1 billion in assets; $6.8 billion in liabilities. Of the $6.8 billion in red ink, about $245 million a year is pension obligations. Another group of employees is about to get stiffed on their pensions, at a time when the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the government insurer of retirement funds, is already insolvent.

Of course, the last bit of Kodachrome film was gradually phased out between 1996 and 2009, and the last lab that processed Kodachrome closed in 2010. As a metaphor for Kodak, it’s not bad.

But Kodak was a lot more than Kodachrome film, even if Paul Simon linked it indelibly. (There’s even a Kodachrome Basin State Park in Utah.)

Kodak actually saw the digital revolution coming in photography, and after its earlier loss of market share to Polaroid – remember Polaroids? – acted preemptively and released some of the early digital cameras. But Kodak couldn’t keep up with either the improvements in sensors out of Japan or the improvements in on-camera processing software in the U.S. Kodak never really got on board the digital bus. While Kodak holds some of the early key patents in digital photography, it was never able to turn those patents into a profitable product.

WC is baffled by Kodak’s recent strategy. On the one hand, it wants to sell inkjet printers, staying in the business of making photos. On the other hand, it has turned into a patent troll, suing anyone and everyone that it thought infringed on the patents it could not use profitably itself. Kodak couldn’t seem to understand that you can’t be a patent troll and expect your inkjet printers to be viewed favorably by the photography industry or photographers.

WC has thousands of Kodak™ prints. A few have been scanned and digitized, but most sit in boxes, gathering dust. And now Eastman Kodak itself stares at a similar fate. Kodak has joined slide rule manufacturers, 8-track and cassette tapes, day timers, encyclopedias and countless other products as roadkill on the digital highway.

Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome
(Leave your boy so far from home)
Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome (away)

Farewell and good luck, Kodak.

It’s remarkably hard to find current on-line news of the ship. For what it’s worth, this was one of the hardest blog posts to research that WC has done. But it seems very likely the Astican Shipyard’s maritime lien against her will be foreclosed by a Spanish court, and she will be sold at public auction for scrap. Here is an on-line photo of her in dry dock in the Canary Islands.

M/V Polar Star in Dry Dock, Astican Shipyard, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, July 2011; photo by CHARRN

There are unindexed Receiver’s Reports for the Karlsen Shipping receivership.  The Second Report of Receiver dated September 27, 2011 summarizes the receiver’s analysis of the financial value of the ship. Partially because her engines will have to be replaced (something the Captain told WC back in 2010) it’s very difficult to find financing. It would cost $2.5 million just to get her out of the Atiscan Shipyard. That’s before the engine refit, which would have to include conversion to diesel fuel to comply with changes in ship requirements in the arctic and antarctic scheduled for 2014. In the Second Report, the receiver concludes:

Based upon the above, the Receiver has concluded that there is little prospect of any significant return to creditors by continuing to actively pursue the sale of the Ship. The net proceeds are unlikely to exceed the amounts owed to the lien holders.

Therefore the Receiver has concluded that the Ship be abandoned to the Astican Shipyard and the Receiver shall assist the shipyard, if required, as regards any local judicial sale of the Ship.

In the Receiver’s Third Report dated October 27, the receiver simply says:

The M/V “Polar Star” remains at the Astican Shipyard in Las Palmas, Spain as reported in our Second Report. All interested parties are being directed by the Receiver to the solicitor representing the shipyard.

Readers will recall that in November Cheeseman’s Safaris had scathing criticisms of the Astican Shipyard and the receiver for their failure to protect the ship against the elements. If you look at the area behind the stack, there’s black rags? Those are the remains of the Zodiac rafts used to move passengers around. The ultraviolet in tropical sunlight is not kind to Zodiac fabrics. If the interior of the ship is in as bad a condition as the Zodiacs, Ted Cheeseman was exactly right.

But by the time Ted Cheeseman and his prospective buyer got there, the decision was already made.

A sad, sad end to a great ship.