103 I’ve sure never lost to any prepubescent females in fucking Ping-Pong, I can tell you.
104 Winston also sometimes seemed to suffer from the verbal delusion that he was an urban black male; I have no idea what the story is on this or what conclusions to draw from it.
105 This is not counting my interfaces with Petra, which though lengthy and verbose tended of course to be one-sided except for “You are a funny thing, you.”
106 The single most confounding thing about the young and hip cruisers on the Nadir is that they seem truly to love the exact same cheesy disco music that we who were young and hip in the late ’70s loathed and made fun of, boycotting Prom when Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park” was chosen Official Prom Theme, etc.
107 Interfacing with Winston could be kind of depressing in that the urge to make cruel sport of him was always irresistible, and he never acted offended or even indicated he knew he was being made sport of, and you went away afterward feeling like you’d just stolen coins from a blind man’s cup or something.
108 Choosing from among 24 options, they can run on all four, or one Papa and one Son, or two Sons, etc. My sense is that running on Sons instead of Papas is kind of like switching from warp drive to impulse power.
109 The Nadir has a Captain, a Staff Captain, and four Chief Officers. Captain Nico is actually one of these Chief Officers; I do not know why he’s called Captain Nico.
110 Something else I’ve learned on this Luxury Cruise is that no man can ever look any better than he looks in the white full-dress uniform of a naval officer. Women of all ages and estrogen-levels swooned, sighed, wobbled, lash-batted, growled, and hubba’d when one of these navally resplendent Greek officers went by, a phenomenon that I don’t imagine helped the Greeks’ humility one bit.
111 The Fleet Bar was also the site of Elegant Tea Time later that same day, where elderly female passengers wore long white stripper-gloves and pinkies protruded from cups, and where among my breaches of Elegant Tea Time etiquette apparently were: (a) imagining people would be amused by the tuxedo-design T-shirt I wore because I hadn’t taken seriously the Celebrity brochure’s instruction to bring a real tux on the Cruise; (b) imagining the elderly ladies at my table would be charmed by the off-color Rorschach jokes I made about the rather obscene shapes the linen napkins at each place were origami-folded into; (c) imagining these same ladies might be interested to learn what sorts of things have to be done to a goose over its lifetime in order to produce pâté-grade liver; (d) putting a 3-ounce mass of what looked like glossy black buckshot on a big white cracker and then putting the whole cracker in my mouth; (e) assuming one second thereafter a facial expression I’m told was, under even the most charitable interpretation, inelegant; (f) trying to respond with a full mouth when an elderly lady across the table with a pince-nez and buff-colored gloves and lipstick on her right incisor told me this was Beluga caviar, resulting in (f(l)) the expulsion of several crumbs and what appeared to be a large black bubble and (f(2)) the distorted production of a word that I was told sounded to the entire table like a genital expletive; (g) trying to spit the whole indescribable nauseous glob into a flimsy paper napkin instead of one of the plentiful and sturdier linen napkins, with results I’d prefer not to describe in any more detail than as unfortunate; and (h) concurring, when the little kid (in a bow tie and [no kidding] tuxedo-shorts) seated next to me pronounced Beluga caviar “blucky,” with a spontaneous and unconsidered expression that was, indeed and unmistakably, a genital expletive.
Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of that particular bit of Managed Fun. This will, at any rate, explain the 1600h. — 1700h. lacuna in today’s p.&d. log.
112 All week the Englerites have been a fascinating subcultural study in their own right — moving only in herds and having their own special Organized Shore Excursions and constantly reserving big party-rooms with velveteen ropes and burly guys standing by them with their arms crossed checking credentials — but there hasn’t been room in this essay to go into any serious Englerology.
113 (not — mercifully—“bowal thrusters”)
114 In other words, the self-made brass-balled no-bullshit type of older U.S. male whom you least want the dad to turn out to be when you go over to a girl’s house to take her to a movie or something with dishonorable intentions rattling around in the back of your mind — an ur-authority figure.
115 This helps explain why Captain G. Panagiotakis usually seems so phenomenally unbusy, why his real job seems to be to stand in various parts of the Nadir and try to look vaguely presidential, which he would (look presidential) except for the business of wearing sunglasses inside,115a which makes him look more like a Third World strongman.
115a All the ship’s officers wore sunglasses inside, it turned out, and always stood off to the side of everything with their hands behind their backs, usually in groups of three, conferring hieratically in technical Greek.
116 As God is my witness no more fruit ever again in my whole life.
117 And it’s just coffee qua coffee — it’s not Blue Mountain Hazlenut Half-Caf or Sudanese Vanilla With Special Chicory Enzymes or any of that bushwa. The Nadir’s is a level-headed approach to coffee that I hereby salute.
118 One of very few human beings I’ve ever seen who is both blond and murine-looking, Ernst today is wearing white loafers, green slacks, and a flared sportcoat whose pink I swear can be described only as menstrual.
119(the pole)
120 This is what I did, leaned too far forward and into the guy’s fist that was clutching the hem of his pillowcase, which is why I didn’t cry Foul, even though the vision in my right eye still drifts in and out of focus even back here on land a week later.
121(also in the ND known as Steiner Salons and Spas at Sea)
122 So you can see why nobody with a nervous system would want to miss watching one of these, some hard data from the Steiner brochure:
IONITHERMIE — HOW DOES IT WORK? Firstly you will be measured in selected areas. The skin is marked and the readings are recorded on your program. Different creams, gels and ampoules are applied. These contain extracts effective in breaking down and emulsifying fat. Electrodes using faradism and galvanism are placed in position and a warm blue clay covers the full area. We are now ready to start your treatment. The galvanism accelerates the products into your skin, and the faradism exercises your muscles.122a The cellulite or ‘lumpy fat,’ which is so common amongst women, is emulsified by the treatment, making it easier to drain the toxins from the body and disperse them, giving your skin a smoother appearance.
122a And, as somebody who once brushed up against a college chemistry lab’s live induction coil and had subsequently to be pried off the thing with a wooden mop handle, I can personally vouch for the convulsive-exercise benefit of faradic current.