The neverending cruise, promoted as the "world's first floating city."

It's the Freedom Ship, a name that does not work on me. It telegraphs imprisonment.

And I love that it uses the roof for an airport and landing strip on the top level, so the 50,000 residents — instead of having a place to experience sunlight and sky — can feel and hear jets landing and taking off.

The benefits of ocean occupation would involve brand new schools, hospitals, businesses, parks, promenades, landscaping, public art and saltwater aquariums.

What's the law enforcement? Will that be experimental too?

"This will be a very heavily capitalised project and the global economy in the last few years hasn't been too inviting for unproven progressive projects like ours. Happily, though it has experienced a hiatus, the Freedom Ship now looks as if it is a live project again. In the last six months we're getting more interest in the project and we are hopeful we will raise the $1 billion to begin construction."

Looks as if... as if...

It looks as if this is a project for bilking billionaires getting articles written about nonsensical boyish fantasies.

I know. I shouldn't give these clowns attention. But I just hate cruises.

"We envisage this space with community in mind – a surprint environment that is accessible to all..."

"... and inspires conversation about how everything is connected – shore birds, me, you, the sea, fog and much more."

What is the Google barge project?

A surprint environment??

"The Paul R. Tregurtha becomes the first ship of the season to pass through the Soo Locks just after midnight Monday in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich."

"The 1013-foot ship is headed to Superior, Wis. to be loaded with coal. This time-lapse video condenses the 50-minute trip to about 25 seconds."

"A cruise ship’s passenger log is comprised entirely of the exact demographic that is least prepared for a cruise to go to pot."

"A cruise is a giant boat full of your mother-in-law. Your mother-in-law does not belong in the wild."

So writes Monica Hesse in the Washington Post, where I guess mother-in-law jokes are okay. (What is it, the 1950s?) Oddly, Hesse is also claiming to love cruises. And she prefaces her disparagement of older women with "I say fondly."

About those 4,200 cruise ship passengers...

Do they all imagine they are media stars now? Do we have to hear from each and every one about what they did with their precious bodily fluids?

“It just feels so good to be on land again and to feel like I have options,” said Tracey Farmer of Tulsa, Okla. “I’m just ready to see my family. It’s been harder on them than us I think because they’ve been so worried about us. It’s been extremely stressful for them.”

Tracey Farmer — if that really is your name — please go home to Tulsa, Oklahoma. All of you 4,200 people, please melt back into your normal lives in your respective hometowns.

Unless you have a distinctive and grisly detail or a truly idiosyncratic way to describe the mundane, I don't want to hear about it. I don't want to hear how it feels good to be back on dry land, how you care about your family with whom you are at long last reunited, how stressful it all was, and the crushingly obvious fact that shit stinks.

You are all people who went on a cruise in the first place. That's where you made your mistake.

The America Christopher Columbus discovered on October 12, 1492 was an island in what is today the Bahamas.

The Commonwealth of the Bahamas is today's "History of" country. It was an island that was inhabited by the Lucayans, who called it Guanahani. The Lucayans had canoed over to the Bahama islands between 500 and 800 A.D.

The Bahamas held little of interest to the Spanish other than as a source of slave labor. Nearly the entire population of Lucayans (almost 40,000 people total) were deported over the next 30 years. When the Spanish decided to evacuate the remaining Lucayans to Hispaniola in 1520, they could find only eleven in all of the Bahamas. The islands remained abandoned and depopulated for 130 years afterwards....

English settlers began arriving in 1648. The first, who called themselves Eleutherians, were farmers who didn't do too well. The New Providence settlement, begun in 1666 "made their living from the sea, salvaging (mainly Spanish) wrecks, making salt, and taking fish, turtles, conchs and ambergris."

Conflicts with the Spanish ensued over this salvaging of Spanish wrecks, and in 1685, the Spanish burned down New Providence and Eleuthera and these places were "largely abandoned." Five years later, the place was full of English privateers, who — after England made peace with France — became pirates. Then — if I'm reading this right — the pirates got back to being privateers or back again to being pirates depending on whether there was there was a war going on.

If you want to investigate the privateer/pirate distinction, you can look here.

Nowadays, the Bahamas seems like a nice place to go for vacation, and it looks like the tourists like the pirate-related attractions, like the Pirates of Nassau Museum, which invites you to "plunder" its gift shop.

"Boy, I can't think of a better Christmas present than to read about these vile unpleasant asocial deluded individuals suffering..."

"... all locked together in a big metal box. Schadenfreude to the max."