[CRUISE] Generally Talking Excitedly About the Cruise
This is the place for everyone to discuss general stuff relating to the JoCoCruise Crazy fan cruise happening Jan. 2, 2011. (http://www.jococruisecrazy.com)
Who's coming and where you're coming from; talk about how *totally* awesome it's going to be; suggestions for shipboard activities; discuss the ports of call, the ship, the food; whatever else occurs to you.
Have at it!
Who's coming and where you're coming from; talk about how *totally* awesome it's going to be; suggestions for shipboard activities; discuss the ports of call, the ship, the food; whatever else occurs to you.
Have at it!
Comments
Saw this excursion and immediately thought: Arrrrr!:
The Trolley Roger
Grand Caymans rich history and folklore of pirates and hidden loot awaits you on the one and only Trolley Roger. Permission to come aboard maties, and bring yer wee ones too for a swashbuckling tour of George Town, Grand Cayman. Your expert guide relates the entertaining history of the island and its colorful past.
Maybe we can get Wil at the helm? Course, I guess there's not much to a cruise if you just warp from port to port...
So, realistically, how many people are expected to book on the cruise?
We were on one other fan cruise for a band, and it was quite small. But this has more entertainment so I'm not sure it's a good comparison.
By searching the #JoCoCruise hashtag on Twitter, I can identify at least a dozen people who booked within the first 12 hours, and quite a few more who are talking about booking soon. I don't think the Collector's Edition passes will sell out within days, but by August wouldn't surprise me.
Don't take my word for anything, of course; I'm just prognosticating. Since my predictions of sellouts are usually correct though, I am going to confidently assert that enough tickets will be sold for our intrepid heroes to make a profit and consider this adventure a success.
(All this said, I'm not even sure I'm going. Can we have some more people talking excitedly to help sway my moral aversion to cruises?)
I'm sorry, I just can't bring myself to use more than one exclamation mark.
P&S
Hopefully I can find a british travel agent who will sell the holliday with flights and that its not too expensive, if not, no cruise :( Which a shame because I could have crossed something from my lifes todo list(Hi5 Wil Wheaton Aswell). not to mention I would have had a completely AWESOME time
I don't want to dissuade anyone else from going, but every choice I make has to go through the sustainability guilt filter first--and boy do I feel guilty about potentially picking JoCo & Friends over Saving the Planet. I like travel as much as the next person and sometimes compromise on my preferred ethics, but somehow this feels more wasteful than two weeks in Spain.
Holland-America does have a sustainability statement, which is a step in the right direction. Still feel guilty.
So...who wants to help help me justify this cruise to my conscience? Anyone?
(My non-moral aversion to cruises stems from the very small overlap between the sets of "people who go on cruises" and "people I have anything in common with". Luckily JoCo/P&S/Wheaton fans are mostly "my people", and this point is unlikely to be an issue.)
However, if you go on precisely one cruise in your life (perhaps your conscience allows you to try anything once; mine does that when I see intriguing foods imported from far away), I'm pretty sure this one will have the highest awesomeness to environmental damage ratio of any you will encounter. Plus you'd get to meet many JoCo fans and hangers-on which you or they would otherwise have to take many separate flights to see, not that you would actually visit them all individually, so it's an unfair comparison, but I already told you I wasn't going to actually justify the cruise. Also, you could use the time to pester JoCo into writing some kind of song about a wasted resource who is sad, or a giant squid who has no reef to look up at because a cruise crushed everything, thus compelling his fans to be less wasteful, and ensuring that he is not tempted to put on another cruise. Or you could do something else to make up for it. Which reminds me of a hare-brained plan I once had which I didn't get around to following through before I came to my senses. I really should do that.
We're coming from Connecticut; maybe this time Storm will sit on my lap instead of Paul (I had the honor this April in NYC). My other goal for the tour is to get my wife (who's originally from Quebec) to teach P&S how to correctly pronounce "poutine".
This trip gets more enticing every time a familiar name signs up. The entertainment may be fabulous, but you folk are the ones I'd be hanging out with. (:
On the Cruise site, I cannot recall where, it mentions the phrase "...all balances must be paid by October, 1st..."
Am I in understanding that this is the deadline for cruise payment, or is this just the deadline for the price increase on the entertainment pass of the Coultony type?
Just curious, because I have devised an ingenious plan to make money for the cruise...=) Just need to know if the deadline will put a huge halter on the project.
From the FAQ (http://jococruisecrazy.com/faq/#install):
As far as whether the cocktail will require cocktail dresses, the dress code on the Holland-America site includes the following: That said, given the typical style of our hosts, I keep imagining that formal at a JoCo-related event will mean "nice pair of jeans and a new tshirt".
However. I love dressing up. I especially love making elaborate new outfits for big occasions, and a week-long cruise is one heck of a big occasion. I don't even care if everyone else is decked out in nerd casual, but I think it would be great if there was at least one night for everyone to get shined up in party clothes.
I'm a little bit concerned about T-shirts not being allowed in some places in the evening, but I do have a few other tops.
Are you going to bring your 'It doesn't mean Wil Wheaton doesn't love you' shirt?
Hehe... I was just thinking I should move this discussion to the 'Talking Excitedly' thread when I realised you'd already done it.
I see that you can also rent formalwear:
I'm talking like I've decided to go, aren't I?
I did more research into cruising vs. the environment, and for what it's worth, Holland-America is about as good as cruise lines get for environmental practices. I have further made peace with my ethics by pricing out carbon offsets with a local company for both this and last year's trip to Spain, which I never got around to paying indulgences for.
(Aside: Yes, carbon offsets are of dubious worth, but Offsetters is not only so local that I could walk to their head office to chat, they invest in local energy projects that will improve the sustainability of my community in the long term. I feel that making any contribution toward a measurable goal is better than nothing.)
JoCo cruise is so in love with Molly,
at least all these geeks'll tell you so.
But while we think she's cute while playing ukelolly (meh I was going to go with 'oh my golly' but then I thought that ukelolly was so bad it had to be used.)
Most of us are here to see JoCo.
And a lifetime of Hodgman's books would cause too much er eruditon? self-importance? World knowledge?
Good thing that we've got JoCo on board.
JoCo cruise is JoCo cruise crazy,
several thousand geeks and you.
If you think JoCo cruise is awesome,
you might be JoCo cruise crazy too,
you'll flash your big white shiny phone
and buy expensive merchandise (or gadgets)
But you'd be the only man on Earth
who couldn't figure out how to finish this chorus. Yeah, that's all I have. It's 1:37a.m.
(Continue with statements about how unimportant all the other performers are. I don't think they're unimportant, even though I'm only really familiar with half of them, but that's just the way the song went; it's not my fault.)
By the way, does anyone want me to bring them some souvenirs from CERN or anything?
Fancy Pants parade
(this should inspire chicazul)
Should there perhaps be a keepsake exchange? The ship will be filled with many people from many places (most less interesting than CERN, to be sure) and it might be interesting to trade things.
I usually bring a whole lot of CERN playing cards to give to enthusiastic-looking geeks at JoCo shows, because they're small, light, can be played with and have a lot of information on them (there's something different on each card.) I will also bring punch cards (someone I shared an office with left behind a box of punch cards with CERN logos on them when he retired) and pins. But if anyone wants anything else, there are things like pens, rulers, mugs (which show the history of the universe when you put hot liquid in them) keyrings (ETA: including some limited edition ones with superconducting cable in them, if there are any left), lanyards, fridge magnets, caps, hard hats, ties, T-shirts (the adult ones either have a picture of a collision them, or some equations which I don't understand but I've heard they describe life, the universe, and everything) parkas (or not parkas, going by the wikipedia definition. They're thin windbreakers known in French as K-Ways) with big CERN logos on the back, polar fleece jackets, DVDs with videos you could probably find online I suppose, CDs of Les Horribles Cernettes, which you can definitely download but it might be cool to have the physical CD, books (some which you could probably get in any sufficiently technical bookstore, but also some which are specifically about CERN, and some more for kids with cartoons and stuff, like these.) There's even a pop-up book, but I see you can get it from Amazon so there probably wouldn't be much point in my bringing you one.
Here's a wonky panoramic photo I took of a souvenir display case the last time somebody asked me this. Oh yeah, the beige T-shirt on the right has the diagram from Tim Berners-Lee's proposal of the worldwide web; on the back it says, 'vague, but exciting'. Oh, and there are also tote bags with the equations of life, the universe, and everything on them. The brighter-coloured T-shirts on the right are only in children's sizes.
I will probably have plenty of spare luggage space, since I'm used to either just taking a backpack on trains or a large but half-empty suitcase with a 20kg limit when I fly to New Zealand, but all flights to or from the US have a much higher weight limit on luggage even in economy class. So I could bring a few of the larger items without a problem. I can't bring a large collider but I can bring some hadrons.
Also, I could bring more general Swiss souvenirs and/or chocolate.
P.S. Just made my booking with Telaril, happy happy joy joy.
By the way, JoCo should definitely make a deck of Thing a Week playing cards with Len's VTAWs. I keep thinking of designing some myself and then being too lazy or forgetting or not finding some kind of playing card template to use.
@Angelastic That stuff looks awesome! The playing cards, mug, and t-shirt are especially interesting. Anything I can get you from Alabama to trade? I could easily pick up something Crimson Tide football related or I could try to get something at the gift shop of the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville; it's only a few hours drive from me.
ETA: I don't know anything about Alabama, so anything would be interesting except football. I love space and rockets, though, which is why I'm hoping to go to Cape Canaveral before the cruise if I can figure out transport (anyone want to go with me, or for me to pick them up a souvenir?)
Oh, also, I can pick up free copies of the CERN Courier or the CERN Bulletin if anyone wants, but you can see them on the web anyway so it's probably not worth it.
A keepsake exchange sounds awesome, but I'm not sure what anyone would want from Ohio. Corn? A buckeye (the nut, not a football player)? I'll have to rack my brain for something good.
We've both been on one cruise before ( Carnival Destiny - May 2009, Eastern Caribbean ), and it was great. The reason I'm posting is that on our last cruise, we went in a group of 10, all of whom were friends with one couple (but not all of us knew each other). We had a large table in the dining room and it was really nice to get to know a smallish group of people over the course of the cruise.
The point is, I'd like to form a group that has dinner together in the main dining room (and maybe split a cabana on Half Moon Cay). I was thinking the 5:30pm dining time because it keeps your evenings open, and if you get hungry later on, you can always find more food somewhere. Is anyone interested?
Thanks,
P&S
Otherwise, I am a Maker of Things, and I would likely want to make stuff to bring. What kind of things would people like to see/have? (My friends had suggested companion cubes for everyone, but they're too bulky to travel.)
I have some ideas of my own that may be of interest to this crowd--I'm hoping to have prototypes by August.
ETA: If anyone wants me to bring them a Swiss flag or anything with a Swiss flag on it, now would be the time to say so. The supermarkets are full of Swiss things in preparation for the national day.
- Yes, you can expect that we (P&S) will be doing some backup vocals during the request show.
- a Fancy Pants Parade is most decidedly on the list of planned events. (it was one of the first things we thought of, heh). Mostly a matter of figuring out logistics; as Jonathan mentioned in his post, the eventual number of people in our group will play a large part in what's available to us, so most things are just theoretical at this point.
That said, keep the suggestions for shipboard activities coming!
I'm *totally* on a plane right now,
Paul