Oiceberg Roit A'ead!

I'm just a day less than three weeks before my cruise and here I am, watching "A Night to Remember" on TCM. Reminds me of the time I was on the Veendam and the movie was James Cameron's "Titanic." That was about as bad as, say, taking a trans-Pacific flight and having the movie be "Snakes on a Plane."

Admittedly, it's getting harder and harder to sink a ship, but I suppose there's something out there we just hadn't thought would happen. The Titanic was, in fact, practically unsinkable from the usual danger: Getting t-boned by another ship. Just nobody thought it would run over the underwater ridge of an iceberg and tear out its bottom.

Stuff you don't expect to happen, happens.

We had a demonstration of some new printing machine that was supposed to replace sliced bread as being the best thing since. I politely asked what we should do in the event of a paper jam; the salesman confidently assured us that could not happen. I said, "That's good to hear, but I've used anything that prints since I was twelve; if paper moves, it can jam.” He then became testy and said his machine would not do that, so I backed off. The next day, we had to call him in because there was a paper jam.

I wonder how you plan for the unexpected? Without getting paranoid, I think it's a good idea to look for what can go wrong in our lives. It's just that we can't tell what it's going to be. It's only after the crash, the attack, the whatever, that we learn how to avoid it in the future. People live or die because they changed their travel plans, but nobody knew ahead of time which was the better choice. Earlier plane? Later plane? This highway, that highway?

We do our best, then toss the dice and hope it comes up 7.