Star Princess Fact Sheet
Built: 2001
Port of Registry: Hamilton
Call Sign: ZCDD6
Official umber: 733709
Gross Tonnage: 109000 tons
Net Tonnage: 71763 tons
Length: 951 feet
Breadth: 118 feet
Full Capacity: 2649 tons
Fresh Water Capacity: 2731 Tons
Normal Passenger Capacity: 2600
Normal Crew Figure; 1150
Cruising Speed: 22.5 knots

Just got on the boat a few hours ago. Stateroom E121 rocks hard:



That's Jaimee's legs and part of her arm. Those are my books near the bed. The only one you might be able to make out clearly is Best American Essays 2004, which I brought by accident (I'd meant to take Stories instead), but it turns out to be pretty good and I'm glad I brought it. I think Essays succeeds where Stories sometimes fails, even though it's still comprised of at least seven pieces from The New Yorker each year -- because while The New Yorker too often has a certain type of story it likes to publish over and over again, it publishes a much wider variety of nonfiction.

Next up is the Jared Diamond essay, so I'm especially excited about that one. I also brought The Fortress of Solitude and Bend Sinister and Break It Down, which I've wanted to read ever since I realized that hte only thing I'm even halfway good at writing is short shorts. That may seem like a lot of books for a cruise, but I require a large variety of books when I travel -- you never know what you're going to want next

Yesterday on the plane I looked at children's lit superstar Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, and it's actually fairly interesting. What's best about those books so far is not the anti-religious perspective but the notion he's come up with of an alternate earth where humans have a psychic connection with a talking, animal-shaped magical companion from birth. The psychological complications of this situation are sort of interesting. I really got the impression (unlike, say, Harry Potter) that the His Dark Materials trilogy was not originally intended for children, but instead that a decision to market it to that demographic was made after the fact of creation by the publisher. It's not high art or anything, but it's not unbearably awful, either. It was good plane junk reading.

Long digression aside, that's the basic setup of our room. But I know what you really want to know about, and here it is right here.