Good news and bad news

Shall we start with the good news or the bad news? Normally I would start with the bad (I prefer to get these things out of the way early) but we're going to switch it up tonight.

The good:
1. I just moved to Istanbul.
2. I decided to restart blog, mostly so I won't later forget all the little things or take the experience for granted.

The bad (which isn't really bad at all):
3. My blog is now here. Come join me? Pretty please? Do I have to say it in Turkish?

And now for a short break...

I've decided to put my blog on hold. It started out as a lark but has since evolved to a "should do" on an endless, joyless to-do list on the path to chasing a career goal that I'm not sure is even my goal anymore. Clearly, I'm having a crisis and I haven't reached mid-life yet. I might come back to it next month to document my (hopefully fabulously awesome) adventures in Turkey and Italy, but until then, the blog is on pause. :)

J.Crew in Guatemala

I feel like I just blogged about J.Crew's latest travel catalogue, featuring Turks & Caicos. Not a month has passed and the next has already arrived. This edition is a bit Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego since it's the first I've seen (since I started paying attention) that doesn't offer the location up front. J.Crew's June cover features a luminous model on a boat while the shots that follow feature the same woman modeling various bathing suits in front of an anonymous body of water (my guess: Lake Atitlan. But I'm getting ahead of myself...).

It isn't until page 19 that we find out that J.Crew's June's catalogue is set in glorious Guatemala. (I hear it's glorious, anyway – it's nearing top 5 on my list but I have yet to go.) A different, but familiar, model takes over and poses around the city of La Antigua, according to the handy Travel Note. I get the feeling that La Antigua is Guatemala's (cheaper) version of San Miguel de Allende – founded in 1543, it's also got the wonderfully preserved colonial architecture, a UNESCO World Heritage designation, and a plethora of Spanish schools. For the most part, the model lounges against walls or ambles between stonework.

At one point, a Travel Note mentions that they used La Antigua's Convento de las Capuchinas as a backdrop. The convent was severly damaged in a 1773 earthquake, which also took out much of the town. But according to TripAdvisor, "Now open to the public, tranquil gardens, sparse nuns’ cells and a terrific view from the roof make this a popular attraction." It's the only location identified in the women's section.

J.Crew's Guatemala photos end on page 41, only to be recontinued on page 100 with the guys. The lone male model spends his pages hanging out in the north part of the country, at the Mayan ruins of Tikal (also, incidentally, a UNESCO World Heritage site). According to the UNESCO website, it was a major center and inhabited by the Mayans for 16 centuries. According to the text in J.Crew, it was also one of the settings in the original Star Wars.

Apparently, Tikal doubled as the moon Yanvin IV, from which the Rebel Alliance based their attack on the Death Star. I didn't remember any of this, but a quick look at the movie (which I have – yes, I'm a closeted Star Wars geek) jogged the memory. The one Travel Note in the men's section mentions that some of the guys on the shoot were so excited upon hearing this trivia that they geeked out and used their iPhones as light sabers.

Glee-ful Cruise Ships

Another night, another TV show making cruise ship references. This time it's Glee! Yes, happy days are here again.

In the latest episode "Dream On," Bryan Ryan returns to McKinley High to crush Mr. Schuester's ambitions. Once upon a time, the two men were themselves high-school Glee Club rivals – and Bryan Ryan got all the solos and all the girls. Unfortunately, though, the intervening years have not been kind. Instead of making it as a Broadway star, Mr. Ryan let a song go out of his heart and now he's just a bitter school-board member looking at ways to cut the budget. Take it away, boys...

Bryan Ryan: We’ll probably cut the Glee Club.

Mr. Schue: But you were in Glee Club. Show choir was your life!

Bryan Ryan: It was, Will. And after I graduated, I hit the big time. I was a featured soloist at Kings Island in the Doodle-Dee-Doo musical review. We were a smash. Then for three years I did the cruise ship circuit. When that dried up, I realized that I had been sold a bill of goods. Nine years later, I woke up on a urine-stained mattress in the West Lima crack district.

Hmm, I hope it was the hairdo that killed his mojo. It couldn't have been the cruise ships. Nooooooo, not the cruise ships!

Grey's Anatomy Cruise-Ship Love

This is Henry Stam. Henry was a patient at Seattle Grace on Grey's Anatomy last night. The poor guy had boarded his Alaskan-bound cruise but fell down the stairs before the ship even left port. In one of the episode's funniest - and perhaps not meant to be overtly funny - lines, he told the doctors that his children had given him the cruise as a present so that he might meet a nice lady.

Henry wasn't able to go on his cruise but don't feel too bad for him - he ended up running into his long-lost love at the hospital and they rekindled their thwarted romance. So all's well that ends well, even if it didn't end in Alaska.

LMN's Deadly Honeymoon

It took me a week to get around to watching Lifetime's World Premiere Movie, Deadly Honeymoon. LMN is not usually my network of choice but this was a cruise movie - and one ripped from the headlines. Despite the disclaimer that the movie was not based on real people and/or events, the plot of Deadly Honeymoon was loosely constructed around the story of honeymooner George Allen Smith IV, who mysteriously disappeared from Royal Caribbean's Brilliance of the Seas in July 2005, somewhere in the Mediterranean between Greece and Turkey.

Still, despite surface similarities, the film mostly skipped veracity in favor of drama - and gave the cruise industry quite an (undeserved) thrashing in the process. Deadly Honeymoon beats the "omg, cruise ships are deadly, scary, crazy places!" drum pretty hard, but for no purpose...since the wife is partly responsible for his death. It's domestic violence, not a mysterious crime wave at sea. Yes, mostly likely there is a cruise line(s) that has made a mistake(s) - but is this the only arena where a crime has been mishandled or covered up? I just think it's kinda ridiculous to suggest that it's this huge, industry-wide, purposeful debacle. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In Deadly Honeymoon, newlyweds Trevor and Lindsey Forrest opt for a South Pacific cruise on the fictional Emerald Cove Cruise Lines after a destination wedding in Hawaii. They seem like the perfect couple - but only for about five minutes. Lindsey gets upset when Trevor befriends some young Hungarians (whom she dislikes on sight, as they've been cast in the "suspicious foreigner" roles). Then on one particular evening early in the cruise, events spiral out of control - Trevor gambles in the casino with his new friends, Lindsey drinks herself nearly into oblivion and gets cozy with another guy, they fight, separate...Lindsey wakes up in a halllway and somehow Trevor ends up overboard. (It's not terribly far off from the real-life Smith case, as you can read in Bryan Burrough's excellent piece for Vanity Fair.)

Let the cruise-bashing begin:

Example #1: Present inaccurate figures

As it happens in Deadly Honeymoon, an FBI agent just happens to be sailing that week, and she lends the ship's security officer a hand with the investigation. And as they're walking through one of the corridors, Officer Alan Sherrington explains to her why it was so easy to ID the three Hungarians. "Over the last few years," he says, "more than 30 people have disappeared on cruise ships - and that's not including suicides and accidents, that we know about." But you know the problem there? That statistic isn't actually true. According to cruisejunkie.com, a cruise resource maintained by Canadian professor Ross Klein, 39 people have gone overboard on cruise ships in the last 3 years (is that a "few"?). Of those, only about 15 had unknown causes as presented - he didn't necessarily follow up on every story, so the number of mysterious deaths is probably even less than that. With the remaining cases, the people who went overboard were either rescued, had been seen jumping/falling, or had left suicide notes. The point is, that's far less than Alan Sherrington's 30.

On average, that's five people a year. And 13.35 million people were estimated to have cruised last year, according to CLIA's 2009 Marketing Overview. I'm pretty sure that more than five people have already died under mysterious circumstances in Dallas this year - and we don't have a population anywhere near 13 million. It sucks, yes, for everyone involved but the point is, crime happens everywhere.

Example #2: Present lots of victims

Later on in the movie, the grieving Lindsey visits her cruise-friend Kim (from Dallas!) in her cabin. Kim has apparently been surfing the Internet and discovers a bunch of cruise-victim websites. She tells Lindsey, "Well, they're out in the middle of nowhere, no cops around. Look at this website right here - it's all people who went missing from cruise ships. There are so many of them!"

Yes, there are websites dedicated to cruise victims and there are a lot of grieving families. I'm not taking issue with that - it's just at this point in Deadly Honeymoon, it's starting to look like Lindsey might be hiding something. She's certainly already tried to blackmail the captain. So really no need to keep bashing cruising itself.

Example #3: Give faulty legal information

Trevor's disappearance apparently isn't the only crime that takes place that cruise -Kim confides to Lindsay that one of the Hungarians raped her (which is actually a legitimate cruise ship crime and a subject that might have been more appropriate for LMN to tackle). After Lindsey makes a scene at the pool, Kim is forced to discuss her legal options with the Captain and Alan Sherrington. They essentially tell her that the Tahitian authorities will arrest him and if she wants to see justice served, her only option is to go to Liberia - where the ship is registered - and take him to court there. As a victim, Kim is already completely traumatized and the conversation just makes it worse.

I am absolutely NOT an expert on this, but I do know that their advice is not completely accurate. Since Kim is a U.S. citizen, the case does fall under the FBI's jurisdiction. According to the Cruise Ship Law blog, published by a law firm, "Federal law allows for the prosecution of those accused of attacking U.S. citizens on the high seas." The blog stated this in connection with a 2009 case, where a passenger accused - in a Los Angeles court - a Portuguese crew member of sexually assaulting her on a Princess cruise.

So yeah, you might say that Deadly Honeymoon is only a movie and I shouldn't get so worked up. But I tell you, it really pissed me off. When you're making a "fictional" film that's so obviously based on real events, I think you have some responsibility to stick to the facts. Yes, crime occurs on cruise ships. But crime occurs everywhere - cruise ships are not black holes of death and despair, and I'm getting a little tired of this meme that wants to paint them so. Especially because in the end, Trevor's death is a result of a domestic dispute! There is no crazy murder on the high seas - just a little adultery, a few drugs, and an accidental slip over the railing.

Ironically, at the end of the movie, the Captain counsels a distraught Lindsey, who's freaking out over some headlines she's already seen on the Internet about her husband's disappearance. He tells her, "You shouldn't be looking at that junk. Those people, they're just using you as fodder for innuendo and speculation."

Would "those people" happen to be you, LMN?

J.Crew in Turks & Caicos

Usually I'm a big fan of the J.Crew travel catalogues but May's book? Not so much. The catalogue was shot in the Turks & Caicos, apparently chosen after Creative Director Jenna and her family spent a lovely holiday there. I can corroborate this sentiment - I raved about Grand Turk after spending a few days there during Christmas. So then, with all this, why do the models look like they're having no fun at all? Cheer up, girls, you're being paid to visit the Caribbean!

Seriously. With the first model, I can just imagine her saying, "Daaaaaaaaddy, stop trying to, like, take my picture!" The second model looks like she's mourning the boyfriend who just got washed out to sea. The J.Crew models don't always look cheery but I think these ladies come across as more glum than usual.

Added to that, most of the photos in the front part of the catalogue seem to use a heavy flash (or were taken at sunset), which really dulled the background - often turning Turks & Caicos variegated azure ocean to a pastel mush. I guess it's an artistic thing, but I'm just not sure why you'd spend the money and manpower to stage a shoot in the Caribbean and then not utilize the location's beauty, you know? I've posted one of my own photos to help you out. See what you had to work with?

But then, finally, the outlook starts to brighten on page 82, after we've had about 40 pages of studio shots to forget what happened up front. In the Weddings & Parties section, the wedding party - gasp - looks like it's actually having fun. The girls are smiling! And why shouldn't they? The sun is shining and the sea grass is a-blowin'. And their friends are getting married for what, like the 5th time in catalogue-land?

So yeah, the May catalogue...not my favorite. And not just because they skipped the fun travel notes this round, either. But I have faith in you, J.Crew, that you'll work on this problem and return to redeem yourself. And hey, I still like your sweaters.