Strings, Rings, and Other Things

[Sorry this one's a bit long, but there was a lot of great stuff on that final day.]

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Friday, January 7:
Our final day at sea began with Peter Sagal leading a quiz show featuring the various entertainers. It was listed on the schedule as "Hey Hey... I'm Clever!", but after one of his comments about a pet peeve at Monday's Q&A session it was renamed "Hey Hey... I'm An Asshole!" Much like the Q&A session, this was a great chance to see a bunch of the performers a bit less formally and just cracking jokes with each other: those were some of my favorite parts of the cruise. This also may have been the only time all week that we saw David Rees's deadpan nonchalance break down into laughter. (If folks eventually get video of this online, I'll try to post the appropriate clip.)

After lunch, I ventured to the game room once again and entered the Pirate Fluxx tournament, competing for the chance to win a copy of the not-yet-released game. Sadly, Fluxx is always very random and we didn't have nearly enough time (or speed) to do lots of rounds to even that out... or at least, that's my excuse. :) While waiting for one particularly long round to finish at another table, my table played a game of "Once Upon a Time": it's a fascinating game about collaborative storytelling, but I got the sense that it could easily be prone to rules arguments and misunderstandings between players. I'd like to try it again now that I've got the gist of it. Once I was eventually bumped out of the Fluxx tournament, I played "Apples to Apples" for a while before it was time for the show.

The final evening of the cruise featured an all-request show by JoCo (we'd been turning in request cards all week), though it opened with the cruise director telling us how much he and the staff loved us. My ex-students Liana and Phil wound up sitting next to us, and as we discussed the week during intermission Liana commented that the last thing she'd expected from the trip was to find herself sitting next to her physics professor with both of us singing all the words to "I Feel Fantastic". JoCo sang lots of great songs, many of them more obscure (and many of those with more than a few stumbles along the way), and it was wonderful. There was a Fancy Pants Parade (and competition). We got a fun explanation of the underlying story for "Under the Pines", and generally lots of other great songs (including a cover of "Birdhouse In Your Soul"). Our one disappointment was that JoCo started to lead into my request ("You Ruined Everything", a favorite that Kim and I have been thinking of a lot lately), but held off because he hoped his daughter would come back from getting pizza first, and then he never got back to it. But to counterbalance that, JoCo's own request for the night was a song by John Roderick (with JoCo, Paul, and Storm as backup) called "The Commander Thinks Aloud" that was just amazing. I'll embed it below; Peter Sagal called it "[his] fav[orit]e cruise moment (among many)" (many indeed... but this is the one he tweeted about three times). All in all, this was a great final show for the week.

After that was dinner (a fancy dinner show by the staff); toward the end, one table and then more and more spontaneously got up, faced JoCo's table, and started singing "This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS." I helped Kim pack and fill out our comment cards, and then I went up to spend a bit of time at the farewell party on the back deck of the ship. I said goodbye to a number of people I'd met during the week, and I chatted with some famous people. I told Wil Wheaton that a friend of mine remembered meeting him when Will appeared at his dorm room to visit his roommate Dean, and Wil filled in a detail: Wil knew Dean because Dean was trying to steal away Wil's girlfriend at the time, a project in which he eventually succeeded. (Who knew?) I also expressed my admiration for Peter Sagal, and found that he did indeed remember ukulele from his show ("How could I forget a name like that?" he asked). After some final goodbyes and a brief attempt at stargazing, I headed off to bed.

The next morning was simple: just a final breakfast and then a wait until our turn to disembark. It was a little sad seeing all of our cruise partners scatter away, but hey, we may all get to do this again someday. (Another cruise is almost certainly in the works.)

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Video evidence: I haven't seen any significant footage of the quiz show up yet: people seem to be uploading mostly in order. However, it looks like at least one person has uploaded the full request show: here's the first part (which is actually entirely Paul and Storm doing administrative stuff), but it should lead directly into later bits with actual music.

Finally, John Roderick singing "The Commander Thinks Aloud", a tribute to the astronauts who died when the space shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry. I'm tempted to embed the relevant segment of the full concert recording, since it's a bit higher quality and includes John Roderick's introduction to the song, but for now I'll stick with the music:

[For some particularly good photos of everything, the official photographer has uploaded a lot of his best.]

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Wednesday, Jan. 5:
The ship visited the town of Ocho Rios, Jamaica, but Kim and I mostly sat it out. Few of the things to do sounded worth the money to us, and the one that was most tempting (walking up a pretty series of waterfalls) sounded potentially unwise for her uterus and my knee. We had a relaxing morning, and after lunch we walked out maybe a quarter mile onto the island just to say we'd been there. (And it sounds like we didn't miss much: most people seemed to agree that it was the least interesting port of call.)

The JoCo show for the day started with Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett from RiffTrax doing their MST3K treatment of a couple of short instructional films: Shake Hands with Danger (construction site safety) and Drawing for Beginners: The Rectangle. (They were joined by Peter Sagal, who got some good lines.) After that, Molly Lewis played a good set of songs with her ukulele. After that, Mike Phirman came out and did some music and some standup comedy (much of it simultaneous) that was a lot of fun. He ended right on time at 7:30... and then suddenly the RiffTrax guys came out along with John Hodgman to do one last short (about making crafts with grasses), followed by a big group singalong of a generic national anthem, "Our Nation's Better Than Yours". In other words, we ran way over time, but it was fun.

We had another pleasant dinner with some neat people (new ones again: I liked that), and then Kim and I both went to the game room for a bit. I played a game of "Back to the Future", a substantially simplified variant of Chrononauts based on the movie trilogy (simpler to play, but still fun and probably much easier to learn). It was fun chatting about the design of the game with the founder of Looney Labs, too; she's pretty cool. After that, Kim headed to bed; I stayed up to watch folks play Rock Band for a little bit, but I joined her pretty soon.

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Video evidence: Bits and pieces from the show: Molly Lewis singing "Road Trip" (it's the only video of her show that I've found so far; not my very favorite of her songs, but still fun), Mike Phirman's show (with bonus excitement when the camera falls from the balcony, happily failing to hit anyone), or perhaps better, Phirman's standup bits and his music, and My Country's Better Than Yours. (Also, I just added a video of Molly Lewis singing at JoKaraoke to the previous day's video list.)

[Note: I've added links to a few videos at the end of my last post, many of which by some miracle include glimpses of me.]

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Monday, Jan. 3:
We woke up early (Kim eats these days on a schedule a hobbit would envy), and I put on my Vinyar Tengwar T-shirt in honor of Tolkien's birthday. The ship had reached "Half Moon Cay", so we took a tender to the island and found a place to settle in a good distance down the beach (as it turned out, Wil Wheaton and his family spent the morning just a stone's throw away). Kim relaxed in the shade of some trees while I went for a swim in the stunningly clear, blue water. I swam along the shore for quite a ways, and despite my lack of glasses I managed to recognize our friends from the hotel and hang out with them in the water for a bit before heading back to Kim. (I found Kim's shady spot on just my second nearly-blind guess. :) ) After I did a bit more of a stroll to the far end of the beach and back, we headed back to the ship for lunch.

In the afternoon, I went to the game room again (I'd decided that was one way to make myself actually socialize a bit). I played a soon-to-be-released game called "Orbit" with its designer (and had a conversation about the Elvish letters on my shirt along the way), and then I moved on to a game of Monty Python Fluxx followed by Munchkin Cthulhu (both of them new variants of games I know well).

Finally, at 4:30 it was time for the very first JoCo group show! When it was time to start, the lights went down and "I'm On A Boat" started playing from the speakers. Moments later, Jonathan Coulton came on stage along with Paul (from Paul and Storm) for "morning announcements" (about schedule changes and upcoming informal events), the crowning of the "Monarch of the Seas" before introducing Wil Wheaton. Wil read three of his narrative stories, with musical accompaniment by Paul and Storm. They were fun and touching and it was all very cool.[1]

After Wil's stories, Paul and Storm played their own set. I hadn't heard them play before, but again, lots of fun. In their patter between songs, they quickly established what became the meme of the cruise: "_____ is my _____ cover band." (One example: after Storm explained his expanded facial hair by saying, "Yes, my beard is in double overtime", Paul jumped in with, "Double-overtime beard is my ZZ Top cover band.")

After the show we changed for dinner. It was open seating, so we joined an eight-person table and had a good conversation with a wide range of other geeky types. There was a mysterious, never-explained delay of half an hour or so between the time we finished soups and salads and the time they finally brought our entrees; we got the impression that there was some sort of problem in the kitchen. But it was all tasty once it got there. After that, we went back to the room to rest a bit (sadly, we skipped the Mustache Formal event, which sounds like it was a lot of fun). Finally, at 11pm we went to the "Drama Club" event where Peter Sagal and Bill Corbett each presented a play.

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Video evidence: Videos are only gradually showing up, but here's [updated!] a somewhat complete set from the first night's show in a handy playlist. And here's the beginning of Bill Corbett's play "My Monster"; I won't link to all the separate parts, in part because this camera was apparently out of focus. [Or follow the original links I gave for the main show: Welcome and announcements, Monarch crowning, Wil Wheaton intro, "The Trade (I)", "The Trade (II)", [missing video about Rocky Horror], "The Excellence Incident" (a good, brief example), Paul and Storm: "Opening Band", "Cruel, Cruel Moon", "Nugget Man" (with JoCo), "Nun Fight", "Ten-fingered Johnny", The Frogger Musical, various tribute songs, and finally "The Captain's Wife's Lament" (with Wil Wheton and zillions of "X is my Y cover band" jokes) (two more parts will be uploaded shortly).]

I'm much more in the mood to collapse into bed than to post oodles of news here, but we have indeed made it home safe and sound. The house seems very quiet compared to what I've been used to lately, and it seems to be rocking considerably less. It's good to be here! We'll surely say more soon.

I've just given the house a once over with a vacuum, and now it's finally time to pack up this computer and the last few things we need before we hit the road! I've still got a bit of work to do before the first day of class, but I'm content that I'm ready enough. :) (I may end up sitting at an airport in Florida for five hours waiting for our flight back, anyway.)

So farewell, all! We'll have little to no internet access for the next week (maybe a bit at the hotel tonight), which should be a nice change. I'll look forward to reporting on JoCo & Co. once we're back.