markeb

The Baltimore Sun is reporting there was a pilot onboard. There are unconfirmed reports that the ship lost power; no one's going to confirm that until there's a full investigation. I'm not that familiar with the Port of Baltimore, but from the reports I've seen, cruise ships are a blip on the radar. Shipping traffic into an out of the port is suspended. No one is saying for how long. That's container ships, roll on/roll off car shipments, etc. Whoever's in the port may be stuck there, and it could be awhile before anyone else gets in. Praying for the victims and their families.

It's Newark. They posted a couple of weeks ago about going from EWR to Broadway to catch a play. Do you have to take the train to the Uber pickup point? EWR isn't my airport...

No, I didn't.

What ship what venue? It's showing $17 on Summit in the MDR.

Best live moment ever. 2016. Nats Park. Incident into Rosie live. If you know, you know…

Again, what was the last generation who didn't believe the next generation's music was awful?

That may be the greatest oversimplification of musical tastes of the two generations I'm counting on funding my social security I've ever seen! Yes. EDM at the club. Yes, with a big but, to hip hop and rap. Those are two very broad genres that encompass an awful lot of music. Most of it's not my style either, but some of it's pretty good. And a lot of Millennial and Gen Z music is new country, which has become almost the descendant of southern rock. Apple has a pretty good playlist for Gen Z, as do a number of other sources. It's all over the place. Everything from late 90s TLC to Cee Lo Green to Kelly Clarkson to Carrie Underwood to... You can't lump Millennials and Gen Z into Hip Hop and EDM. If you do you're just as bad as our parents when they couldn't accept the Beatles, the Eagles, Springsteen, Billy Joel, Quiet Riot, etc. I've seen teenagers at Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen concerts, not always with their parents, and my wife and I have been to Paramore and loved them. We were at a Patti Smith concert last fall and the age certainly tended to my late Boomer/early X generation, but there were plenty of people a generation younger than me there. Insert Dr. Rick gif here...

Someone got it!

As in most restaurants, you’ll get much better wine by the bottle than by the glass. The package pays off if you’re mostly happy with the by the glass offerings, have a beer or cocktail or two, and throw in some bottled water. Then you get the discount on a good bottle or two. And don’t pay too much attention to the pennies!

With the premium package you get a 20% discount on the bottle price. You’ll still pay a 20% gratuity but on the discounted price. Easy math is $100 bottle @ 20% discount is $80 plus $18 gratuity is $98. With gratuity you pay $2 less than the posted price, but $22 less than the bottle would cost without the package discount. ($100 + 20 = $120)

Hasn't that always been true? I've never seen Luminae open for lunch on a port day (other than embarkation day).

I guess it's too simple to just point out that RCG has invested heavily in Florida with cruise terminals in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Port Canaveral, and Tampa. Every cruise that leaves one of those locations increases the return on those investments. And those cruises are mostly leaving full. Including plenty of cruisers willing to fly from the West Coast. Seattle and especially Vancouver give them advantages that wouldn't exist in Southern California. They can reach Alaska easily from either location, and Vancouver as a non-US location allows them to do one way cruises to Alaska or Hawaii. Europe and even Australia have become big "other markets" for RCG. If the OP has an actual business case for San Diego I'd love to hear it. Although having multiple user names on the same platform usually gets one banished. I'd have to look at the user agreement on CC...

Well that greatly simplifies the definition of modern popular music! Keep having fun out here! 😁

Agree. Although I'm stuck with Disney+ since they're now the "other than UK" distributor of Doctor Who. How does a ...

We'd have to sit down over a beverage and update my baseline on Baroque versus Classical. Not sure I'd know the difference. Would be a fun exercise. Nirvana for their impact on popular music. Green Day for still being around and still making great music. Foo Fighters doesn't count. Taylor or Adele would depend on the day of the week and the mood I'm in. Are we talking Red and earlier or 1989 and later? Taylor's early stuff is more storyteller, like a lot of Adele, but her voice is better now. Adele is just Adele... Les Miserables. Of course!

I wonder if that would crash their servers like she crashed Ticketmaster...

I'm almost exactly a decade behind you. I can handle all of that, maybe even a little bit of ABBA, in moderation. The overproduced music of the late 80s pretty much led directly to grunge and the rock of the 90s. So we can skip most of the late 80s. We're a quarter of the way into the 21st Century. It's OK to play something more recent. I was truly amazed in November that the house band on Equinox knew at least two Foo Fighters songs! Mind you, they were both off The Colour and the Shape which was released in 1997, 27 years ago. And I think they'd been specifically told not to do anything harder, which is kind of difficult with the Foos. Equinox put on what ended up being a "tribute" to Queen one night in the Grand Foyer which was maybe the worst butchering of Freddy Mercury I've ever seen or heard. Be careful what you ask for! And for the record, my favorite album of all time is Born to Run and it will be 49 years old in August. Not hearing that on a cruise either...

Back to the Future is one of the Kennedy Center shows we're looking at. People seem to like it, but I haven't seen it. If you haven't seen Hamilton, though...

Because they can make more money sailing from Florida? Just like California? 😃

Good question! We have a Kennedy Center gift certificate and need to make a choice or two soon. We haven't made it to Broadway on our last couple of trips (just did two quick nights).

Or they need a US flagged ship and comply with US labor and tax laws... Edited to add: Oops! Forgot immigration and customs!

I don't work in advertising and only took one marketing class for an MBA, but I vividly remember a case study about the Ford Ka in France. Every marketing student or MBA student goes through the analysis and recommends that Ford use the behavioral based segmentation and targeting strategy proposed by the marketing firm they'd paid big bucks to analyze and recommend a marketing approach. Ford went with age and gender because they always had and the car failed miserably... I sometimes feel like Celebrity is in no man's land. Trying to go over the wire but retreating constantly, and doing non-value added silly things. They really do need to attract the next generation or RCG should cut them off (bluntly). But someone, probably upper management way out of touch with their future target market, has decided to, for instance, raise the volume throughout the ship, because when they were a freshman in college in the late '70s or early '80s loud music made a party. The party had nothing to do with the people who were there and enjoying the other people, it was the loud music. (Full disclosure: I'm pretty fond of a good rock band with appropriate loud volume for the venue with an appropriate mix. I'll also get really annoyed when someone refuses to trust the venue's sound guy and ups the guitar to 11 and leaves the vocals at 6; it really doesn't work. Maybe the Ramones or the Sex Pistols, but not any modern band.) I don't know if Celebrity is doing in house marketing or using a large marketing firm. Or if they're being really stupid and just paying for advertising and not doing the upfront work. As you say, they may well have different segments depending on the ship. They almost certainly have different segments based on itinerary. And unless they're just taking the money and running because they're big enough they can, that marketing firm is trying to tell them how to move to the future while only alienating a portion of their current segment. Because they will eventually have to sacrifice some of their current segment to move forward. See BMW and Porsche and the near total lack of a third pedal (manual transmission). They've cut off a lot of traditionalists but have generally increased sales while navigating global fuel consumption requirements. And the cars are generally faster and easier to drive. Sucks to be a traditionalist but that's business. TL;DR: Tough call on whether the marketing person is off or the C-Suite won't listen to them. All things to all people usually results in poor things to most people...

They have to go to Cabo, or some other non-US port. Otherwise it's a domestic cruise. Separate issue from the PVSA but they tend to get lumped together.

Not sure how that’s different from most advertising. The old joke was that no one in a sports car ad could afford the car and by the time you could you didn’t have the flexibility to get in and out of the car. It’s idealized and aspirational, like most advertising.

1969… (Looked it up.) It can stay in FLL. I’d take White Wedding instead!