The Big, Stuck Boat Is Glorious

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Amanda Mull
@amandamull
Sources are reporting that big boat still stuck

The Big, Stuck Boat Is Glorious
The Ever Given is very big and very stuck.
theatlantic.com
7:07 AM · Mar 26, 2021

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/03/were-going-to-need-a-smaller-boat/618414/

Yesterday, with only a few minutes left in my weekly Zoom appointment with my therapist, I decided to derail the proceedings to ask her what I believed was an essential question. It had nothing to do with my fear of vulnerability or difficulty asking for help; in fact, it had nothing to do with me at all.

Had she seen the stuck boat?

The boat, of course, is the Ever Given, a massive container ship operated by the Taiwan-based shipping company Evergreen, which probably now wishes its name wasn’t painted on the boat’s sides in such enormous letters. On its way from China to Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, the boat accidentally Tokyo drifted to a stop in Egypt’s Suez Canal on Tuesday, where it has been stuck sideways ever since. Efforts to refloat the Ever Given so far have been futile; the heavy construction equipment and fleet of industrial-strength tugboats assigned to that job have been successful not at dislodging the ship’s bow from the canal’s sandy shore, but at demonstrating this big-ass boat’s stupendous girth in photos. The ship, which is longer than the Empire State Building is tall, looms over literally everything—construction equipment, palm trees, nearby buildings. The Ever Given is Manute Bol to the human world’s Muggsy Bogues.

My therapist had not seen the boat, even though photos of it had already begun to be manufactured into memes about life’s existential problems and the stupid little things we all do to feel some control over them. I asked her to Google it in front of me, because I had become obsessed. Since Tuesday afternoon, in fact, I have thought about little else. The first photos I saw of it were taken by workers on the Maersk Denver, the ship that was immediately behind the Ever Given when a wind storm is suspected to have blown her sideways. (Yes, the boats are girls.) I spent much of yesterday hunting down photos of the boat, both in situ and in happier times. I acquainted myself with websites like VesselFinder and MarineTraffic, as well as with the concept of Suezmax and the phrase bulbous bow, which the Ever Given has and which means that she is not just on top of the sand, but also lodged inside it.

I’m obsessed with the dang boat because people like me and you are not really supposed to be aware of what boats like her are up to. You’re not supposed to think about, or even notice, global freight, but the Ever Given has made cartoonishly noticeable some of the crucial infrastructure of global capital, which is usually invisible in most people’s daily life. She has done so with an absolutely sublime visual gag, improved by every new detail about the problems the ship is causing and every new photo of the impotent human measures being undertaken to fix them. Peruse the surrounding waterways on any of the internet’s maritime trackers, and you’ll find the beginnings of a far more significant problem: More than 150 other absolutely huge shipping vessels, transporting everything from live animals to crude oil, are waiting on either side; the barge ran aground at a point where the Suez has only one lane, which means that traffic is blocked in both directions.

*snip*

[riversedge]

1. umm.. might consider using more backhoes???

[Midnightwalk]

2. This article from Harvard might help

[link:https://www.health.harvard.edu/bladder-and-bowel/natural-ways-to-relieve-constipation|]

[underpants]

5. It says I have to "log in"

If I could log in I wouldn’t be constipated.

[Wounded Bear]

3. Back in my engineering days, we called shit like this a "single point of failure"...

as in, if you have one thing that can bring down the whole fucking system, you had better design it to be failsafe, or at least easily fixable.

[fescuerescue]

16. All true. But building redundant canals....

And this Canal was built in the 1850s.

It was a major miracle to build one. Heck it's been reported that 120,000 people died building that sucker.

[Goonch]

4. ;-{)

[underpants]

6. Amanda Mull sounds like a lot of fun

No seriously

[dameatball]

7. This is a job for a Space Force tractor beam. That's what we pay them for. Well, that and the cool

sky parades.

[Yavin4]

8. They should call Little Toot

[dalton99a]

9. Any day now

[Wingus Dingus]

10. I wonder if this guy feels self-conscious from all the attention--

especially when he has a sandwich or takes a bathroom break. A hundred-plus ships and the rest of the world wait for him to clock back in.

[PortTack]

11. I read yesterday it will take them weeks to refloat the behemoth

[FSogol]

12. PS: The shoes you ordered online are going to be late.

[KY_EnviroGuy]

13. They've also started a meme war on Twitter....

Found at: https://twitter.com/ben_hr

KY.............

[crud]

14. Reading this brought to my mind

the dill-dozer from idiocracy.

[DontBelieveEastisEas]

15. Ping Pong Balls could get her loose

I'm pretty sure that the best way to get her going again is by using Ping Pong Balls to get her to float higher.

Either tunnel straps beneath the hull or use the "bulbous" hull to devise a system for containing the Ping Pong Balls.


This really works as was demonstrated by the Mystical MythBusters.