Down to the Sea in Schticks

It's an undersea month coming up: Shark Week on Discovery Channel next week, Sharknado 3! on Syfy later in the month. So that'll be the theme for these random thoughts.

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First, dive with me in my personal underwater craft, the SS Sub-conscious:

The weird dreams have continued to be intense the past few days- and typically I have no idea why they are so vivid or why the particular subjects are coming up as they do.  This morning when the alarm went off, I was on a bus with thanatos_kalos, heading to Pearson Airport in Toronto so we (she? I?) could make a flight to Heathrow- and we barely missed the flight due to the extended TSA interrogation at the Niagara Falls border.  Now: I did, indeed, catch up with Mel at YYZ in January when she had a long stop there coming back from London (but Gatwick, I think)- but what the trigger was for an imaginary return journey is beyond me. Even odder, she posted on LJ Tuesday for the first time in awhile, but I didn't see it until after said dream.

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Thinking of Mel also reminded me of seaQuest, which in turn got me realising something way too late (or possibly a little too soon):

We're now less than two years away from the opening events of that series.

Unlike our online webseries based on the show, seaQuest itself still has a Wikipedia page.  You could look it up; it describes a Federation-style international bunch of good guys known as United Earth Oceans, which

was created following a major showdown of nations and confederations at the Livingston Trench in the North Atlantic Ocean that occurred circa 2017, and it remains a recurring element for the duration of the series. The seaQuest was designed by Nathan Bridger and built by NORPAC (a military organization mentioned in the pilot) and given as a loan to the UEO after its creation. The storyline begins in the year 2018, after mankind has exhausted almost all natural resources, except for the ones on the ocean floor. Many new colonies have been established there and it's the job of the seaQuest and its crew to protect them from hostile nonaligned nations and to aid in mediating disputes as well as engage in undersea research, much of which was still in the preliminary stages when the show began production in 1993.

The good news is, our planet is not quite that far along in terms of surface destruction as it was predicted to be by the mid-90s writers of the actual series.  The bad news includes the amazingly stupid amount of denial being hurled at the current, still-not-good, state of affairs, and the pittance of  attention to researching the undersea world's potential to solve our abovesea problems....

Even when there was a real-life television show involved.

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The past week also brought this piece, about the sad end of Cousteau's Calypso:

In its day, the Calypso was more than an oceanographic research vessel. It was the constant companion of the famed French explorer Jacques Cousteau, as the ship and its captain logged over a million nautical miles together from the Red Sea and the Amazon to Antarctica and the Indian Ocean.

Now, all that can be seen of it is a skeletal frame, extending outside a warehouse in this small port town on the coast of Brittany in western France.

It is difficult to recognize it as the same boat that starred in award-winning films and televised adventures beginning in the mid-1950s and extending into the 1980s. Over those years, the Calypso and Mr. Cousteau turned into icons of a vibrant ecology movement, raising awareness of the wonders and fragility of the world’s oceans. Their travels brought the duo fame and made them synonymous with the romance of marine exploration, as they pursued sharks, sea sponges and shipwrecks across the globe.

Today, the Calypso rots in the warehouse where it was brought to be repaired in 2007. Stripped of the metal and wood that once encased it, weeds curling among the wooden beams of its frame, the ship is now a symbol of how Mr. Cousteau has faded in the collective memory and how despite France’s sailing tradition, neither the government nor his heirs have found a solution for its restoration.

You'll likely not be surprised to hear that (a) lawyers are involved and (b) Millennials don't care.  The most likely ends to the boat are recycling it into tiny bits or reefing it whole to become a home for a new generation of fish.  Why it isn't in the French equivalent of the Smithsonian (if there even is such a thing), I don't know; but I do know this:

If somebody doesn't get that goddam John Denver song out of my head, it will be torpedoed.