OutBreak

I have just returned from a Cruise on the Adventure of the Seas.  Our itinerary was the western Caribbean. There is nothing that will get you into the Christmas spirit more than a group of local islanders in Calypso shirts and Santa hats playing "Jingle Bells" on steel drums in Aruba... NOT. They did not sing the words but if they did it would have sounded like this, "Jangle Balls,  Jangle Balls, Jangle all ta way, Mawn." 

Photograph at your own risk!

However, since there was no traditional Christmas to be garnered, I did manage to use my time to solve a problem that the Cruise industry has been struggling with for some time now.  I have found the source of all the contagious disease at sea.  It could only have been discovered by a guest entertainer who had read the book he brought, and run out of budget to pay for the expensive wifi fee.  With much time to consider and ponder the events I came to a scientific conclusion. The source of the health problems at sea. I took a picture of it, or should I say "him". If he was real he would be known as Typhoid Barry. Here he is.

I am sure that the ship has a name for him, to me he is just the "guy giving the finger". He is a sculpture that resides in the middle of the Promenade of the ship.  In my search to stave off boredom I would sit at the Dog and Duck pub just across the "mall" and watch as people by the hundreds would stop and pose a picture with him.  All were trying to be clever... by that I mean an attempt to have the picture go FaceBook viral.

Everyone thought they were being original by composing a picture that involved his extended right hand index finger.  I saw it go up the nose of several guests, in the mouth of others, handled, fondled but mostly abused in some suggestive way.  All this with the complete ignorance of where that finger had been only minutes before in some other person's picture.  

At every entrance to the ship and at the door way of every lounge and restaurant is a Purell dispenser and a member of the crew standing guard to make sure guest sanitize their hands.  Yet the infested sculpture stands unattended in the middle of the busiest part of the ship, steps away from two bars and the Promenade Cafe.

 I shutter to think what a swab from the finger of this work of art would reveal in a lab culture.  I am guessing the microbic life species they are searching for on other planets.  For sure it contains common germs among the exotic. Yet hundreds of guests approached the statue with smiles on their faces eager to post a "clever" pose on line that no one had ever thought to do before.  He could be the most photographed object in the Caribbean Sea. As for me after an hour watching the throngs that touched the artwork... I would not go near it. 

So... to all of you who are saying, "Oh look Doris, there is the statue in the mall of the Adventure of the Seas that we have pictures of." If this statue is at all familiar to you, my advice is to get checked immediately and do it before they can dismantle the new HealthCare system.

As you were,

Jay