Perhaps the Royal Caribbean ship “Anthem of the Seas” should be called “Anathema the Seas”**. The ship is turning around for the 2nd time in almost as many weeks. Do you remember the Super Bowl Sunday storm that tossed the 6,000 capacity cruise ship up, down, and all around off the coast of North Carolina? Yeah. That's the one. A skittish crew and new company policies since that first cursed tour has them turning tail at the thought of a repeat trip. LOCAL CONNECTION 2nd Ward Townie Bruce Woodruff and his wife Deborah were aboard the Anthem of the Seas on the first ill-fated trip, where passengers reported lists up to 45-degree angles in the choppy waves. “It wasn’t that bad,” Bruce said. Here's an ABC report with passenger footage: Bruce and Deborah were cruising with friends who are experienced boaters and cruisers. Together, they used phone apps to measure the worst toss at about a 21-degree angle, with most of the leans averaging between 6 and 8 degrees. “I’m not gonna lie,” Bruce said. “It was bad. But it wasn’t nearly as bad as was reported.” The Captain asked everyone to remain in their cabins while they navigated the rough. To pass the time, Bruce and Deborah watched a bit of the Super Bowl in their friends’ suite. The ship’s constant leaning eventually pushed every loose item onto the floor (except, Bruce noted, a magically anchored bottle of wine). When the couple eventually headed back to their own cabin, they employed a walking strategy that proved successful. “You can feel when the ship is about to list,” Bruce told Havertownies. “You just walk to the opposite wall.” Watching the rest of the Super Bowl in their room also required some creative countermeasures. Bruce and Deborah fortified themselves in their bed alcove, forming a t-shape with their bodies and bracing their arms and legs against the floor and walls. “Not the most romantic position,” he admitted. But, they were able to watch the game (we … [Read more...]
Restaurant happenings we don’t really care about
When longtime beloved dive diner Hanne's at Darby and Eagle closed, it was replaced with Havertown Grille. Both charming in their own ways, we were happy to see another diner take that space when it was left empty. It's still a regular on our breakfast rotation. We haven't yet tried the old-Irish-Shop now McKenna's but we hear good things. Kettle is always a fave, of course. That Kettle Omelet or the Veggie Scramble. Yum. Today the Main Line Times has some news about Marc Vetri selling his restaurants (except Vetri) to... Urban Outfitters? (Anyone else think that's weird?), about SNAP pizza (which is awesome for Celiac's as well as you omnivores) getting more space even FARTHER away from H-Town, and one other food-business happening that doesn't matter. We've already forgotten about it. We like dining out, of course, but the restaurant scene in H-Town has upped it's game so much in the last few years, our jeans don't fit. Edgewood is excellent and would impress anyone (we don't care who you are). Slice It Up pizza regularly burns the "gluten-free" fries but everything else is great (try the wings!). Brick N Brew... Kaffir Thai. We hear the Thai takeout place near the "ghetto" Rita's on WCP is killer, too. The best place to see our own little restaurant wars is the Havertown Community Facebook group. Lots o' opinions there, as you can imagine. And apparently there's this one Townie old guy who is Yelp Famous. Has a huge following and everything. We contacted him for an interview but he snubbed us. We aren't Yelp famous, I guess. We aren't even HavertownieHQ famous. Whatevs. Yelp's a cesspool anyway. So there. Anyway, here are links. We're kind of over big, blue, underlined links interrupting our reading flow. Our brain voice hums along, reading normally, then IT HAS TO SHOUT because: hypertext. The really annoying practice was probably invented by Yelp. Main Line Times, droning on about some food stuff Havertown Community Facebook Group – Use at … [Read more...]
Local cheater-mcgeeter numbers
The respawned Patch paper has a data scientist or two looking through the hookup website Ashley Madison hacked info for IP addresses that are assigned to Delaware County and its surroundings. Havertown: 1686 registered users Haverford: 343 registered users Ardmore: not listed So let's round it off and say 2 grand of our 40,000-sh residents had logged on to the site at least once. That's 5% fodder for juicy Townie gossip. Or is it? Deeper analyses of the Ashley Madison user data are taking over the web. Gizmodo pointed out that almost all the real (actual human) accounts on the site belong to those who identified themselves as men. 5 million accounts belonging to women are now thought of being fake. So the site was a big ol' sausage fest spewing out (allegedly fraudulent) claims that their users had affairs within a few months of signing up and that there were plenty of women on the site. The truth: Most of the real accounts had no activity on them. So don't go looking for your neighbor's name. Even if his name is on there, it doesn't mean much. You'd have to dig down and see if he was active on the site and then figure out if he conversed with anyone. It's not worth all the trouble, seeing that the data is unreliable. Still need to sate that insatiable curiosity? Go over to The Truth About Deception and sort through some of articles with infidelity statistics, or read this (a bit sexist & skewed toward women) Woman's Day article about men and cheating. Also, sociologists will tell you that we find our romantic partners (including illicit lovers) from the pool of people we know (or the people they know). Almost all of our connections are contained within the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend circle (i.e. 3 degrees away from us). So the myth of a "cheater's website" is a convenient one to distract us from an uglier truth: if your spouse is cheating, they are cheating with someone you know. It's kind of a similar myth of the online sexual … [Read more...]