Monday, February 8, 2016

At Sea Heading to Cape Town - Feb 8th

Our favorite Russian piano player Alexei is leaving the ship in Cape Town - we will miss him!


Local time is 7 hours ahead of the US, so when the ship broadcast the Super Bowl from the Insignia Lounge, it started about 1:45 AM. Joani and I got up at 3:30 AM and watched the second half live. Saw the ESPN International broadcast, so no US commercials.



Alexei's music remnds me of the "Natural Xylophone" we saw in the Namibian desert outside Walvis Bay:

The rock formations of the moonscape formed 300 million years ago under the earth’s crust from magma that was primarily granite. As it cooled, long narrrow cracks developed that were filled by pressureized molten material with lower melting points, especially black dolomite that had a high iron content. Thrust to the surface by tectonic plate movement, this has resulted long black horizontal lines on the moonscape. From a plane looks it like alien art work. Quartz became embedded in the granite through the same process.



The dolomite lines have often turned into black ridgebacks, as the dolomite-granite “sandwich” was stronger and resisted erosion better (kind of like reinforced concrete).




In places the granite has weathered away and the dolomite has cracked and broken into different sized large rocks on the ridge line. With the high iron content, the different sized rocks can be “played” like a giant xylophone by striking the rocks with one held in the hand, as the guy below did for us:

Here's the promised engineer joke from our bridge instructor, after such a dry post:

Three guys were awaiting execution by guillotine in a French prison. The first one said, I am brave, I will lie on my back, and I will watch the blade descend. He was strapped in, and for some reason the blade miraculously stopped inches from his neck. The warden said,, "You were obviously fated not to die, so by our custom, you are pardoned and free." The second guy elected to also lie on his back, and the same thing happened. The third guy was an engineer and he also elected to lie on his back, but just as the guards were about to release the blade, he said, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, I think I see what the problem is!"

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