Here's the link:
- Sound effects this week (wind, seagulls, helicopter) were gotten royalty-free from soundbible.com.
- A distant inspiration here was David Foster Wallace's essay about a Caribbean cruise, published in Harpers in 1996, called Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise. It was later reprinted as the title essay of his collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The inspiration from DFW's essay is very distant, but I like including the link just in case somebody might actually go read the thing. It sets a kind of comic equivalency between luxury and unreality.
- I cop to cribbing the slow, florid announcer voice from Lorelei, a hostess on the Danube river cruise my wife and I were enormously privileged to be able to take last year. (Also, yes, the tour of the Castle Schmönigkönigstein was inspired by that cruise.) All of the diabetic comas are invented.
