It is hard not to observe that the average American these days enjoys a good meal. Food is everywhere, cookbooks are bestsellers (despite the demise of cooking), and there are even two full cable networks devoted to cooking shows. Cruises, as the phenomenal Dave Barry has pointed out, exacerbate the problem, since there’s an actual rule that you cannot be on a cruise ship and not eating. Still, when I get stuck standing in line for a sandwich behind a man who is in his left hand holding the crust of a pizza he just finished consuming before lumbering up to the deli window to order something with extra cheese and extra mayo. And then, before leaving the window, to see the man just leave the pizza crust on the counter instead of turning around and putting it in the waste basket five feet behind him. Well, I start to feel a little snappish toward other human beings.
It’s true.
This particular cruise had all of the rooms named for Impressionist painters. I am damned if I know why. All of the Impressionists were male and white, of course; the only room named after a woman was the Cassatt Lounge and no one went in there. That was weird. The restaurant on the Lido deck (the buffet) was named The Cezanne. It had this painting hung several times on its walls:
That was weird because it was hung at irregular intervals, as though the decorator of the ship had assumed that either no one would notice that there were several iterations of the painting or perhaps was unable to get more than three different Cezanne paintings to cover the entirety of the large room, thus necessitating the repetition. Bryan and I, working on our various projects, sat at a table for an hour or so and contemplated the judgmental features of this particular lady.
This comic is filed under: NC1763.V3 L86 2012b, for Drawing. Design. Illustration–Caricature. Pictorial humor and satire–Special subjects, A-Z–Vacations. For more comics from this trip, check out: Vacation, Day 1.
To finish things up, here is another photo. This one was taken in Mexico, but I guess it could have been about anywhere. It reminds me of an important principle in my photography, which is that photographs tend to turn out better if I get as close as possible to the subject. Also, they turn out better if I use autofocus, since my poor eyesight means that I sometimes manually focus the lens into fuzziness. Oops.
