Feels relevant:

> The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built.

From George Orwell's 1984.

Ain’t that symbolic.

Well that's symbolic as heck. A component in a piece of ritual magic maybe. Somebody should feature it that way in a comic book.

Ikea in south philly will never be the same :<

Other than it changing hands a couple of times and it languishing for decades, both of which are pretty normal, the cleanup of the ship sounds largely successful. Almost like an example of how all cleanup projects should go.

We are running out of metaphors.

Over the past 9 years, my genealogical research has taken me to some interesting places. Among other discoveries, I found that I have 5 grandfathers. One of my "surprise" grandfathers brought his family over from Scotland on the USS Leviathan. Now, the interesting part about gigantic ocean liners is that they often have Wikipedia pages about them, and this was no exception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Vaterland_(1913)

So it turned out that the Leviathan had belonged to Germany under a different name, until it was seized by the USA during WWI. It was very interesting to discover all these facts about a vessel that is an intrinsic part of my quite recent family history, that was completely unknown to me, being adopted, until the miracle of DNA and digging into available public records began to reveal it all.

Why was it using asbestos?

Honestly read this as satirical after my brain inserted "intelligence" after reef. It certainly feels like that.

I've had a lot of chick-fil-a sitting in my car looking at this thing.