Silversea Water Cooler: Welcome!

[spinnaker2]

Jeff, no mockery of your wokery....

 

 

And we do have an attractive dog sitter, our daughter.

No muffins for her though, I did make lots of other soups, chilis, zucchini pancakes, etc...all in freezer. Clearly marked.

 

Now if she just remembers to close the freezer, all will be good.

 

Waiting for the chocery pics, will you send them from a doggery?

[UKCruiseJeff]

Spins,

 

This is an interim chocery piccery of my muffinery from the kitcheny just straight out from the oveny.

 

I only make 3 muffins a day 'cos I like to give her a fresh muffin every day.

 

Today it is double choccy muffinery and this is waiting to cool for the fudgery ...

 

They await their toppy,

 

:)

 

[UKCruiseJeff]

Spin!

 

She just bleedin' scoffed me muffins .....:eek:

 

They don't last for long .....

 

Before and after ......

 

:)

 

Jeff

 

[jpalbny]

Made it to Paris and checked into our hotel. The public transportation is all free this weekend! Easy trip on the RER to the Métro to our hotel for €0. Can't beat that with a stick. Time to freshen up and go exploring!

[spinnaker2]

Jeff, I think posting muffins without toppings may be obscene.

JP, glad you made it safely! Now go forth and enjoy!

[UKCruiseJeff]

JP ... how exciting!!! The smell of the Metro .... and all free. I do miss the smell of the Metro all French sweat and those lovely Gauiloise and Disqu Bleu ... and dust ... which use to pervade ......

 

Looking forward to hearing about what you are both doing during this adventure. :)

 

 

 

Spin, no more muffins with nuffin on!

 

Today has been Massaman lamb and sweet potato curry with coconut pilau ... with Tiger!

 

Edited March 21, 2015 by UKCruiseJeff

[TLCOhio]

Made it to Paris and checked into our hotel. The public transportation is all free this weekend! Easy trip on the RER to the Métro to our hotel for €0. Can't beat that with a stick. Time to freshen up and go exploring!

 

Glad to hear that JP and Chris are in Paris, enjoying that great city, etc. Look forward to more details, pictures, etc.

 

Spring is officially here, but some parts of the east got snow yesterday. Should be a high of 58F here today in Columbus with the NCAA tournament busy in our town and at other key cities across the US. Next weekend it is the "Sweet Sixteen" for this "March Madness" fun.

 

Keep those great food pictures coming from Jeff, etc.

 

THANKS! Enjoy! Terry in Ohio

 

Enjoyed a 14-day, Jan. 20-Feb. 3, 2014, Sydney to Auckland adventure, getting a big sampling for the wonders of "down under” before and after this cruise. Go to:

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1974139

for more info and many pictures of these amazing sights in this great part of the world. Now at 103,131 views for this posting.

[spinnaker2]

Jeff, in the words of one of the Supreme Court Justices, " I know muffin porn when I see it"...

[TLCOhio]

Pretty amazing when you put everything in perspective... I know what it takes just for me to go grocery shopping! :cool:

~Steve

 

From the New York Times this morning, they have this headline: "A Luxury Liner Docks, and the Countdown’s On" with these highlights:

" 'turnaround day' . . . . Just as an airplane makes money only when it is flying, keeping a cruise ship out at sea is essential for its profitability. But instead of turning over a few hundred airline passengers, this ship offloads 6,000 people, takes on new supplies and welcomes 6,000 more travelers — all in under 12 hours. Logistics are essential on turnaround day, at once the first and last day of a cruise, and the busiest time for the ship’s 2,140 crew members. Oasis docks at about 6 a.m. and leaves by 4:30 p.m. In that time, more than 12,000 bags need to get off the ship, food must be stocked, beds made and bathrooms cleaned. Getting everything ready in time is part Nascar pit stop, part loading of Noah’s Ark."

 

Full story at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/business/a-luxury-liner-docks-and-the-countdowns-on.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

 

On another CC Board, a post was made about this NY Times story today, plus I am enclosing this great above point by Steve. Yes, the Silversea ships are much smaller than these large mega sailing craft, but this story does a nice job summarizing the challenges and needs. For just one household, it is lots of work with all that is involved in doing our grocery shopping, etc. For a large ship and crew, it is amazing with ALL that is involved.

 

Having just done a back-to-back Amazon River and Caribbean "adventure", this included a day in Barbados as those from the first, 17-day cruise were departing and then the new folks for our follow-up, nine-day cruise were getting aboard. We could see some of the work in loading the skids of supplies, food, bottled water, paper goods, wine, etc., etc., coming off of the trucks and on to our ship. Fascinating with what it takes to get things to a port in the Caribbean . . . and these items being loaded, check and stored in the lower levels of the ship. So much work during a short period of time.

 

THANKS! Enjoy! Terry in Ohio

 

From our Jan. 25-Feb. 20, 2015, Amazon River-Caribbean combo sailing over 26 days that started in Barbados, here is the link below to that live/blog. Lots of great visuals from this amazing Brazil river and these various Caribbean Islands (Dutch ABC's, St. Barts, Dominica, Grenada, etc.) that we experienced. Check it out at:

http://www.boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=2157696

Now at 19,831 views for these postings.

 

 

Here is how a big skid of materials was moved last month by a fork-lift from the back of the truck to go on-board the Silver Cloud in Barbados.:

 

[TLCOhio]

Jeff, in the words of one of the Supreme Court Justices, " I know muffin porn when I see it"...

 

Not sure that "muffin porn" is that exciting for me personally. BUT, I noticed mixed in with the Massaman lamb and sweet potato curry, some of my favorite cashews. Looking good!!

 

This posting is now over 157,000 views. Pretty amazing total that keeps getting high and HIGHER!!

 

THANKS! Enjoy! Terry in Ohio

 

If Venice is one of your future desires or past favorites, look at this earlier posting for many options and visual samples this city that is so great for "walking around", personally seeing its great history and architecture. This posting is now at 49,903 views.

Venice: Loving It & Why??!!

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1278226

[UKCruiseJeff]

Jeff, in the words of one of the Supreme Court Justices, " I know muffin porn when I see it"...

 

Thought I'd do you a muffin rhyme. :)

 

 

There ain't nuffin' like a muffin,

Nuffin' in the World,

There ain't nuffin' like a muffin,

Specially when the choccy fudge is twirled.

 

 

Jeff

[spinnaker2]

Jeff...

If I recall, once upon a time,

We created a lot of posts entirely in rhyme,

Perhaps we can do that again, line by line....

[UKCruiseJeff]

I had for today something which to others will seem strange

But it had been playing on my mind

That I simply could not rearrange

It involved sautes and kippers and eggs and some love

And once they had been plated

It just fitted like a glove

 

:)

 

[TLCOhio]

Jeff's breakfast looks good. Makes me hungry. Need to eat now.

 

THANKS! Enjoy! Terry in Ohio

 

Enjoyed a 14-day, Jan. 20-Feb. 3, 2014, Sydney to Auckland adventure, getting a big sampling for the wonders of "down under” before and after this cruise. Go to:

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1974139

for more info and many pictures of these amazing sights in this great part of the world. Now at 103,464 views for this posting.

[UKCruiseJeff]

An interesting item by Camilla Cavendish in todays Sunday Times that is relevant to some of the comments in this thread ....

 

Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore may be autocratic but at least the escalators work

 

From my office window I can see the Shard, Europe’s tallest building, sweeping up into the stratosphere. Near its foot an ugly wooden hut has appeared, shielding two escalators that usually take commuters down to the Underground but are broken.

 

The hut is ominous. In 2013 engineers took a year to fix three sets of escalators at Oxford Circus station. Last summer you couldn’t change to the Bakerloo line at Paddington for two months while the escalators were being repaired.

 

Londoners are used to going the long way round. But I can’t help thinking that the Victorians would never have put up with this. How are we going to build George Osborne’s northern powerhouse if we can’t fix a moving staircase?

 

A friend who lives in Singapore tells me there was outrage last year when a metro escalator was out of order for “a whole five days”. Five days? Here it probably takes longer just to do the health and safety assessment.

 

In Singapore it’s not just the escalators that work, it’s everything. Fifty years ago the city state was a swamp with no natural resources. Its first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, transformed it into an economic powerhouse with a higher standard of living and better healthcare than in many western countries and school results that regularly top international rankings.

 

In the process he upended the notion that political freedom is necessary for prosperity. Western democracies are now in a global race against autocratic capitalism.

 

This weekend Lee lies critically ill in hospital. Whatever you think about the autocratic regime that he ran and then passed to his son — a culture memorably described as “Disneyland with the death penalty” by Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait in their book The Fourth Revolution — we could learn a lot from Singapore.

 

Lee was the ultimate pragmatist. “Not invented here”, which sums up a certain type of mulish British insularity, would have meant nothing to him. He was interested in what worked and he would borrow ideas from anywhere in the world.

 

His ambitions were staggering. To achieve them, Lee built one of the most efficient government machines in the world. It is powered by one of the smallest, most highly paid and ruthlessly meritocratic civil services. Forget promotion on seniority. Forget nepotism. The Singaporean state hires the best people, pays by performance and sacks underperformers.

 

It also consumes only 17% of GDP, which puts into perspective last week’s wrangling in Britain about whether the next government will spend a bit less or a bit more than 36% of GDP. In the general media furore hardly has anyone asked whether that colossal amount of money will be spent effectively. Yet that is what matters most.

 

The speed of the Singaporean machine is stunning. Biosciences is now one of the world’s fastest growing industries but 15 years ago Singapore did no biomedical research. Today it accounts for more than 6% of the country’s GDP. Glaxo, Roche and Novartis, the pharma–ceutical companies, sit in a vast hub of private and public laboratories called Biopolis. They are attracted by tax breaks and by the fact that Singapore boasts the world’s shortest approval time for starting the clinical trials that are crucial to the development of medicines.

 

What was Britain, with all its brilliant PhDs and Nobel prizes, doing during that time? Filling in forms. The number of clinical trials held here more than halved between 2002 and 2007. Trials had to be approved by seven different regulators. Instead of supporting scientific ideas, bureaucracy was killing them. Since 2011 the coalition has begun to turn the tide but it has been a colossal struggle waged against the machine by ministers, advisers and the chief medical officer.

 

Of course it is easier to take long-term decisions in an autocracy than in a democracy, where raucous groups lobby to be heard. But Victorian Britain was a democracy too. Joseph Bazalgette and Isambard Kingdom Brunel did not face the inertia of vested interests. Ministers who visit Singapore to learn about its teaching techniques, or go to India to see a world-class hospital, cannot take home what they observe: vested interests say, “Britain is different. We couldn’t do that here.” Sometimes it feels as though we are vanishing down the plughole of our own insularity.

 

Although Lee was clearly an obsessive — he used to turn up the air-conditioning to get officials to work harder — he was also willing to change course. In 1998 Singapore’s prisons were plagued, like those in the West, by overcrowding, high reoffending rates and a recruitment crisis. The government decided to make prisons “schools for life”. Guards became teachers; drug addicts and those with mental health problems were given treatment; prisoners were helped to get jobs after their release. Within 10 years reoffending rates fell from 44% to 27%. Staff morale boomed.

 

Similar proposals were made in Britain around the same time but when David Blunkett, then the home secretary, tried to license an experiment, the Treasury obstructed him. Since then security concerns have trumped every serious suggestion for rehabilitation. As a result our prisons continue to suffer from the same old problems, despite there being a perfectly good model of how it could be different on the other side of the world.

 

Lee was feted by small-state conservatives, notably Henry Kissinger, but Sir Michael Barber, a former adviser to Tony Blair, points out that effective government is vital whether you are a big state interventionist or a small state radical. In his new book How To Run a Government, Barber describes the great thinkers Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati passionately disagreeing on how much of India’s future can be left to the market. The point both men miss, says Barber, is that India’s lack of effective government will undermine either vision.

 

Singapore is at a turning point. Fifty years after independence, the educated middle class is clamouring for more freedom. The government is realising that such a tightly controlled society does not produce graduates who are creative and that creativity cannot be imposed.

 

Creativity could turn out to be the West’s strongest card. The precious freedoms of our messy democracies translate into scientific freedoms, into art and into ideas that give us an economic edge. We won’t capitalise on those, however, if we are hamstrung by bureaucracy.

 

Ten years ago a few American academics were still arguing that the Asian model was too rigid to adapt well to change and that flexible, laissez-faire capitalism was more likely to win the global race. But we in the West increasingly look like the rigid ones. Singapore topped the 2014 Global Infrastructure Investment Index. Britain lagged behind in 10th place.

 

Lee Kuan Yew was happy to poach good ideas and we should do the same, starting with his Rolls-Royce civil service. We won’t win the global race if we can’t fix an escalator.

[TLCOhio]

An interesting item by Camilla Cavendish in todays Sunday Times that is relevant to some of the comments in this thread ....

Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore may be autocratic but at least the escalators work

 

Appreciate, Jeff, this fascinating and very interesting article/column on Singapore and its leadership/government approaches. Certainly can debate "freedom", punishments for not following the "rules", but their economic success and benefits have been real.

 

As I have mentioned previously, we have never, yet, had the chance to visit SE Asia, including Singapore. Look forward to seeing this area, learning more, etc., in the future. Being willing to adapt/borrow smart ideas from others is good. Making things work, like escalators, is very vital to keep things functioning properly, etc.

 

THANKS for sharing! Enjoy! Terry in Ohio

 

For details and visuals, etc., from our July 1-16, 2010, Norway Coast/Fjords/Arctic Circle cruise experience from Copenhagen on the Silver Cloud, check out this posting. This posting is now at 174,886 views.

http://www.boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1227923

[lincslady]

If your face you like stuffin

you can't beat a mufffin

I prefer something savoury

to me it's more flavoury

eggs and kippers, sublime

I will try them sometime.

Breakfast kippers on ships

are really the pits

takes a Brit to cook decently

no good ship ones recently,

the best ones are Craster,

some others, disaster.

 

I'm a rubbishy poet

but thank goodness, |I know it.

 

LOL LL

[Mr Luxury]

LL

Probably the best thing that you have written on CC.

[UKCruiseJeff]

How's the car hire business going Lux?

[UKCruiseJeff]

If your face you like stuffin

you can't beat a mufffin

I prefer something savoury

to me it's more flavoury

eggs and kippers, sublime

I will try them sometime.

Breakfast kippers on ships

are really the pits

takes a Brit to cook decently

no good ship ones recently,

the best ones are Craster,

some others, disaster.

 

I'm a rubbishy poet

but thank goodness, |I know it.

 

LOL LL

 

That ditty was very pretty .....:D

 

There is a web site with muffin poems. I liked this one 'ish.

 

Today is a muffinless morning

Today is a muffinless morning.

I shouldn't have ignored the clock's warning,

As I wouldn't have been nearly late for tea

And find out that without muffins I would be.

 

Next time I'll remember to wake up on time

For tea without muffins is simply a crime!

[TLCOhio]

An interesting item by Camilla Cavendish in todays Sunday Times that is relevant to some of the comments in this thread ....

Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore may be autocratic but at least the escalators work

 

From the New York Times and Wall Street Journal this morning, here is one of the headlines in connecting with the passing today of the long-time Singapore leader: "Lee Kuan Yew, Founding Father and First Premier of Singapore, Dies at 91".

 

Here is one of the NYTimes story highlights: "Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father and first prime minister of Singapore who transformed that tiny island outpost into one of the wealthiest and least corrupt countries in Asia, died on Monday morning." The notation about Singapore being "least corrupt" is an important quality/description that is rare for many parts of the world.

 

Right now, I am listening to the CBS Morning News with a detailed profile and interview with him. Host Charlie Rose interviewed him several times and he was very strong in his praise.

 

This story also noted that he was a "driving force in what he called a First World oasis in a Third World region. The nation, reflected the man: efficient, unsentimental, incorrupt, inventive, forward-looking and pragmatic."

 

As stated earlier, I have never had the opportunity to visit Singapore, but it is on my future "to-do" list.

 

Full NYT and WSJ stories at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/23/world/asia/lee-kuan-yew-founding-father-and-first-premier-of-singapore-dies-at-91.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

http://www.wsj.com/articles/lee-kuan-yew-singapores-founding-father-dies-at-91-1427056223?mod=WSJ_hppMIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

 

THANKS! Enjoy! Terry in Ohio

 

Did a June 7-19, 2011, cruise from Barcelona that had stops in Villefranche, ports near Pisa and Rome, Naples, Kotor, Venice and Dubrovnik. Dozens of nice visuals with key highlights, tips, comments, etc. We are now at 196,257 views for this live/blog re-cap, including much on wonderful Barcelona. Check these postings and added info at:

http://www.boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1426474

[UKCruiseJeff]

Thanks Terry,

 

He was indeed and extraordinary man. He loved Singapore and was what can be best described as a benevolent dictator. When Singapore was expelled from Malaysia he cried because he felt he had let Singapore down. One of the most remarkable tributes to him has been from the World Bank who praised his unstinting efforts to stamp out corruption. Thye cannot say that about many.

 

From a personal viewpoint he was MP for Tanjong Pagar GRC (Tanjong Pagar-Tiong Bahru) and therefore responsible for our favourite area in Singapore.

 

The world has a lot to learn from his example. I don't think his achievements have ever been - or are likely to be equalled anywhere else.

 

The 50 year celebrations this year will be very different.

 

Jeff

[TLCOhio]

Appreciate Jeff's added follow-up comments on Singapore. To reflect spring's arrival in Central Ohio, below are a couple of visuals that I snapped on Saturday.

 

THANKS! Enjoy! Terry in Ohio

 

From our Jan. 25-Feb. 20, 2015, Amazon River-Caribbean combo sailing over 26 days that started in Barbados, here is the link below to that live/blog. Lots of great visuals from this amazing Brazil river and these various Caribbean Islands (Dutch ABC's, St. Barts, Dominica, Grenada, etc.) that we experienced. Check it out at:

http://www.boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=2157696

Now at 20,077 views for these postings.

 

 

From sunny Saturday in central Ohio, here are two of the samples for the early spring flowers coming up and brightening the weekend. Our daffodils/narcissus and tulips will be coming up and UP soon!!:

 

 

 

[mysty]

Beautiful pix! I am so envious! We are still under mountains of snow here. I think this is the place spring forgot. :(

[TLCOhio]

Beautiful pix! I am so envious! We are still under mountains of snow here. I think this is the place spring forgot. :(

 

 

For our northern neighbor in Canada, YES, spring is getting closer. Glad you liked these pictures. I will be sharing more from Ohio as our flowers and other pretty signs of nature come along. Hope others post their fun symbols of warming trends. After the challenges from this past winter, we need ALL of the relief and hope that is possible.

 

THANKS! Enjoy! Terry in Ohio

 

Enjoyed a 14-day, Jan. 20-Feb. 3, 2014, Sydney to Auckland adventure, getting a big sampling for the wonders of "down under” before and after this cruise. Go to:

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1974139

for more info and many pictures of these amazing sights in this great part of the world. Now at 103,788 views for this posting.