On the island of Muroran are huge industrial enterprises, like Nippon oil and many petroleum Enterprises. Our ship was berthed alongside a lovely oil refinery, billowing caustic smoke into the cruise-ship. Not the fault of the beautiful oil refinery; the fault of the wind. Since the ship– at 18 storeys tall — does not have windows which open to Nature outside, the intake fans suck volumes of sulfuric smoke into the ship’s air conditioning bowels.

Speaking of bowels, new evidence has emerged related to the previous blog entry regarding a passenger having shat the spa. Turns out, a passenger in a bathrobe (post-massage, no doubt) was leaping about wildly in front of the hair salon — a part of the spa. The grand entranceway into the Lotus spa was sullied by passenger dung when the robed man could no longer hold his mud, perhaps to to the undulating fingertips of the Lotus masseur. This being last night, the story is still quickly metastasizing across the ship. A Little Friskies-sized bolus of poop sat brownly on a sea of white tiles. The unimaginable could not hide itself, causing shrieks of horror from the well manicured Lotus staff. This team of South African and Australian ladies, with their blond hair pulled back and fingernails painted to a high gloss, withdrew from the presence of this steaming Moloch. Their cure was to dial maintenance and force the Filipinos to defeculate the usually-impeccable Lotus spa sanctuary. At the time of this writing, the mess has been mopped and sanity restored to the Lotus Spa. I am reliably certain but no fingernails were broken or manicures sullied during the removal. Further, the spa’s planned Champagne Botox Party will go on as scheduled!

It is important to note that these cruise ships are populated with vast numbers of Filipinos, paid approximately $200 per month for unpleasantly long hours in servile positions. One of the gifts of offshore hiring is the ability to avoid all US labor laws — repellent as they are, what with the notion that working people are actually human and deserve certain protections and treatment. But we all know that that leads to the road of socialism where people start to imagine that they actually have rights. As we know from the recent Supreme Court decision of Citizens United, only corporations have the kind of rights as workers fancied themselves entitled to. In fact, the bigger the Corporation, the more the rights. To this end, why should a tiny unincorporated Filipino feel so entitled when his team of attorneys never bothered to build him personal corporate status. The Wall Street bankers are not sipping champagne in balconies overlooking protesters for nothing. Tomorrow Vladivostok, Russia!