Another fun Costa Concordia fact: "Local schools and the church were opened, and the first survivors were hustled inside and given blankets. Every free space began to fill" (Vanity Fair, May 2012).
Even though they've reached land, and got their blankets, and Dawn's life has been changed, their fate still seems inextricably linked to the whims of Bryan Burrough at Vanity Fair and his editors.
When I was in the sixth grade, I had to write a series of Reports on various civilizations in the ancient world: Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages. My research was very thorough: I would look up the subject in my parents' World Book Encyclopedia set, and copy the article, but change the words as best I could to make it sound original. This Costa Concordia story brought back a lot of warm childhood memories for me.
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I used to do the same thing with the World Book encyclopedia and reports. But then, I was such a nerd that I also would grab a volume and read my way through it for fun, too.
But back to Dawn... I guess all that tragedy was worth it in the end since it changed her life.
I have the same childhood memories, Wanders, sitting at the kitchen table and rearranging the text from our family's Encyclopedia Brittanica. I only wish I had allowed enough time to include as many illustrations.
One that I will never forget was a report on the California Badger, with diorama. Partly because I didn't start working on the assignment until the day before it was due, the badger was represented by a prune with a stripe of white glue down the middle, in a shoebox filled with dirt. Of course the glue dried clear, erasing the badger's only recognizable characteristic.
Even Uncle Joe is copying the Costa Concordia with its single funnel and the v shaped radar equipment and, of course, it's final resting place in the water.
I remember having to write a report on a president. JFK was and is my dad's favorite, so I picked him. I also used World Book! And we had to draw a picture of our president (WTF?!?) so I just traced the one in World Book and colored it in with colored pencils. Kids these days just don't know what they are missing!
Again, the Cleveland Plain Dealer eschewed the first two panels and cut to the chase.
Anyway...now we get to The Lesson, which obviously escaped All Of Us, and it is NO MAN IS AN ISLAND! PEOPLE WHO NEED PEOPLE ARE THE LUCKIEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!
And here we thought it was going to be something about...oh, never mind. The Important Thing is that Dawn's life IS CHANGED! And all it took was death and destruction and some really Poor Taste. (And Plagiarism.) Whew.
Mine was The Book of Knowledge. No one else at St. Joseph's had this set of encyclopedias, so my reports seemed more original. By the time I got to grad school, I had learned the fine art of BS...and I do not mean Bachelor of Science.
But, I lose sight of the important message of today. Dawn's life has been changed, for the better, we hope. And in the coming weeks, we will probably hear all about how and why, at great length.
This is "Summary Sunday" (as I like to call it), and when I got the the last panel, I was puzzled. This is the first I have noticed that this trip has changed Dawn's life in any way. Even Dawn admits that the most unbelievable part of this entire adventure is her climatic epiphany regarding the playing of "My Heart Will Go On" in the dining room during dinner.
Tomorrow being Monday, I doubt we will find out more details about Dawn's big life-changing revelation, as the storyline must move on...
am loving the stories about school reports and our beloved encyclopedias! I did the same thing, of course. (We had the old red-colored set of World Books) I also fondly remember making a map out of flour and salt and food color to illustrate to various topographical features of my buckeye state, Ohio. Those were the days.
I doubt Dawn has ever made a flour paste map or even HEARD of encyclopedias. But hey, I've never been on a sinking ship that changed my life
Hmm. . . Encyclopedias and BS, it all comes back to Mary Worth somehow. I noticed today that Wilbur's eyes were brown. In Friday's strip, they were blue. Either JG is blatantly sloppy about continuity (ie: Wilbur's changing pants during the shipwreck) or he is trying to illustrate that old saw, "You're so full of %$??!!, your eyes are brown." The latter would seem to be true, given Wilbur's need to deliver a Message to Dawn on what Thorpnotized so accurately described as "Summary Sunday".
By the time I was done, you'd swear that I had written the World Book section on musical insturments!
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