The Italian Cruise Ship Disaster: The One Fact No One Else Is Giving You.
Posted: January 17, 2012 Filed under: Foolishness | Tags: coast guard transcript link, Costa Concordia, Costa Cruises, Cruise ship, current events, Francesco Schettino, italian coast guard transcript, news, postaweek2012, roller skate, what does Schettion mean 37 Comments
Costa Concordia, upright (Image via Wikipedia)
I am an inquisitive person. I see things. I think about them. I ask questions. Things like the Costa Concordia disaster in Italy raise questions in my mind, and I am certain they do in yours.
- How does a modern ship like that get off course?
- Why would you wait to tell the passengers things aren’t going well?
- I always heard the captain goes down with his ship. Why was Captain Francesco Schettino on one of the first lifeboats?
- Do the rocks the ship hit feel a little guilty, even though this wasn’t their fault?
There are any number of websites you can visit for answers to those and other questions. There are even transcripts of the radio conversation between Captain Schettino (safe in his lifeboat) and the Italian Coast Guard as the captain sailed away from his sinking ship and its frightened passengers.
But you don’t come here for things you can get elsewhere, do you? You want something CNN and all the other news outlets will not tell you. I am not going to let you down.
Here is the one fact that no one else covering this story is going to tell you:
Ahoy, Captain (Image via Wikipedia)
In Italian, Schettino means roller skate.
I don’t know what you can do with that, but you’re welcome.
Related articles
- Captain heard resisting orders to re-board cruise ship (ctv.ca)
- Audio: Cruise captain pleaded not to reboard ship (newsok.com)
Blurt 
Why isn’t anyone talking about this? Frickin’ skaters….
They call themselves journalists. Appalling.
You always bust the case wide open! Of course this had something to do with roller skates!
Watch the “reporters” get on the bandwagon.
Of course roller skates. Appropriate for a quick getaway…
Buoyant roller skates.
Well I am glad I stopped by, you learn something new everyday!
Well I am glad you did too. I’m just fluent in so many languages.
I love this enlightening tidbit. I would say that captain was skating on—well you know–thin ice?
This time, he cut a hole in the ice.
Are you KIDDING me? This changes EVERYTHING. I don’t even know exactly how I feel right now, other than…I feel like boogying down 70’s style. Like doing my famous backward cross-over moves. Like kneeling down with one leg straight in front of me, throwing my arms out to the sides and doing jazz hands.
That’s how I feel.
Were you in that Xanadu movie?
Ah, Xanadu. A movie in a class of its own. And Gene Kelly on Skates! What was there not to like?…
Man, that was a broken hip waiting to happen, wasn’t it?
Love Xanadu, and I don’t even care what that fact says about me.
Good date movie, as I recall.
So he was just skating away, leaving ship and passengers in danger? They just don’t make captains the way they used to, do they? Thanks for the expose’!
Skated, and according to something I just saw on TV, got on his cell phone once he was on shore and called his mom.
“Well, I got a brand new pair of Schettinos, and you have a brand new key …”
This and Xanadu? You were the skate queen, weren’t you?
No. I had to live vicariously through Xanadu and songs. The wall was my friend (or enemy). Roll. Thud. Roll. Thud. (It’s a gift.)
I’m once agian overwhelmed with emotion at the things I learn by reading your posts.
It’s the important details that bring these situations home to us. Something like that.
Fasten a heavy pair of schettinos on his feet and drop him back in the ocean.
There’s a reason Jacques Cousteau didn’t wear skates!
OMG…it all makes perfect sense now.
I know, sort of pulls it together, doesn’t it?
I’m curious about what made you look up the meaning of schettino; it never occurred to me to find out the definition. Solutions always seem to hide in plain sight.
This may exonerate the captain. If he were wearing his roller skates (probably a dress code for this ship), it stands to reason that he may have been unable to control the wheel because his feet kept sliding out from under him. It’s all so clear, now.
Or does this make his “I fell into the lifeboat’ defense credible?
You promise and then you deliver. What more could you ask for from a blog, except, perhaps, pizza. Tada! I just brought that full circle. In yo face.
Seriously, though, as I pondered this also, I realized that 100 years of nautical knowledge since the Titanic can still be overridden by a single human being. That’s a sobering thought.
Oh man, Titanic. Does this mean we can expect a movie? Oh it was so romantic….people died!!
This does indeed add some much needed perspective: if the Coast Guard had simply lit up the ALL SKATE sign, he’d have been free to leave the lifeboat and rejoin the ship.
Yeah, some organ music and a disco ball. He’d have been right back up the ship.
I don’t think he’s going to skate from the charges.
You. You are the punster.
[…] one was sicker than the ship’s captain (played by Francesco Schettino in the role he was born to play). He was so sick that he left the bridge. The ship hit a reef while […]
Reblogged this on Blurt and commented:
Today, cruise ship captain Francesco Schettino was sentenced to sixteen years in prison for his role in the Costa Concordia disaster.
Never one to miss a potential writing prompt, I dashed this off around the time of the ship’s sinking. Sort of sinking. More of a tipping over, really.