All O'er Board!

If Memory Swerves™, 'twas on this day in history — April 14, 1912 — a mere four days after the U.S.S. Titanic departed on her maiden voyage from New York City (“The Big Apple”) to Southampton, England (“The Boiled Potato”), that a besotted passenger spilling his guts o'er the rail spotted the tip of the iceberg — as it 'twere — and attempted, mid hurl, to alert the Pinochle card-playing crew, who commenced to point and laugh and, alas, at 26:20, or twenty minutes after 14 o’clock (Ocean Standard Time), the ship commenced to plummet, culminating in the deaths of a near “boatload” — nautical for fifteen hundred — including two knuckleheads out on the bow and a small string band playing on deck for dramatic effect. Overlooked in the telling — and bloody retelling — of this infamous maritime disaster is the fact that seven hundred seafarers — primarily women and children, if you can imagine the racket on those lifeboats — found their way to safety, including “Stowaway” child star Shirley Temple, who went on to become a U.S. Senator or something. A fictionalized account of the event was brought to the screen in the Irwin Allen film-edy “The Poseidon Adventure,” starring Carol Lynley, a comely blond who stole our hearts in a tame-by-today’s-standards Playboy "nude-torial," Shelly Winters, a shrill, scene chewer-upper who drowneded in dramatic fashion to thunderous audience applause, Stella Stevens, from TV’s “Love, American Style,” happy/sad clown Red Skelton or possibly Buttons, barking French actor Gene Hackman and Navy stalwart Ernest "Marty" Borgnino in the role of Lt. Commander Quinton McHale. Not to be outdone, film director James “Cameron” Swayze recently resurrected the fallen vessel, or a 3-D replica of it, along with some bloody amulet off the ocean floor, for “Titanic II: Beyond the Poseidon Adventure,” a 2012 release starring large-headed actress-dater Leonardo DiCaprio and pint-sized, oft-married British annoyance Mary “Kate” Winslet. The sinking of the Titanic was also immortalized in the song “The Wretched Sir Edmund Fitzgerald,” sung from the point of view of the shite-face passenger by Canadian Tire® singer salesman Gordon Lightfoot or possibly Terry Jacks.