Good ship and true

Today's post happens to land right on Pilot's World's 22nd birthday and the 51st anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. 

To celebrate, I've given the place a bit of a facelift, thanks to my friend Jenna, a fellow Edmund Fitzgerald mourner. 

Let's be honest, the place needed a tidy. When I relaunched the blog in 2024 (the "for real this time" time), my old pinup model design had fallen apart and wasn't working. The Blogger templates had updated, and a bunch of my old image hosting wasn't working right anymore. So I tossed up a new template and a picture off my phone. It was rough.

A year or so ago, I played around on Inkscape for an afternoon and came up with that abomination of a logo that had been there. You know it - 

Gosh, I'm sorry about that thing. It was never meant to be permanent, and then I never changed it. 

A couple of weeks ago we were discussing buying a bereaved co-worker a crown and I told my friend Jenna that I'd actually put some thought into a crown recently. Poor Jenna, she had no idea what was coming. A professional graphic designer - and a goddamn good one at that - the sheer sight of my blog design actually left a pea-sized hole in her cerebral cortex. 

To her credit, once she stopped vomiting, she quickly jumped into action and designed me a fresh new look using my colours and general vibe to put together roughly what you see today. I had to squeeze her design and selection work into the available Blogger templates, and that menu isn't very big. Actually took three tries before I had something worth keeping. 

But overall - very happy. It's clean and colourful, if a bit bright. I would have preferred this as a "dark mode," but none of the templates were letting me have anything that looks good. Ah well. 

The Gales of November

This year, online meme culture has really leaned into observing the anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It's become something of a "Titanic for the men" type thing. But there's also a bit of carving space away from the encroaching Christmas season that is maybe more in line with my interest this year. Some of my favourites include insisting that Maria Carey cannot be unthawed until after the bell has rung 29 times. I think we're all sick of too much Christmas, and this is people standing ground. 

Honestly, it was only yesterday that I realized the birthday of this blog is on the anniversary of the sinking of that good ship and crew. Which is odd. I've gone out of my way to post at least one meme a day to my Instagram story about the Fitz this month. And I've also known that today's post would land right on the blog's anniversary. You think I'd connect the dots. But no. 

And no conversation about the Pride of the American Side is complete without mentioning the absolute banger that Gordon Lightfoot wrote about this disaster. It cuts doubly deep the last couple of years since we lost ol' Gord. I'm actually trying to think of a Lightfoot song I'd like to learn, and this one is pretty high up on my list. 

So, what do you think of the new paint job? What are you doing to observe the disaster of the Mighty Fitz today?