SUB-PRIME SUB

CNN management is kicking themselves for not
thinking of the oxygen countdown clock first.

 Now that the OceanGate disaster has finally come to its totally-expected
conclusion, I think it's time to pass along our condolences to the person who suffered the most: Tom Cruise. Because you can bet your personally-autographed Xenu photo that Cruise was praying that the mini-sub would be found with all passengers alive and well, so he could star in the $100,000,000 movie as its hero -- filmed in an identical submersible in the Atlantic Ocean (with Iphones because the contraption was too damn small for a real camera).  

The second person I feel sorry for is James Cameron. Now that the non-stop coverage is over, he will no longer be the go-to expert regarding this Titanic-related tragedy. Or, as dozens of headlines put it yesterday, JAMES CAMERON BREAKS SILENCE ON SUBMARINE DISASTER. Breaks his silence? This guy has been flapping his gums since the thing lost communication with the outside world. He probably talked more in the last week than on the Avatar set and its sequel. 

Audiences will take him more seriously if he's
called "Deep-sea Explorer" instead of "Movie
Director".

Cameron's big reveal: he knew immediately the sub, cleverly named Titan, had imploded. Not to be a braggart, but I knew that, too. Come to think of it, you probably did. What did anybody think would happen with what can only be described as a rich person's high school science project?  

That Titan's designer Stockton Rush cut corners on this thing is like saying subprime mortgages were an easy way of buying a house. A joystick literally torn from a video game. Lights bought at a camping store. Materials, such as carbon fiber, that his own associates warned weren't safe -- which seemed to be the whole idea. As Rush himself put it, similar subs were "obscenely safe". Man, when it comes to travelling underwater, give me that kind of obscenity any day.

Stockton Rush: Jackass in the box.

Stockton Rush -- even his name sounds like an entitled frat boy --boasted about charging passengers $250,000 for going to the bottom of the Atlantic in an overgrown Green Giant Creamed Corn can  -- bolted shut from the outside! -- that one of his own employees found so unsafe that he alerted government regulators. That was in 2018, the same year outside experts predicted the very disaster that happened last week.

Stockton's reaction to all these red flags? Riding the Titan was "safer than crossing the street". What street? In downtown Kyiv during a Russian bombing? This kind of hubris hasn't been seen since Capt. Edward John Smith allegedly said, "Even God couldn't sink this ship." He was speaking about, of course, the Titanic. Damn, this is becoming like those Lincoln/Kennedy assassination coincidences.

Yes, condolences to Tom Cruise. A movie about the Titanic where 1,500 people died horrible deaths is drama. But doing the same about five passengers on a mini-mini-mini-sub? Tacky. And spare a prayer for the other victims here: the news networks, which can no longer follow this pricey mass murder like it was another missing Malaysian airliner. It was fun while it lasted, right? But don't worry -- there's a slow-motion Russian revolution in progress for them to broadcast 24/7! What would we do without disasters?

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