An Australian billionaire said Monday he'll build a high-tech replica of the Titanic at a Chinese shipyard ... because there aren't any Australian, British, or American shipyards anymore...
and its maiden voyage in late 2016 will be from England to New York, just like its namesake planned.
Whoa! Nobody's ever sailed that route, have they?
Weeks after the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the original Titanic, Clive Palmer announced Monday he has signed a memorandum of understanding with state-owned Chinese company CSC Jinling Shipyard to build the Titanic II. "It will be every bit as luxurious as the original Titanic,
... which'd put it on par with Carnival or Norwegian Cruise Lines...
but ... will have state-of-the-art 21st-century technology and the latest navigation and safety systems," Palmer said in a statement.
"The rubes will eat it up!"
"We'll make a fortune!"
"We've already got a fortune!"
"We'll make another fortune!"
He called the project "a tribute to the spirit of the men and women who worked on the original Titanic."
Those who didn't drown are long since dead of old age, so unless they're looking down from some sort of passenger shipping valhalla they don't really care. If they actually are in Passenger Shipping Valhalla they're probably eating oysters Rockefeller and swilling Chateau Lafitte Mouton Cadet '02 and having too much of a good time to pay attention to some cheap Chinese knockoff unless the knockoff goes down and they find themselves sharing table space with a bunch of people eating with chopsticks...
More than 1,500 people died after the Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its first voyage.
Another 30 were killed when her sister ship, the Britannia, which was in service as a hospital ship, hit a mine off one of the Greek islands in 1916 and sank. But they haven't made a movie about that one, even though they probably should...
It was the world's largest and most luxurious ocean liner at the time.
Her sister ship, the slightly smaller but equally luxurious Olympic, continued placidly transporting people back and forth across the Atlantic without incident, to include service as a troop ship during WWI. She was known, in fact, as the Old Reliable. She was in service until the mid-1930s, at which time she was scrapped...