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I salute those Americans who make America Great.

He was a man ahead of his time.

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"The ocean is desert with its life underground'

That lyric came to me when I watched this:

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Ah, but I'm such a sucker for all things Titanic -- sort of the way Chip loves Egyptology. I even have a google alert set to "Titanic."

The notion of draining the Atlantic to get at a shipwreck is absurd fantasy. But something like that happened once.

Benito Mussolini had an entire lake, Lago di Nemi, drained to reveal an ancient Roman shipwreck:

Emperor Caligula's Pleasure Craft?
[note how small the men standing in the foreground are]

The whole incredible story is here. I've been to Lago di Nemi. At the time, I was unaware of the wrecks. I was attracted to the lake's history and the myths surrounding the lake as related by George Frazer in The Golden Bough.

The lake wasn't really hard to drain. It is a crater lake, inside an extinct cinder cone volcano and all they needed to do was to tunnel an outlet on one side of the cone and drain the water to the surrounding lower elevation. Researchers found two largely intact wooden ships. The remains were carefully removed from the lakebed and reconstructed on higher ground. Unfortunately, everything went up in flames in WW II when an errant American bomb set them afire. More history per Wiki: link

Given what we know of Emperor Caligula's depravities, it's hard to fathom what actually happened onboard this ship:

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