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(“WHY THE HEEL AM I SO OBSESSED WITH THIS F****G SHIP” reads one comment.) The volume of books and articles available is staggering today one can even read individual accounts of what happened in each of the Titanic’s 20 different lifeboats. But of course, there are plenty who share the fascination-a 2.5 hour YouTube video showing an animation of the Titanic sinking in real time has over 70,000,000 views. I look back on my Titanic period and think of it as a little weird, like a child getting into the Hiroshima bombing or the Tenerife airport disaster. Its gift shop offers Titanic hip flasks, Titanic socks, Titanic cufflinks, authentic Titanic coal in a commemorative case, replicas of the first class salad plates, Titanic Christmas tree ornaments, Titanic paperweight with miniature iceberg, replicas of historical newspapers from the day, a children’s book called Travis The Time Traveler and the Terrifying Titanic, Titanic word search and coloring books, and a plush teddy bear wearing Captain Smith’s uniform.)
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(Today, the museum offers a 3-hour “ First Class Dinner Gala” where you can reenact the experience of having a four-course meal as it would have been eaten in 1912, alongside actors playing Titanic captain Edward Smith and “Unsinkable” Molly Brown. I also convinced my parents to take me to Titanic: The Experience, a museum in Orlando that recreated bits of the ship and featured rescued artifacts ranging from a wooden deck chair to the jewelry and combs of first-class passengers.
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I don’t remember how I became obsessed with the disaster, but I remember spending long hours reading about it, thinking about it, and playing a computer game called Titanic: Adventure Out of Time in which you explored a realistic simulation of the ship, meeting various eccentric passengers and crew, and trying to solve a mystery before everybody drowned. As a little boy growing up in Florida, I went through a “Titanic” phase.