Your “The Skies of November Turned Gloomy” Tuesday Evening Open Thread

NFL Nuggets:

• Ben Roethlisberger is among four Steelers added to reserve/COVID-19 list, joining already quarantined teammate Vance McDonald.
  • They all will be isolated for five days. Each will have to pass COVID-19 tests throughout the week if they want to be able to play in Sunday’s game against Cincinnati.
  • When reached for comment, Big Ben downplayed the seriousness of the situation:
    • “WOO! BIG BEN GET TO STAY HOME WITH CORONAS! I THOUGHT ME DONE DRINKING!! HARF HARF!!”

• If you are getting the feeling it’s 1982 again, you aren’t far off as the NFL is looking at the 1982 playoffs as a contingency plan for the 2020 playoffs.
  • This is where the 16-team playoff comes into play, as that’s what they did during the strike-shortened 9 game season.
    • It will be based on whether all 32 teams can play a sixteen game schedule, and if they can’t & then have to rely on winning percentages to determine playoff eligibility.
      • The extra team will compensate for discrepancies in record based on games played.
  • The league believe that its contact tracing & isolation protocols should help it get through the regular season without missing any games, but that they have to be prepared in case such an eventuality needs to be confronted.

Well, it was 45 years ago today that the lake they call Gitche gumee did its thing.

For the few unfamiliar with the event or legend, the Edmund Fitzgerald was a freighter that carried iron ore from Duluth, Minnesota & Superior, Wisconsin to various steel mills along the eastern Great Lakes. The boat was launched in June 1958, and at the time was the largest ship that worked the Great Lakes. It sank on November 10, 1975 with 29 men on board, in Canadian waters due to hurricane-force winds (over 70 mph) that caused the ship to break in two. It had been trying to make it to Whitefish Bay, near Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, to ride out the storm because the port authorities had closed the Soo locks between Lakes Superior & Huron. While the exact specifics of how the boat sank are unknown, the stern of the ship landed upside-down on the lakebed, indicating the ship broke up before sinking.

The scientific thinking is that a freak wave caused the hull to be lifted out of the water, and the weight of the water on the deck caused the ship to bend. The scientists are divided over whether the boat was bent over the wave in a convex fashion, forcing it to split in two, or the hull was suspended in mid-air between two or three rogue waves, causing a concave space under the boat where a lack of buoyancy would have caused the ship to crack under the weight of its cargo. A third theory, which forms the basis of the USCG report, involves the weight of the ship carrying it too low in the water to avoid being overcome by the waves and water ingress, possible grounding near Caribou island which weakened the keel or hull, and the ship taking on too much water to extricate, causing the fatal split that resulted in its sinking.

In any event, when the ship began to crack, the iron ore in the hold – 26,116 long tons of taconite pellets – rushed to the bow, accelerating the damage & driving the bow straight down into the lake. The stern flipped over during sinking because air trapped in the hull kept it more buoyant as it sank. The wreck site itself is the two major pieces of the hull and a confused debris field representing the middle 200 feet of the ship.

The Edmund Fitzgerald‘s sister ship, the Arthur M. Anderson, the last ship to hear from the Edmund Fitzgerald before it sank, keeping radio contact until it went silent, is still active & working the Great Lakes today. Seriously – it worked today.

In doing my research today, I was impressed with how many academic papers cited the Gordon Lightfoot song, and that many of them used the lyrics to break up their papers into chapters. Of course, the real legacy in Canada is subsequent generations of musicians who think being a balladeer involves writing some god-awful lament every time there is a disaster, to promote “healing” or “understanding”, and that “songwriter” is enough qualification for a government grant to produce “art” that society usually doesn’t want to “buy”.

Tonight’s sports:

• NCAA:
  • Kent State at Bowling Green – 7:30PM | ESPN2
  • Miami (Ohio) at Buffalo – 8:00PM | ESPN

Tomorrow is Remembrance Day or Veteran’s Day, depending on your side of the closed border. Here’s a brief video on the Canadian version of the topic,

and despite the current apocalypse, do take a moment of your day tomorrow at 11:00 to remember those who paid the ultimate sacrifice.