Titanic Anniversary

I live in Northern Ireland, where the Titanic was built, so there has been much goings on in Belfast for the 100th year anniversary. I think it's a particularly (Northern) Irish trait to celebrate the anniversary of a monumental loss of life, I don't mean that in a bad way, it's just that as sweeping generalisations go the locals tend to have a particularly black sense of humour and what better example than renaming the dockyard area "Titanic Quarter" after a ship that sank on it's maiden voyage.

My own sense of morality has been in question, even I find it a little perverse to see humour in dramatic and mass carnage. In World of Warcraft there is a quest named "Twilight Skies" the basic gist is you're on a goblin crewed zeppelin that is air support for the attack on Twilight Highlands. When the zep is crashing you have a goblin NPC shouting out "Oh the goblinity!" I always felt slightly uncomfortable, jokes about the Titanic disaster are the same for me, I feel a little perverse.

When I was a child, I can think of two separate happenings when similar humour evoked that "Oh you're going to hell" feeling. The first was the Barlow and Chambers execution by hanging in 1986, as I'm from Western Australia there was plenty of coverage on local news and most of the jokes were Fly Malaysian Airlines for a swing-away holiday! and the second was Space Shuttle Columbia disaster: What does N.A.S.A. stand for? Need another seven astronauts.

I think though that I will leave my Titanic jokes to the picture above and even that was about the movie rather than the disaster.