People, are you ready for…the Titanic? You should be, because over the next three weeks, it'll be harder to miss than an iceberg in the fog (okay, bad joke).
This is Titanic Time.
In case you haven't heard, the 100th anniversary of the big ship's sinking, off the coast of Newfoundland (just over 200 miles from New York, her final destination), is April 15. As the clock winds down to that centennial, the interest — or at least the attention — ramps up.
On that fateful day, but in 2012, several ships will be in the waters where she sank, to mark the anniversary. Some will have paid big bucks to be at "the exact spot" where the Titanic sank and two of the Titanic museums will be there to spread 1.5 million rose petals…that ship is not open to the public.
That is just the beginning.
At least nine books about the disaster have been released this year, six of them this 
month. Last year we spent some time on the Celebrity Eclipse, listening to and interviewing John Maxtone-Graham (right), a renowned and prolific maritime author and Transatlantic traveller. His book, Titanic Tragedy, came out last week, although he told us he'd planned to get a jump on everybody else and release it in the fall of 2011. Perhaps it was too big a jump, six months ahead of the anniversary.
Besides books, there are 4-part and 12-part TV documentaries — Titanic and Titantic: Blood and Steel — to be shown next month, and who knows how many DVDs? The movie that won 11 Academy Awards is being returned to the big screen, for a short run, next week and this time you can watch it in 3D.
An auction of 5,000 Titanic artifacts in New York, two weeks from tomorrow, is expected to net $190 million. They're not being sold one at a time…you buy 5,000 artifacts or you buy none. A lifejacket, one of only six in existence, reportedly sold at Christie's for $68,500 — a bargain compared to the $119,000 that somebody paid for one of the other five in 2007.
There are Titanic museums or exhibits in many places, such as Pigeon Forge (Tennessee) and Branson (Missouri), and Halifax (Nova Scotia) and Las Vegas. Two new ones were scheduled to open this week in Southampton and Liverpool, once head office of the White Star Line. There's even an online museum!
Where will it all end?
It won't. John Maxtone-Graham explains it best: "The Titanic is inexhaustible. When someone says the word Titanic, silence falls over the room."
While Titanic was once a luxury ship, now it is as much a business as it is a memory.
Sapphire Princess
7 nights
May 26, 2012
Anchorage, Hubbard Glacier, Glacier Bay, Skagway, Juneau, Ketchikan, Vancouver
Inside: $499
Cost per day: $71
www.princess.com