The wreck of the Costa Concordia is a story straight out of Conrad, starting with "Heart of Darkness" (the darkness of the Congo, the cruelty of colonial oppression, the blackness of men's souls). You've seen this movie transposed to Vietnam: Apocalypse Now.

But there's an even closer parallel: "Lord Jim," the story of one man's cowardice under pressure. When his ship is in danger of breaking up on the high seas, the first mate, Jim, leaps into a lifeboat, leaving hundreds of passengers to fend for themselves.

Peter O'Toole played Jim in the 1965 film version, written and directed by Richard Brooks:

"I've been a so-called coward and a so-called hero and there's not the thickness of a sheet of paper between them. Maybe cowards and heroes are just ordinary men who, for a split second, do something out of the ordinary. That's all."

Jim eventually lives down his past; it's a novel of redemption. On the other hand, at the end of "Heart of Darkness," Kurtz can only murmur, "The horror! the horror!" Is he referring to the Russian passengers aboard the Costa Concordia who bought their way onto lifeboats with wads of cash? Or to Captain Francesco Schettino, piloting his own lifeboat through the waters off Giglio, bashing the heads of refugees swimming for their lives?

The story's not going away soon. Costa Cruises, for its part, is offering a 30 percent discount to Concordia passengers on any future cruise. But that's peanuts compared to the 70 percent discounts that other cruise lines are offering on their departures this winter.

Bacon is a $2 billion industry in America. Jimmy Dean lives in half of all home refrigerators; rashers of Swift are consumed in astounding quantities, and never more than in these tough times. Bacon consumption is up, over the past ten years, by a pound per person (to 17.9 pounds for every man, woman and child in the country). And how are restaurants responding? Duh, pass the bacon! Bacon on burgers, steaks, pancakes, in sandwiches, even woven into a tapestry upon which more bacon-laden foods can be served.

What you're looking at, on the left, is a tasty, $10 dish called Tempura Fried Kurabota Bacon, served, with a maple sambal ponzu sauce, in the bar at John Howie Steak in Bellevue. It's been two years since I ate it, and I still remember how good it tasted.

But I've also had some truly horrifying bacon experiences. Bakon Vodka, for example. Baconnaise, for another, created by Seattle entrepreneurs Dave Lefkow and Justin Esch. They started with Bacon Salt (now in nine flavors), then moved on to Baconnaise (regular and lite). I found it more medicinal than bacon-y, with a bitter, chemical aftertaste. The list of ingredients is downright frightening, including corn syrup, MSG, hydrolized vegetable protein, autolyzed yeast extract, palm oil, flour, and "smoke flavor." No doubt similar to the flavoring ingredients used in "real" bacon, but that doesn't make it any healthier or tastier, even if it is, technically, kosher.

The latest to climb aboard the bacon bandwagon is none other than Burger King, with $2.5 billion in annual revenues and whose menu includes a stunning number of bacon-ated sandwiches and wraps, everything from single-stackers to Double Croissan'wiches to 1,140-calorie Triple Whoppers. Afgter a year of testing and staff training (more on that here), BK now prepares all its bacon in-house: brined, smoked and cooked daily in every one of the chain's 7,200 or so restaurants. BK, by the way, is the fifth-largest restaurant chain in the US (after Subway, McDonald's, Starbucks and Pizza Hut).

"People are crazy about bacon," BK's executive chef told us by phone this week. That would be 52-year-old John Koch, who has spent his career in working for corporate restaurants and their vital supply chains (most recently for a meat distributor). You'll recall that pasty-faced "King" character who was the TV face of the company for a couple of years? G-gone, fired, along with the "cutting edge" ad agency that created him. The new agency, McGarry Bowen, is putting the focus on products and ingredients, hence the push to publicize the company's newfound emphasis on bacon.

And don't forget that Burger King is testing home delivery as well. The company has developed a "proprietary thermal packaging technology," says Jonathan Fitzpatrick, BK's chief brand & operations officer, which, he says, "ensures the Whopper is delivered hot and fresh, and the french fries are delivered hot and crispy." (Pizza companies are watching closely; delivery is 70 percent of Domino's business.) If BK's experiment works, it could revolutionize the fast-casual sector. After all, if cardboard covered with glop can make it as a staple item in America's takeout inventory, bacon can't be far behind.

The BK folks taped Chef Koch during our phone call. You can watch the video below.

The enormous and unwieldy Costa Concordia, three times the size of the Titanic, twice the size of a Jumbo Ferry, lies beached on the rocky coast of Giglio. If you brought the two-block-long ship to downtown Seattle and stood it on end (perish the thought), it would be as tall as the Columbia Tower, with roughly the same population (4,200) and roughly the same square footage.

And yet, the Concordia isn't even in the top dozen cruise ships. The biggest, named Oasis of the Seas and owned by Royal Carribean, is twice as large.

The Costa Concordia was built six years ago by one of the giants of Italy's economy, Fincantieri, a ship-building company headquartered in Trieste with manufacturing yards on both the Adriatic and Ligurian coasts. Italy's Environment Minister called for banning cruise ships from sailng close the Italian coastline, at least until it was pointed out that Fincantieri is the second-largest builder of cruise ships in Europe and the largest in the Mediterranea, providing 10,000 jobs at its shipyards in Monfalcone and Genoa. A ship like the Concordia costs at least $500 million.

Costa Cruises is part of Carnival Corp., which also owns Carnival Cruises and another ten lines (among them:Cunard, Holland America, Princess, and Seaborn) and controls half the $30 billion cruise market.

At year-end 2010, the cruise industry carried 14.8 million guests worldwide, according to CLIA's Year-End Passengers' Carrying Report. The vast majority of its customers sailed safely on their vacations, it's often pointed out, while over 30,000 people die every year in automobile crashes in the United States (the number was 50,000 a year forty years ago). In 2010, not a single person died in a commercial airplane crash.

Nonetheless, Carnival Cruise Lines has suspended its broadcast and digital advertising (and direct mail, too) "for the time being," a company spokesperson said. Meantime, they're still finding bodies, and trying to keep the oil slick from spreading.

It's a tale of Two Italies: the showboat and the tugboat, the thoroughbred and the workhorse, the hare and the tortoise. The story is now all-too-familiar: an overconfident captain with his shirt unbuttoned and his eyes on an exotic young dancer, navigating a risky course through rocky shoals. Never mind that the most elementary precautions, like a lifeboat drill, have been postponed. When disaster strikes, as it's bound to do, it's someone else's fault, certainly not the captain's inattention or incompetence.

To the rescue comes Gregorio de Falco, of the local Coast Guard detchment, a gent with a gruff, take-charge demeanor, a cross between a drill sergeant and a brain surgeon. He does not tolerate fools. When he learns that the captain is no longer on the ship, he barks, "Get back on board, you dick!" (A transcript of the conversation goes viral, and the Italian phrase "Vada a bordo, cazzo!" quickly becomes a best-selling t-shirt.)

In Italy this week, Capt. Francesco Schettino is under house arrest, and the Coast Guard officer who commanded the rescue effort is hailed as a hero. Meantime, the disgraced former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who played bunga-bunga while Italy's ship of state foundered, is biding his time, expecting a return to political life. The man who succeeded him, Mario Monti, is making slow but steady progress restoring discipline to Italy's chaotic economy. (Monti is often described as a technocrat, leading a government of technocrats who were chosen because they have experience and expertise rather than political connections. Very rare, even in the US, to have professionals rather than party hacks, former rivals or long-time campaign contributors as cabinet ministers and ambassadors.)

But let's get back to the lifeboat drill. Every cruise is supposed to have one, before dark, on the first day out. I was on the Holland America line's Zaandam five years ago for a brief repositioning cruise between San Diego and Vancouver, BC. Although there was an interesting wine & food program on board, I found that cruising's not for me.

And how many times have we tuned out the safety demonstration aboard airplanes? We get it, already! We feel it's an insult to our intelligence at best, or an intrusion on our drinking time at worst. Right? The pilot may not be Sully Sullengerger, but we have every confidence that, should there be an emergency, at least the crew isn't going to trip past us into an evacuation slide.

Part of our series about Washington's viticultural areas.

If the Red Mountain AVA, subject of last week's profile, is the the rodeo rider down in the ring, the Horse Heaven Hills are the bleachers. From the north rim, you see the entire Yakima Valley, with Red Mountain punctuating its eastern end. Across the broad hilltop of the AVA, 50 miles long and 20 miles wide, extends an undulating, dry plateau of loam over fractured basalt formed when the Missoula floods receded, 12,000 years ago. It looks like a mound of crumpled blankets.

Fly over the plateau, or traverse it by car, and you'll see giant "crop circles," 160-acre fields (a quarter section, half a mile on each side) with a giant sprinkler arm positioned in the center, turning slowly to irrigate a field of grass or grain. Not until the legendary Dr. Walter Clore came along in the 1970s did anyone think to plant wine grapes alongside the wheat. Dr. Clore suggested to ranchers Don and Linda Mercer that they ought to put down a vineyard where they were growing carrots, in a little patch that the sprinklers weren't reaching. That was in 1972; today, the property--now known as Champoux Vineyards--grows the fruit for Quilceda Creek's best-in-the-nation Cabernet Sauvignon.

And when Chateau Ste. Michelle went looking for a couple thousand acres in the late 70s, the biggest vineyard expansion up to that point in the Washington's history, the company settled on the southern rim of the Horse Heaven Hills. Paul Champoux, who later purchased the original Mercer Ranch vineyards, was hired to oversee vineyard development; Doug Gore was in charge of wine making. Says Gore: the primary characteristic of Horse Heaven grapes is balance. "The grapes stand on their own, they don't need to be blended with anything else since they already have great flavor intensity and high quality tannins."

In 2005 the Horse Heaven Hills were formally recognized as an AVA covering half a million acres, most of it suitable for vineyards. Already, a quarter of all Washington's grapes are planted here, 28 vineyards, 9 bonded wineries, and nearly 10,000 acres of vines: cabernet sauvignon, cab franc and merlot mostly, but a handful of whites and a miscellany of warm-climate reds.

The most intriguing new project involves the 1,300 acres of bench lands planted over the years by the Den Hoed family and recently purchased by Allen Shoup's Long Shadows development company: south-facing terraces, where rainfall is modest and the heat is mitigated by breezes from the Columbia.

As long as the winds aren't too strong (which would toughen the skins of the grapes), the Horse Heaven Hills are in the running for the state's best red-wine vineyards. After all, Quilceda Creek's streak of six vintages produced four 100-point wines and two 99-pointers, all with grapes from this exceptional AVA.