Copious Booze Blamed For Cruise Ship Brawl That, For The Record, Did Not Involve Clowns

I do my best to avoid checking Twitter on weekends. On Saturday, though, I opened Twitter to send a tweet and saw these headlines: "Bloody fight starts on UK cruise ship after 'clown' shows up." If nothing else, the news stories served as a strong reminder of why I enacted that no-Twitter-on-weekends policy.

But, it turns out, those initial reports besmirched the good name of clowns everywhere. The Telegraph clarifies that, in fact, it wasn't clowns but all-you-can-drink alcohol that likely led to the terrifying melee aboard a U.K.-based P&O cruise ship last week. Six passengers sustained cuts and bruises in the incident.

"There was no clown on board or involved in this incident," a Southampton police spokesman told The Telegraph.

A passenger aboard the ship told the paper that it wasn't clowns that caused the violence, but a more logical culprit: lots of alcohol. The unnamed mother who was on the cruise with her young son describes passengers "purely there to drink as much as they could," aided and abetted by the cruise line's unlimited alcohol policy. She tells the Daily Mail it will be her last cruise.

It's much more logical to think that a bunch of drunk passengers sparked the Friday-morning brawl that has thus far led to two arrests. Let this be a lesson to cruise ships and their passengers alike.