It's Hard Out There for a Pirate

The ongoing saga of the Pirates Off the Horn of Africa (soon to be a best-selling trilogy of books/movies/video games aimed at the tween market, followed closely by a Broadway musical/traveling-ice-capade tandem to milk the parents dry until the remakes begin production) has just gotten a tad more interesting with the introduction of the sexiest thing in the world: lasers.

This just in from my contacts in London:

Sailors may soon have a weapon in their battle against sea-borne raiders: an anti-pirate laser.

BAE Systems has demonstrated its new laser system, which can temporarily blind would-be attackers. The system would prevent pirates from being able to aim their weapons at targets, BAE claims.

At distances of more than of between 1.2km (0.75 miles) and 1.5km (0.85 miles), the laser beam acts as a warning signal, letting the pirates know they've been spotted, said Brian Hore of BAE.

"Today's pirates tend to be opportunistic. If they know they've been spotted, they're likely to look for an alternative target," he told BBC News.

(courtesy BBC)

"At closer ranges, the green laser beam will dazzle them, making it difficult for the pirates to use weapons of their own" and rendering them physically unable to avoid dancing energetic ethnic steps to a John Williams score as Navy SEALs swoop in to gather the best performers in large canvas sacks to be airlifted to Central Casting in Los Angeles for further study, according to Brian "Dirty" Hore of BAE.

But the real question here is: are Somali pirates dazzled by lasers as sexy as vampires?

We aren't sure...

This is a valid concern and one which at the very least requires further taxpayer-subsidized research at entertainment think-tanks across Los Angeles and Orange Counties.

Can we lazily plug pirates into the age-old "star-crossed lover" routine with the same success evinced by the aristocrat/peasant, business heir/rival business heir, North/South, one religion/another religion, and vampire/mortal dynamics of years past?

Well, let's have a shot at the pitch and see what happens:

"Arrrr, matey, make haste! Throw the blighty bastard off the poop deck before the accursed pox spreads to the whole ship--he's got The Gout!"

It looks like The Gout is thumbing its nose at all those ignorant souls clueless as to what its curse entails and if it's not exactly bringing millions of landlubbers to a watery grave, the unlucky gluttons are at least experiencing their fair share of discomfort.


"But how does this affect me, an arrogant, relatively healthy--or at least non-gouty--person, in my day-to-day life?"

Well, Mr. Ponce, imagine for a moment that you were to sit down for a delicious meal in an upscale restaurant--Bennigan's, for example--and are served your food by some guy with a mysterious white fluid oozing out of his hands:

"In the early stages of the disease, gout attacks, which can last several days and are excruciating, occur only rarely. But over time, the frequency increases and people can develop disfiguring and disabling lumps of the chalky white crystals, called tophi. Michael Clayton of Atlanta, who has severe gout, said he had to quit a job as general manager of a restaurant after customers complained about the tophi on his hands, which sometimes oozed liquid resembling Wite-Out."

(courtesy nytimes.com)

Yeah--gross. So, you know, get wise--fear the gout. It is everywhere.

"Holy shit! What do I do?!!"

Well, Dr. Goodtime recommends that you try to avoid any interaction whatsoever with those persons afflicted with this 'gout,' in the off-chance the pharmaceutical reps--I mean 'doctors'-- are lying to us out of their own self-interest and the disease is actually contagious.

As if you needed another reason to avoid making out with fat people! LOL!!!!!!!!! OMG!! ROTFL!!!!!!! JMFC!!!! HELP!!!

(btw, shunning is always the shrewdest option, if you ask me, when it comes to other people)

If you are unsure as to how to recognize a sufferer of gout, they usually look like this:



There you have it, people of the Internet. You have the knowledge, you have the will to live--now get back out into that big fat scary world and live in fear--I mean 'be safe!'

_

Oh, the Irony

Those incorrigible pirates captured another ship on Saturday--the Buccaneer!

Meanwhile, the pirates offered to drop their $2 million ransom request for Captain Richard Phillips, if the pirates trapped on the boat with him would be allowed to go free--and the Americans refused!

Why they insist on arresting those pirates, when they have previously stated that there is no way to hold them, nowhere to take them, no court to try them in, is beyond me. Why not obtain the captain's freedom, then storm the pirate village with some Rambo-led black ops division? I mean, we know where they live...is this really that difficult of a decision? Do I need to sail over there and talk some sense into whoever's in charge?

_

Totally Coincidental...

Sure, now that somebody from the United States has been taken hostage, the US military is finally engaging those pesky Somali pirates that have been ruling the Gulf of Aden and environs for nigh on two years now.

Whatever happened to preventing such incidents? Like all those times we went to war when it was none of our business, to 'protect ourselves' from the otherwise inevitable and awful communist/oil-less future...

Do they not have enough fossil fuels in their treasure trove?

_

Pirates, Pirates, Go Away. Come Again Some Other Day!

According to the BBC, those intractable Somali pirates nearly landed an army of lucrative hostages this weekend when they attempted to subdue a US cruise ship with over 1000 people on board.

After reading the full article, several questions come to mind:

1. Why does this boat require nearly one crew member for each passenger aboard? (656 passengers, 399 crew) Do the first 300 to book each get their own prostitute?

2. Who goes on a 32-day cruise?

3. Who goes on a 32-day cruise when the global economy is in the shitter?

4. How does a cruise ship with 1000 people on board outmaneuver and outrun agile skiffs carrying experienced pirates armed with machine guns and rocket launchers?

And, in case you were wondering, that Saudi oil tanker carrying 2 million barrels of crude oil is still being held for ransom, as is the cargo ship bursting with Russian tanks and munitions. So are TWELVE other ships.

I can't wait until they take an aircraft carrier next week and start REALLY fucking shit up...

Mo-town Pirates Back Again...

(Photo courtesy New York Times)

Boy, those pirates are just endearingly incorrigible, aren't they?

This time, they hijacked a Saudi oil tanker THREE TIMES the size of an aircraft carrier. The crude oil onboard has a street value of $100 million.

How the hell can a ship be that big? I mean, I understand the physics of flotation, but where the fuck does that thing park? Where did they build it? And how can a crew of only 25 men run that beast? Amazing. I hope they have 25 more rooms in the hostage village... (FYI, the ship full of tanks, and the crew onboard, are STILL being held by the pirates. Do we need to send Arnold and his elite team in to solve this pesky problem, or what?)

Here is the full article, by the way, for those who still like to read the newspaper:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/world/africa/18pirates.html?th&emc=th


I hope some useless-as-a-bag-o-dicks Hollywood scribe is hurriedly writing a really overwrought movie about them.

"Sunset in Somalia"
A thinking-man's thriller, starring James Spader as a disenchanted former missionary gone mad (!) and Leonardo DiCaprio as the FBI agent who decides to shut him down--at any cost.


Paul Haggis doing anything these days? He could TOTALLY murder this one!
Oh, wait--he's too busy cashing paychecks.

How about John Grisham? That guy's GOTTA have some free time...

Back in Action

Goodtime Charlie is once again stateside, so please set aside any worries you might have about our nation's future--it is once again in good hands.

What has happened while I've been away from the controls? Mucho.

The financial system has gone to pot, thanks to all the people not smoking it.

Do I sound like my mom when I say that people who risked their savings in the stock market should not have been gambling what they could not afford to lose? Yes.

According to Forbes, there are 946 billionaires in the world, due to the unrelentingly-bullish (til recently) global markets. What goes up must come down, right? Right.
Why can't each billionaire the shady financial system created just give $1 billion back to it? Oh, wait, I know--they're greedy. That's why we're in this problem in the first place...

Is it all as easy as I make it sound here? Nope.


My favorite living writer, David Foster Wallace, forever tortured by his own overbearing genius and armor-piercing powers of observation, gave up his struggles and hanged himself in Claremont, California.


Admittedly, the news wasn't exactly shocking--anybody who has read his writings realized how profoundly he struggled with the dark side of life--but it was certainly saddening. For those of us who actually read books (sadly, we are few), the next several decades just got much bleaker for the novels, stories, and essays that he will not create for our enjoyment.

On the other hand, as his sister Amy said (I'm paraphrasing here), rather than think about how much time we did not get from him, it is better to think about how much time he did give us, how long he held on to life in the face of a catastrophically acute depression. Imagining a life without his work, since I have now been spoiled by it, simply makes me grateful for every bit of writing he did provide.

It is hard, especially now, not to imagine Wallace as somewhat of a real-life Hal Incandenza, the main character of his masterwork, Infinite Jest-- so unbelievably intelligent that he is eventually unable to communicate with others, who hear his eloquent oratory only as unintelligible screaming. How long can a man tolerate that? Life at the top of the intellectual heap is no doubt lonely, and knowing all that is wrong with the world, but being powerless to fix it, must be paralyzingly frustrating.

Wallace hadn't written anything in over a year, which is mind-boggling to imagine, considering his output in the past. I always used to hope he was spending most of his time locked in a basement somewhere, methodically perfecting another Infinite Jest-like, 1000-page epic, and I know I wasn't the only one.

He was a literary giant and he will be missed.


Paul Newman also died recently. Not as relevant to my life as Wallace--mostly just a face on one of my favorite salad dressings--but I did enjoy his performances in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Cool Hand Luke. I'm glad he got to live a long, relatively-healthy, satisfying life, and I feel sorry for his wife of 50 years, Joanne Woodward; that has to be tough. That is all.



In other news, pirates have taken over a ship full of weapons off the coast of Somalia, and are holding it for ransom, currently surrounded by US gunboats.

How could this have happened? I mean, this was not a freighter full of Pampers--it is crammed to the gills with 33 Russian-built tanks, grenade launchers, anti-aircraft guns, ammunition, etc. Could the men onboard not have perhaps used some of their ship's cargo against the surely-outmatched Somali pirates? That might have been a good idea.

According to this article, Kenya--the purchaser of the weapons--refuses to negotiate with pirates or terrorists, and is therefore on the sidelines, waiting for other countries to solve the problem for them. Whether or not Kenya intended to give the tanks to forces in South Sudan--which would violate an agreement they have with the Sudanese government--is up for debate. The curious thing is that nobody in the Kenyan military is even trained to operate a Russian tank, since they buy theirs from us...

[Question: Should the Kenyan government be allowed to keep the cargo if it is salvaged? Or should the tanks be given to coalition forces and used to shell the pirate town of Eyl until all the pirates' SUVs and lawn ornaments are reduced to rubble? Discuss.]

That debate aside, the incident certainly begs the question that if a boatload of armaments is not safe in the water these days, what chance does anybody else have? Answer: Slim.

"Today there are thought to be ten gangs operating around Somalia with as many as 1,000 members. Two years ago there were only about a hundred pirates. Most are based in Puntland, a semi-autonomous region that angles around the Horn. Recent visitors say that the tiny fishing village of Eyl has enjoyed a huge economic boom as the pirates buy luxury 4x4s and build smart new homes. Men with laptops describing themselves as “pirate accountants” come and go and restaurants have opened to cater for more than 200 hostages. In all, 13 ships are under the control of pirates. Two more vessels – a Greek cargo ship and a Hong Kong-flagged vessel – were snatched this week and attacks are reported almost daily."
(from The Times online)

Why has the US Government not carpet-bombed this pirate village yet? They don't seem to have any problem with killing innocent people while 'valiantly' fighting to rid the world of terrorism in every other corner of the world. Maybe the pirates are more valuable as defense-contractor customers? Otherwise, you'd think they could at least stop the flow of luxury SUVs and granite counter tops, just to piss them off...


Enjoy your Tuesday, and stay tuned for tales from Tanzania...

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