Yar! Now We're In the Pirate Business

The anti-pirate business, to be clear.

The pirates of the country of Somalia (whose tourism slogan is "Government-free since 1991"), who have reaped a bountiful harvest robbing ships and kidnapping the ships' crews, have some new boat pals to play with as the United States Navy is in the house.

By the way, Mr. and Ms.American taxpayer, can you hear the chorus of thank-you's from the nations whose cargo you are paying to protect? Anyway...

The 2008 numbers are in from the Pirate Statistics Bureau, Johnny Depp, President, and there were 49 ships hijacked last year and 889 crewmembers taken hostage. In response, the USA has sent warships, as have the navies of India, Britain, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Korea.

I never imagined that Saudi Arabia had a navy, they having been blessed with such an abundance of sand. The vessel pictured here is a Saudi frigate, the Al Riyadh, that is one of three that the Royal Saudi Navy had built for them. Frigate, by the way, is an encompassing term that can refer to a variety of warships, so you may now confidently toss about nautical terms with your friends from the yacht club.

The week of January 22 appears to have been the kickoff of the '09 Pirate season (thanks to the NFL playoffs, we missed all the pre-season shows on ESPN Pirate Channel), as 22 ship attacks resulting in 3 hijackings have been recorded since then. Nice weather in the area was given credit for the early flurry of activity.

There ae some carry-over storylines from last season, too. The owners of the MV Faina paid a $3 million ransom to get their Ukranian crew released after four months. Oh, yes, lest we be misled into thinking there was an overriding humanitarian motive, the ransom also secured the return of the cargo: 33 Russian tanks and crates of small arms that were headed for Kenya.

The Russian navy has a fun toy in the area: the nuclear powered heavy missile cruiser Peter the Great. The ship had "detained" ten pirates in an action the other day. If the contemporary Russian definition of detained is similar to the old Russian definition of detained, the detainees won't be a problem for quite some time.

I have detected a hint of the problem in the language that is being used to describe these police actions taken in response to the pirates. There are words of" arrests", people are "detained", they are "held for questioning", etc.

I propose that all the joint naval forces agree that the new course of action, as commissioned by PFOS, American Blogger, is that heretofore all Somalia pirates or scumbags who look like Somali pirates or any dumbass who wanders into the area with his rocket launcher that he uses for recreational purposes, all of those people be blown right off the face of the planet. The winning navy, the one with the most confirmed pirate eradications each year, gets a handsome gift pack at the World Anti-Pirate Banquet that will be held in Champaign, Illinois, the weekend after the state high school football championships.

It's such a feel good story, eh?

Friday the 13th

So which is the worse, the Friday part or the 13 part?


I'm referring to the legend of the unlucky on Friday the 13th. It is an apparently recent superstition, as these things go, having its origins in the 19th century, when somebody linked up unlucky 13 and unfortunate Friday.

Friday is definitely the weaker in terms of negative vibes. This may be that it's worn out, as we have one every week, a Friday that is.

BTW, my dog when I was a little kid was a cocker spaniel named Friday. There is no connection, just sayin'.



So Friday has been negative connotations, e.g. the day of the crucifixtion, the day of the arrest of the Templars, the day of the stock market crash. Friday has a lot of things going for it, too. It's Stop For a Drink After Work Day, Start the Weekend Day, First Day of the Baseball Homestand Day, Day to Call In Sick and Have a Long Weekend Day, Get Out Early and Head for the Lake Day, and some others which I invite you to submit.


Thirteen, on the other hand, has some issues, generally stemming from the fact that 13 isn't 12. Twelve is "completeness": 12 months, 12 hours, 12 Days of Christmas, 12 Signs of the Zodiac, 1212 is when this missive posts each day, 12 apostles and some other 12 stuff that's good and wholesome and remind me, please, of what I've missed.

So, 13 is shunned because it's irregular. Clearly a case of number discrimination. 13 is a prime number, too, always a troublesome thing, and the multiplication tables that kids don't learn anymore stop at 12, so there's another anti 13 bias. Builders often skip numbering the 13th floor, furthering the superstition. The Munsters lived at 1313 Mockingbird Lane.


The fear of 13 is triskaidekaphobia.

There is one verified Friday the 13th problem. Writing up a bunch of facts, and having no punchline or big finish.

That is all.

Valentine v. Claudius

Two days until Valentine's Day. In ancient Rome, February 14 was the holiday to celebrate Juno, queen of the Roman gods and godesses and women and marriage. On Feb 15, the feast of Lupercalia began. Lupercalia is a whole separate topic. Anyhoo...on the 14th, boys and girls would be paired up to enjoy the festival.


At relatively the same time period, Emperor Claudius II, a.k.a. Claudius the Cruel, was in the habit of engaging in a series of nasty wars. As an aside, I am considering changing my nom de plume to "Purple Flag on Saturday the Cruel". Has a nice ring to it, no? Back to Claudius, he was having trouble finding enough soldiers for his armies, and he figured that it was because the fellas didn't want to leave their significant others, so he canceled all the marriages and engagements. It may also have had some connection to the fellas not wanting to get killed, but Claudius was a make war not love kind of guy, and he was the emperor, so he got his way. Go figure.


Now, back to Valentine, a priest, who was way into love not war, and was secretly performing marriages to hitch up all those Roman GI Joes and their nubile babe pals. Claudius found out about Valentine's righteous peace gig and, being a rather impatient sort, had Valentine arrested. Valentine was convicted (like there was any doubt about how that would turn out) and sentenced to being clubbed and beheaded. In that order, apparently, as clubbing a beheaded fella would be cruel and unusual.

The photo is the reliquary of St. Valentine. It might not be "the" Valentine, but the church that's showing this very weird stuff is happy with it, and I think it's pretty cool.

Now the pastors in Rome were trying to S.O.P.--stamp out paganism. What they did to further that was to use saints as the new headliners for the old pagan feasts. The new Christian martyr, Saint Valentine, thus became the poster boy for the former feast of Juno.

Goes around comes around: Marcus Aurelius Claudius, a.k.a. Claudius Gothicus, a.k.a. Claudius II a.k.a. Claudius the Cruel, ascended to power in the year 268 and croaked just two years later, probably from smallpox. Turns out that Valentine just had bad timing.

Giving New Energy to a Crummy Wednesday

The biggest news of the day is that some TV doctors may be going away. Katherine Heigl and T.R. Knight, two of the Grey's Anatomony actors, have apparently quit. At the same time, House, the Fox doc show, is floundering in the ratings and in danger of disappearing alltogether.

I stopped joining the spouse for Grey's some time back because it's a thinly disguised yes we really are doctors though this is about not-so-young people in a constant state of libidinous agitation. I quit watching House because I have a tendency to think I may have every illness that they profile and the lead character has become impossible to not despise.

Seems like the whole world is in a yawn/pause, and this space is no different. To remedy this, I am submitting a script for a two hour made for TV movie special, the premise of which will be a medical convention taking place in Cleveland. Yes, folks, Cleveland rocks, so they say. All the creepy doctors from all the crappy doctor shows will attend this convention. The convention's organizers will have a big group outing where all the TVMD's go ice fishing on Lake Erie as a team building exercise. As an added bonus, the event will be catered, out on the ice, by Brie Hodge's catering company, and since it's such a big job, all the Wisteria Lane women are being conscripted to help.

Once we have them all together out on the ice, the party area will crack off, just like it did in real life last Saturday. The difference this time will be that instead of a helicopter rescue, the ice floe will be enveloped in a dense fog for hours, as the winds push the ice further and further away from, um, oh yeah, Cleveland, blessed Cleveland.

The characters will be stunned, when, in the dark of night, the ice grinds to a halt, having hit land. When they scramble from their rapidly disappearing ice raft to the safety of land, they are amazed to find that their ice ship has transported them to...where?

Welcome to All Star Survivor 2009, my new TV show. Three crapfests combined into one spectacular marathon trek to nowhere. I get all the washed up characters reinvigorated in a new concept, and the struggling shows that they left get to introduce new characters in the old settings. Oh, yeah, I get rich in the process.

Win/win/win.

"...and the Emmy goes to...."

135 x Dumb

Ice fishing is an unusual pasttime. It requires, in its simplest form, that one go out in frigid conditions, venture onto an inherently unstable plane, then drill a hole in it and sit and wait. I have done this once or twice, for short periods of time, I must confess. Many do it in earnest, and there is all manner of ice augers, ice rods, ice shacks, heaters, just about every old thing that you might imagine, to enhance the experience. In many places, entire shanty villages spring up during the ice fishing season. There's one overriding rule that governs ice fishing.

You can't be exceptionally stupid.

This past Saturday, 135 Ohio anglers defied the rule and went for a wild ride. The air had become warm and the wind was blowing pretty hard. Defying nature, this crew headed out on the ice pack on foot, on snowmobile and via four wheeler. There was an ominous warning: a large crevasse in the ice sheet. Ever resourceful (this is not the same as intelligent) the anglers used old wooden pallets to build a bridge. They mighta shoulda brought out a few thousand more pallets and hammers and nails and old old Norwegian ship builder named Lars.

You've seen the story; the ice sheet cracked off and Ol' Ma Nature puffed and blew the dummies out into Lake Erie. There is no apparent truth to the rumor that the province of Ontario mobilized to repel an attack of ice invaders. Thank heaven for cell phones, the Coast Guard and helicopters. All were rescued, except for one man who fell off the hard part of the lake and into the wet part and had a heart attack. A number of snowmobiles, ATV's and other miscellaneous equipment were left behind and are, I assume, going to end up at the bottom of Lake Erie.

It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature.