What’s that? You’ve had a rough week? You lost a bunch of money in the stock market? The government bailout that’s supposed to save that house you over-extended yourself for hasn’t quite shown up yet? Life sounds like it’s been really hard for you … except for this one thing…
Tell me this – when was the last time you got hijacked by pirates?!
Yeah … that’s what I thought, so maybe life in these crazy times isn’t quite as bad as we’d like to think, as long as we’re still not looking down the business end of a saber or walking the last few inches of that illustrious plank! You’ve got to hand it to the crew of the Sirius Star, the latest ship to find itself hijacked out in the Indian Ocean off the coast of East Africa earlier this week – we’ve all had to deal with obnoxious co-workers like the woman who polices the break room for unapproved Tupperware containers or the guy who won’t stop tapping their foot despite the fact that the entire floor can feel the vibrations through the floor, but as far as real workplace annoyances are concerned, nothing beats being boarded by pirates and taken for ransom, that’s for sure!
And seriously, up until this week, who knew that pirates were even a real concern here in the 21st century?! I mean, aside from Internet piracy, of course, but until the RIAA and MPAA start sending their lawyers into court with eye patches and peg legs (…which would actually be pretty appropriate for people who don’t have a leg to stand on…), I don’t really think that compares to real, actual, trouble on the high seas-causing pirates.
Now I certainly don’t mean to glamorize or condone this whole piracy thing because unless we actually are talking about Johnny Depp-style drunken good fun, it’s actually quite bad, but the truly bizarre thing is that although you and I have never heard of it before, apparently this kind of buccaneer behavior actually takes place all the time – try 90 attempts and 36 successful attempts just this year alone! In fact, I read that it happens so frequently over in the eastern half of the world that shipping companies take out insurance policies to help them cover the ransoms rather than trying to fight back and risk somebody getting hurt … that’s right, insurance companies overseas are ready and willing to issue pirate insurance and yet here in the States, half the time we can’t even get our health insurance companies to pay out…
Still, I’ve got to admit that all of this newfound talk of pirates this week has got me wondering what other seemingly fictional genres are being tapped out there that I don’t even know about! Like Robin Hood – is there anybody running around out there in tights, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor? (…this pirate thing doesn’t count…) Or how about Sherlock Holmes? It’d be kind of neat to think that somewhere there were two guys walking around in stuffy overcoats solving mysteries, and those guys didn’t even need rum to be cool!
I guess the moral of the story is … pirates – who’d a thunk it? Anything else out there that we didn’t know about is just gravy. Oh wait, that’s next week…